TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Mar 21 08:23:45 EDT 2025

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ABOUT

Mota Italic [Rob Keller]

Foundry, est. 2009 by Rob and Sonja Keller. Originally located in Berlin, Mota Italic is a type design studio specializing in unique, extensive type families. It relocated to Mumbai, India, at the end of 2014, and moved back to Berlin in 2020.

Rob Keller (b. 1981) is a typeface designer from Illinois. He attended the University of Illinois where he earned Bachelor (BFA) degrees in both Graphic Design and Sculpture. From 2006 until 2007 he attended the University of Reading, England, for the MA in Typeface Design program. Immediately following the dissertation submission, Rob moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to work at Linotype GmbH in the Product Marketing department. He left Linotype to be able to do type design full time, first as a freelancer then forming Mota Italic in 2009. Sonja Keller, now Sonja Stange, left Mota Italic in 2013 to join Type Together. From 2014 until 2020, Rob lived in Mumbai.

Mota Italic's fonts:

• Vesper, a hookish and sturdy serif typeface with which Rob graduated from Reading in 2007 [Discussion by I Love Typography]. It includes Vesper Devanagari (2006) and Vesper Hebrew. The Vesper Devanagari character set was completed in 2014 through the collaboration with Kimya Gandhi. The free font Vesper Libre (2014) is a special web version that has been optimized for online use. Tiny details have been simplified and the character set is reduced for the perfect balance of beautiful web typography with fast page loading.
• Mota Pixel (free), made in 2009.
• In 2013, Rob created the ultra-fat counterless typeface Pufff with three f's.
• Fip (2015) is a techno family.
• When he was a student at Reading he announced that he was working on these font projects: Azul y Blanco Pin Pan Pun (hand-printed), Compilation Serif, New Orleans Light, Unicase Monospace, Untitled Experiment, Chef, Gemma. The large informal typeface family Gemma was finally published in 2009. It includes wonderful multiple master dingbats.
• Brashy, a crazy large multi-glyph handcrafted typeface that emulates painted letters.
• Sharad 76 (2016: free). A Devanagari only font by Kimya Gandhi (after his father's writing).
• Chikki (2019 / Devenagari variable font.
• Collection (2020). An allm caps font in which each letter has 50 variants, and all letters look like they cam from a different font.
• Show Me The Mono (2020).

Type blog by Rob Keller. At the University of Reading, he published Linotype Devanagari: an abridged history of the typeface with analysis of the 1975 redesign (2007). Alternate URL for his blog.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Mota Italic
Fontspace page
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ German type scene ⦿ Pixel/bitmap fonts ⦿ Indic language fonts ⦿ Type design in India ⦿ Unicase type design ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Type scene in Illinois ⦿ Type blogs ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Dingbats (original) ⦿ Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿