About Viktoria Nouveau

Viktoria Nouveau is a revival of a typeface popular particularly in Europe in the first few decades of the twentieth century. While its exact origins and designer are unknown, it was originally released by Theinhardt around the year 1899 under the name Viktoria. It was a staple in the catalogues of several type foundries through the Art Nouveau era, including Theinhardt, Bauer, Nebiolo, and Poppelbaum, who variously released it under the names Viktoria, Phönix, Les Helvétiques, and Medea.
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This revival is a synthesis of the different versions of the font released between the type foundries. Largely faithful to the original design, the only major revision is in the capital ‘M’ and the capital 'Q', whose original design was too far out of the norm to be acceptable for modern users. The character set has also been greatly expanded to include necessary symbols and most western diacritics. In addition, the font features arbitrary fractions, superiors, inferiors, and case-sensitive forms. The Cyrillic comes from Poppelbaum’s 1914 specimen marketed to the Bulgarian market. For Viktoria Nouveau, Russian forms are standard and localised forms were added for Bulgarian and Serbian.
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The original font was issued in sizes from about 10 pt to multi-line woodtype. In keeping with this tradition, Viktoria Nouveau includes three optical sizes, Big, Medium, and Small.
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Viktoria Nouveau includes stylistic sets for more normal ‘A’, ‘V’, and ‘W’ historic to the original release. In addition, the revival also includes stylistic sets not included in the original font for a roman ‘D’, a single-story ‘a’, and, for my personal amusement, ‘Gaelic type’.