I released Presicav on May 1, 2008. The starting point was Tempo Bold Extended by Ludlow, but I didn’t want to do a straightforward revival. Instead, I treated the heaviest weight as a relatively faithful interpretation of the original, then pushed the lighter end of the family in stranger directions. In the ultralight version, bowls connected to stems in unconventional ways, and interpolation between the extremes produced weights with an unusual character of their own. That tension between heavy and light styles gave the family a shifting personality, where the darker weights carried a vintage flavor and the lighter ones leaned toward the experimental.

The first release included six weights. On August 5, 2018, I expanded the family with italics. A technical update on November 18, 2021, fixed a problem with Presicav Bold not appearing in older applications. Another update, version 2.1 on November 1, 2024, renamed Ultra-Light to Thin for consistency and corrected an export issue that had been causing rendering errors in the thinnest style.

Presicav never found an audience and received little attention, but for me it was an experiment in letting a typeface change personality across its weight range rather than enforcing uniformity.