What is the MVB Sirenne® font?

A rare natural history book from the early 18th century served as inspiration for the MVB Sirenne typefaces. The artisan who engraved the book—likely a map engraver—had a distinctive style of lettering that was used on the descriptive captions for the many tropical fishes depicted in the book. The plates used to print the illustrations would have been copper, the letterforms hand-engraved. More… The designers at MVB Fonts found the distinctive quirks of the roman letterforms and the eccentric stress of the italic interesting enough to embark on developing digital fonts based on the engraved samples. As the captions were hand-lettered, there was a great degree of variation, making a direct “revival” impossible, so Alan Dague-Greene interpreted the characteristics of the letterforms into a workable typeface design. The challenge was to retain a rustic quirkiness to the forms, yet have a typeface that was useful for more than display. The solution was to make optical sizes. The “Six” faces are full of character, but strong and open for clarity at small sizes. The design of the “Text” faces is more subtle, so that they can be used for passages of text, but retain the feel of their model. MVB Sirenne “Eighteen” and “Seventy Two” are intended for display use.

MVB Sirenne® Font families

The MVB Sirenne® includes the following font families:

• Sirenne Six MVB TF Roman
• Sirenne Six MVB OSF Roman
• Sirenne Six MVB SC Roman
• Sirenne Six MVB TF Italic
• Sirenne Six MVB OSF Italic
• Sirenne Text MVB TF Roman
• Sirenne Text MVB OSF Roman
• Sirenne Text MVB SC Roman
• Sirenne Text MVB TF Italic
• Sirenne Text MVB OSF Italic
• Sirenne Text MVB Swash Italic
• Sirenne Text MVB TF Bold
• Sirenne Text MVB OSF Bold
• Sirenne Text MVB TF Bold Italic
• Sirenne Text MVB OSF Bold Italic
• Sirenne Eighteen MVB Roman
• Sirenne Eighteen MVB SC Roman
• Sirenne Eighteen MVB Italic
• Sirenne Eighteen MVB Swash Italic
• Sirenne Seventy Two MVB Roman
• Sirenne Seventy Two MVB SC Roman
• Sirenne Seventy Two MVB Italic
• Sirenne Seventy Two MVB Swash Italic

MVB Sirenne® Preview

Here is a preview of how MVB Sirenne® will look. For more previews using your own text as an example, click here.