Giambattista Bodoni (February 26, 1740 – November 30, 1813) was an Italian typographer, type-designer, compositor, printer and publisher.
He first took the type-designs of Pierre Simon Fournier as his exemplars, but afterwards became an admirer of the more modelled types of John Baskerville; and he and Firmin Didot evolved a style of type called ‘New Face’, in which the letters are cut in such a way as to produce a strong contrast between the thick and thin parts of their body. Bodoni designed many type-faces, each one in a large range of type sizes. He is even more admired as a compositor than as a type-designer, as the large range of sizes which he cut enabled him to compose his pages with the greatest possible subtlety of spacing. Like Baskerville, he sets off his texts with wide margins and uses little or no illustrations or decorations.
There have been several modern revivals of his type-faces, all called Bodoni. They are often used as display faces. The Bodoni Museum, named for the artisan, was opened in Parma, Italy in 1963.
