Amaretti: a vintage advertising script for warm, playful branding

Design style

Amaretti draws on the hand-lettered signage and advertising scripts of the 1950s, the kind of lettering you’d see painted on a diner window or a soda label. It’s a calligraphic script with a fairly consistent brush-like stroke, moderate contrast, and a lot of swing in the connections between letters. The curves are generous rather than tight, giving the whole thing a rounded, confident bounce rather than a formal or restrained one.

What separates it from a generic retro script is the willingness to let flourishes run. Ascenders and descenders swirl out past the baseline and x-height with real commitment, and the terminals often finish with a small flick rather than a clean cut. That’s a deliberate choice: it reads as friendly and a bit exuberant rather than elegant. If you’re after quiet sophistication, this isn’t that script. If you want something that feels like it’s smiling at you, this is closer to the mark.

Character set and features

The family comes in three weights, each with a matching oblique, which is more range than most scripts offer. That alone makes it more usable than a single-weight novelty script — you can set a light version for body-adjacent use and a bolder one for a headline without leaving the family.

OpenType support includes alternates, ligatures and swashes, and there’s enough of it to matter in practice: repeated letters in a word won’t look identical if you enable alternates, and swash caps give you a fancier option for the first letter of a name or word. Amaretti is also PUA-encoded, so those extras are reachable in apps like Canva that don’t support full OpenType feature panels — worth knowing if your workflow doesn’t run through Illustrator or InDesign.

Language support is English only, with some common single diacritics included, so don’t expect broad multilingual coverage out of the box. As with most scripts of this density, it’s built for short bursts of text — a name, a word, a line — not paragraphs. Push it into a sentence and the flourishes start to collide and the rhythm gets busy.

Use cases

This is a font for projects that want warmth and a bit of theatre: greeting cards, wedding stationery headers, packaging that’s leaning into nostalgia, matchbook and label design, logo lockups for bakeries, cafés and similar hospitality brands. The vintage-advertising feel makes it a natural fit for anything trying to evoke mid-century Americana without going full novelty-font territory.

It’s less suited to anything that needs to feel restrained or contemporary — the swirls work against a minimal or corporate brief. Keep it to short lines, lean on the alternates to avoid visible letter repetition, and give it space; the flourishes need room to breathe or the whole effect collapses into visual noise.

What we liked, and what we didn’t

Strengths

• Three weights plus matching obliques give real flexibility rarely found in scripts this decorative
• Generous alternates and swashes prevent repeated letters from looking copy-pasted
• PUA encoding makes the extra characters usable directly in Canva

Trade-offs

• English-only language support with limited diacritics restricts multilingual use
• Dense flourishes make it unreadable past a word or short phrase, so it's not built for body text

Amaretti delivers a convincing vintage-signage script with genuine range across three weights and obliques, plus swash and alternate support that keeps repeated letters from looking mechanical. It's built for short, punchy text rather than paragraphs, and its exuberance limits it to briefs that actually want warmth and nostalgia. A strong, well-made choice for the right project, not a general-purpose script.