Reverse Italic, Backslanted, Cilati

I’m working on a sans-serif typeface, and since the italic is simply a corrected slanted version, I decided to include a backslanted style as well.

Now, I’m unsure about the naming—should I go with Slanted and Backslanted, or perhaps Italic and Cilati? The latter has a playful twist, but Cilati sounds quite terrible in Italian, and I’m not sure how many graphic designers would recognize this unconventional naming. On the other hand, Backslanted feels like a rather long name for a style.

I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts and advice on this. 

Comments

  • H&erstwhileFJ’s Turbo is “contra italic.”
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,350
    Did someone say gelati?
  • "Linkskursiv" is the same length as "Backslanted" but considerably more fun.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,350
    I don’t have any plans to make a left-slanting italic, but if I were to, I would call the variant ‘Sinister’.
  • Did someone say gelati?

    I’m hearing Cilantro (coriander) instead of gelato : )

    Croats and Slovenians have quite a few words borrowed and domesticated from Italian, and living here without strict borders has its charm—grabbing a morning coffee in Trieste (IT), enjoying lunch in Grožnjan (CRO), and ending the day with dinner back home in Ljubljana (SLO) some weekends isn’t all that rare. Small pleasures.

  • “back home” !

    “Slovenic” ?
  • “back home” !

    “Slovenic” ?
    I'm a native-born Croat and have been living in Ljubljana for almost 30 years now.
  • "Reverse italic" already has a well-established meaning among editors and typographers. Reverse italic refers to a passage set in roman type within an otherwise italic context.

    Thanks, Joshua. I’ve decided to go with Retalic. It’s short, sounds nice (to me), and I think both users and experts will undoubtedly associate it with the term Reverse Italic.

  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 278
    edited February 25
    Thanks for the follow-up, Ermin.
    Above, I mentioned that GT Planar (2022) uses Retalic. This term was already used in 2016 for Misha Panfilov’s Ogonyok
    TypeType also used it for their TT Biersal (2024). They recently blogged about “retalics” – and included a range of historical examples.
    The additional benefit of this term is that it ryhmes with “Rotalic”, a concept that’s also explained in the blog post.
  • Thanks for the follow-up, Ermin.
    Thank you too, Florian, for all the information you’re sharing here. The article on Retalics by TypeType is an excellent find.