BuyMyFonts Elettriche Modular Type System (MTS) is constructed on a grid of ten modules (plate 6), which correspond to the standard 1000 units in the current digital type format. In general the uppercase characters are 7 modules high, the lowercase 7 and the numerals 6. Ascenders and descenders each take up 2 modules in vertical size.

The module

The BMF Elettriche family consists of three different modules: Base, Punto and Quadro. The Base module is special: it can serve as a background for all other modules when layering different Elettriche fonts. The bold variants are larger than the underlying grid and therefore overlap automatically. In the lighter weights, the dots were connected by hand to form lines. In comparison to Punto and Quadro, the modules of the Base variant are always larger: when Punto and/or Quadro are layered on top of them (plate 7) then the underlying Base is not completely covered, resulting in interesting visual effects. Layering works only when using fonts that use the same module shape and have the same width and style, yet are different in weight and/or module.

Nomenclature

When working with a type family that has presently 648 members, the naming is an important tool for navigation. Each font has a distinctive name that consists of the following components:

a. family name (BMFEle)
b. module (Base, Punto and Quadro)
c. shape (A, B, C, D, E and F)
d. width (C = Condensed E = Extended)
e. numbering system (4 digits)
f. weight, from extra-light to heavy (XLig, Lig, Reg and Hea)
g. style (Do for Double, Tri for Triple)

Using only the letters from A to Z (upper and lower case) in the six lettershapes, one already arrives at 936 different glyphs. Combined with the 3 modules, 4 weights and 3 styles, we come to a total of 33,696 glyphs - and counting all the accented letters, diacritic signs and punctuation signs of the standard western character set which, of course, are also included, we reach a total of 162.000 glyphs in the BMF Elettriche font family!