The Periodic Table of Typefaces by Tessa Haywood

Concept

Introduction

Realist

Geralde

Slab

didone

Serif

Serif/Sans Serif Sans-Serif grotesque

Serif

84 103 111

Sans-Serif humanist

Sans-Serif Geometric

119 123 134 Glyphic

Blackletter

erifed typefaces were popular much earlier Inscriptional than sans-serif typefaces and include semi-structural details on many of the letters. People often refer to them as feet, although that is iwn no way a proper anatomical term when referring to typography. Their are many different classifications for serifed Toptypefaces, 100 Fonts often named for their origins, including Grecian, Latin, Scotch, Scotch Modern, French Old Style, Spanish Old Style, Clarendon and Tuscan. Some of these classifications can also be placed into broader classifications.

- 10 columns - 9 gridlines

Periodic Table

12 Serif

Grid Structure

C ontents 10

I ntroductIon

Sans-Serif Display

An integral part of communication, typography is everywhere.

script

144 148

References

Serif Realist

sed in nearly every form of advertising and design, typography has demanded the skill of dedicated typographers for centuries. As clients develop needs for specific styles and families of type, typographers are called upon to develop brand new, implement existing or revive old typefaces. Dedicated professionals who are constantly curious about their medium, typographers owften create their own typefaces for distribution among the design and advertising professions as well. There are thousands of different typefaces and

fonts available to designers, printers, publishers, artists and writers (as well as the general public) today. There are all types of display and text typefaces and everything in between. Most are available in a digital format from a variety of type foundries and can easily be used, and exploited, with modern computer technology. The vast amount of type available makes specific classification of every one nearly impossible and somewhat frivolous. However, it is important to have an understanding of the basic styles of typefaces to help narrow down the research and selection of the correct typeface.

Introduction

C ontents 10

46 72 27

Periodic Table

Realist

Geralde

Slab

didone

Serif

Serif/Sans Serif Sans-Serif grotesque

Serif

84 103 111

Sans-Serif humanist

Sans-Serif Geometric

119 123 134

Glyphic Inscriptional

Blackletter

Point Sizes Concept 30

Sans-Serif Display

script

144 148

Top 100 Fonts

References

Acknowledgements

I ntroductIon An integral part of communication, typography is everywhere.

20 9

I would like to express the deepest apprecation to Cam Wilde for making the Periodic Table of Typefaces. Without stumbling across it I would have had no clue on what to base this book on. I would like to thank my brain for still functioning on little sleep and coffee over the past few weeksâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we will be able to sleep very soon. Also I would like to thank Dominique, Aurelie and Jacindaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;your creative minds have definitely helped me become a better designer. Lastly, I place on record, my sincere gratitude for my mother for not killing me as I may have made a dent in the lounge room chair. Thank you for pushing me to be the best I can be.

Point Sizes

erifed typefaces were popular much earlier than sans-serif typefaces and include semi-structural details on many of the letters. People often refer to them as feet, although that is iwn no way a proper anatomical term when referring to typography. Their are many different classifications for serifed typefaces, often named for their origins, including Grecian, Latin, Scotch, Scotch Modern, French Old Style, Spanish Old Style, Clarendon and Tuscan. Some of these classifications can also be placed into broader classifications.

Serif Realist

40 20 15 STANLEY MORISON

Born in Essex, Stanley Morison left school at 14 to work in an office. Morison was arrested as a conscientious objector in World War 1 and spent time in prison. He underwent a conversion to Catholicism that seemed to underpin his theories. He has been described as sombre and austere “with the countenance of a Jesuit.” Before Morison the usual typefaces used in English printing were Plantin and Caslon. Morison was the typographical advisor for Monotype. He suggested to Monotype that they remake seven typefaces from the past. This was a revolutionary change. These new creations ushered in a typographical Renaissance.

9 12 15 10

DESIGNER: Stanley Morison YEAR: 1931 RANK: 7

Times New RomaN

Stanley Morison, typographic advisor to Monotype, was also made typographic advisor to The Times of London newspaper in 1929. One of his first responsibilities in the latter position was to redesign the newspaper. Several existing typestyles were tried as replacements for the typeface the newspaper had been using for years; but Morison and The Times executive staff found them unsuitable for one reason or another. The decision was then made to create a new, custom, design. The criteria was simple: the new design would

have to appear larger than its predecessor, could take up no more space, should be slightly heavier and, ultimately, must be highly legible. Morison felt that basing the new design on the Plantin® design would begin to satisfy much of the criteria. He provided Victor Lardent, a Monotype designer, with photographs of Plantin specimens and a list of instructions. The two worked together as art director and designer on the project for over two years. The new design was first used in The Times newspaper in 1932 and was then offered to

the public as commercial fonts in 1933. Since The Times used both Monotype and Linotype machines to set type for its issues, a second, almost identical design, was produced by Linotype for their typesetters. The Times Roman typeface was the result of this design effort. Over the years, Times New Roman has been translated into phototype and digital fonts. The Times New Roman design enjoyed another surge of popularity when it became one of the stable of typefaces routinely bundled with computer operating systems and productivity software.

“Typography is a minor technicality of civilised life.” 15

Spreads Tessa Haywood 2801267

The Periodic Table of Typefaces

Family and/or Class

Rank

Symbol Typeface Designer(s)

Year Designed

Concept Spreads Acknowledgements

The Periodic Table of Typefaces published by Blurb Australia au.blurb.com

I would like to express the deepest apprecation to Cam Wilde for making the Periodic Table of Typefaces. Without stumbling across it I would have had no clue on what to base this book on. I would like to thank my brain for still functioning on little sleep and coffee over the past few weeks—we will be able to sleep very soon. Also I would like to thank Dominique, Aurelie and Jacinda—your creative minds have definitely helped me become a better designer. Lastly, I place on record, my sincere gratitude for my mother for not killing me as I may have made a dent in the lounge room chair. Thank you for pushing me to be the best I can be.

RRP $34.95 GST inc 150 pages, colour, hard cover with endpapers First published in 2015 Text copyright © Tessa Haywood 2015 Illustration copyright © Tessa Haywood 2015 Complied by Tessa Haywood Cover illustration and illustrations by Cam Wilde and Tessa Haywood Designed by Tessa Haywood, T.H. Designs All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Blurb. Printed in Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data National Library of Australia Author: Haywood, Tessa. Title: The Periodic Table of Typefaces/ compiled by Tessa Haywood; illustrated by Cam Wilde and Tessa Haywood Edition: 1st ed. ISBN: 9780646546230 (hbk.) Target Audience: For designers. Subjects: Typeface--Reference Other Authors/Contributors: Cam Wilde Dewey Number: A823.4

C ontents 10

Introduction

Periodic Table

Realist

Geralde

Slab

didone

Serif

Serif/Sans Serif Sans-Serif grotesque

Serif

84 103 111

Sans-Serif humanist

Sans-Serif Geometric

119 123 134

Glyphic Inscriptional

Blackletter

script

144 148

Top 100 Fonts

References

Sans-Serif Display

I ntroductIon An integral part of communication, typography is everywhere.

Spreads

Concept Spreads

STANLEY MORISON

Times New RomaN

Serif Realist

DESIGNER: Stanley Morison YEAR: 1931 RANK: 7

“Typography is a minor technicality of civilised life.” 15

DESIGNER: Bram De Does YEAR: 1982 RANK: 17

TriniTe

BRAM DE DOES History Trinité was originally designed for phototypesetting machines. He considered commissioning a new typeface, specifically designed for the new technology, a much better idea. Although it was not his intention, Enschedé invited him to design this new typeface.

Characteristics To design the typeface, De Does studied different solutions to increase harmony on the printed page, and achieve better legibility. He made a list of design principles for an ideal text typeface. These principles were divided into four categories, which according to him could apply to every human production; functionality for the user (legibility in the case of

typefaces), harmony (for aesthetics reasons), practical ergonomic applicability for the manufacturer (the type foundry and compositor) and originality (‘because otherwise there is no use in making the thing’). De Does was of the opinion that harmony on the printed page had been the most powerful in the early Renaissance incunables, and that they present a stronger, more regular overall image. De Does identified two factors that he thought contributed to this impression: the fact that the characters are subtly slanted, and that the serifs are slightly longer towards the right. He therefore decided to introduce these kinds of features into Trinité as well.

All characters have an angle of about one degree and firm, asymmetric foot-serifs that are calligraphic in shape. The harmony of words was also increased by what he called ‘functional swing’, meaning that there is not a single straight line in Trinité. This made the typeface ‘systematically sloppy’. Although some of these details were inspired by techniques used in Renaissance printing types, De Does missed them in the typefaces that were available for the composition equipment he had at his disposal. Reintroducing them to a new typeface created specifically for this equipment was how he wanted to be original, or as he labeled it; historical originality.

Bram de Does (b. 1934) is best known internationally as a type and book designer, creator of typefaces Trinité and Lexicon. In the Netherlands his Trinité is one of the most popular typefaces in the literary circuit and Lexicon is here particularly known as the body type of the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. He has won many awards not only for his type designs, but also for his book typography, including a ‘Goldene Letter’ in Leipzig, the Premio Felice Feliciano and the prestigious H.N. Werkmanprijs of the city of Amsterdam. This uniquely designed and executed book is the first substantial publication devoted to De Does’s life and work. His typography and text types are certainly classical but never ‘traditional’ or dogmatic.

JOHN BASKERVILLE English writing master, stonecutter, letter designer, typefounder and printer. Although in his lifetime he was underappreciated compared with his close contemporary William Caslon, he is now recognized as the other half of the duo that transformed English printing and type founding. After first working as an accomplished writing master and headstone engraver in Birmingham, he found business success japanning (coating with black varnish) trays and snuff-boxes. With capital from this, in 1750 he set up a printing business, hiring John Handy as punchcutter. Baskerville lost a great deal of money in his printing ventures. The perfection of his work seemed to have unsettled his compatriot printers, and some claimed his printing damaged the eyes! Abroad, however, he was much admired, notably by Fournier, Bodoni (who intended at one point to come to England to work under him), and Benjamin Franklin.

DESIGNER: John Baskerville YEAR: 1754 RANK: 19

Baskerville

DESIGNER: Fred Smeijers YEAR: 1998 RANK: 57

Arnhem

FRED SMEIJERS History The beginning of the 18th century brought about old-style typefaces. At the end was the rise of modern style typefaces. Baskerville belonged to a style of type called transitional, nestled in between the old and modern styles. When Baskerville was created it was used for private press work. After John Baskerville’s death a French foundry acquired the typeface. By the late 1700s the typeface was considered to have been lost until the Monotype Revival brought the typeface to popularity. During its early years Baskerville was not as popular. Detractors of the typeface argued

that the sharpness and contrast hurt their eyes. Benjamin Franklin sent a letter to Baskerville telling him of how he ripped the foundry name off of a specimen sheet for Caslon. Then Franklin proceeded to show the sheet to a detractor of Baskerville. Baskerville was an attempt to improve on Caslon Old Style. Its forms “echoes the architecture of the Augustine Age in its serenity and masculinity”. John Baskerville made the vertical axis of the letters more vertical. He increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes. He made the serifs more tapered and sharp. Some character were widened and made more round.

Signs of his in calligraphy show through in the swash tail of the Q and in the “cursive serifs in Baskerville italic”. Other key characteristics of the face include the long arm of the uppercase E that protrudes like an under bite. Or the open bowl of the lower case g and the spur of the uppercase G. Baskerville is not recommended for use in tight spaces. Nor for use in poster designs because of the thin strokes in the face. Because of its design Baskerville is well suited for use in long text.Versatile enough to be used as text or display Baskerville exudes a classical and elegant nature.

“Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. I formed to myself ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and had endeavoured to produce a set of types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion.”

History Arnhem by Fred Smeijers, was designed in 1999 for the Nederlandse Staatscourant, the daily newspaper of the Dutch state. It can be classified as a very functional design – Arnhem has been conceived for, and does work best in large quantities of running text. Rooted in traditional typography Arnhem undoubtedly has a modern touch, or ‘an edge’, as Erik Spiekermann has put it a few years ago. An outstanding tool for editorial design, Arnhem stands out due to its character, distinct colour and exceptional reading quality. Its first commercial release in 2002

comprised four weights of roman and italic designs: Blond, Normal, Bold and Black. Its Normal weight has a strong colour, which is good especially in small sizes and in less than optimal printing circumstances. Arnhem does not have a Light weight, instead there is a Blond version. Eight years on, Smeijers presents the second generation of Arnhem fonts. With small design and spacing amendments, and completed with a SemiBold weight Arnhem fonts now feature five weights of roman and italic designs: Blond, Normal, SemiBold, Bold and Black. The PRO character set includes

small caps, lining, old style and small cap figures; fractions; comprehensive scientific superiors and inferiors, nominators and denominators; case sensitive punctuation sets; mathematical and monetary symbols (in tabular and proportional widths); arrows; standard and discretionary ligatures; and a complete range of accents for all Latin-scriptbased Western, Central and East European languages. Arnhem is an elegant workhorse; it is eminently useable. To use Arnhem is a pleasure and it will surely imbue a feeling of pride and certainty in a typographer’s work without leaving the reader in the cold.

“You want to design the typeface that is missing from your typographic palette.”

Fred Smeijers is a type designer who specializes in typographic research and development for product manufacturers. Among his typeface designs are FF Quadraat and FF Quadraat Sans,TEFF Renard, and the typefaces published by OurType: Arnhem, Custodia, Fresco, Monitor, Sansa and Ludwig. Born in The Netherlands, Smeijers studied graphic design at the Academy of Art in Arnhem. His first practice came in the mid-1980s with the firm of Océ, just then entering the field of typography with laser printers. This set the pattern for Smeijers’s long engagement with type design in its most functional applications, as part of product design. After five years he left to work in graphic design, helping to establish the group Quadraat (in Arnhem). In addition, Fred Smeijers is the co-founder and creative director of OurType.

S cotch Roman

DESIGNER: A.D Farmer YEAR: 1904 RANK: 73

A.D FARMER

A sub-class of the transitional which should be mentioned is the Scotch Roman. It’s actually a gradual step towards the modern style which became popular in the early 19th century and you can see the last humanist traces are replaced by a minimal, mechanical appearance. The Scotch Roman typefaces feature ball terminals and are modeled on a design done by Samuel Nelson Dickinson in 1839 (cut by Richard Austin and cast by Alexander Wilson and Son in Glasgow).

A. D. Farmer emerged from White’s Type Foundry (1804–1862), later changing its name to Farmer, Little & Co. From 1892, it practiced under the name A. D. Farmer. In 1909, the American Type Founders acquired the foundry. Scottish founders exerted a strong influence on the development of “transitional” types, those being the bridge from “old style” faces like Jenson or Garamond to “modern” designs like Bodoni and Didot. The first Scotch Romans were cut by the Englishman Richard Austin; the Scottish typefounders Alexander Wilson and Son in Glasgow cast them. The typeface known today as “Scotch Roman” has wide proportions, short descenders, bracketed serifs, and large, strong capitals. Its subtle charm makes it suitable for any text setting, particularly books and magazines.

BRAM DE DOES Bram de Does (b. 1934) is best known internationally as a type and book designer, creator of typefaces Trinité and Lexicon. In the Netherlands his Trinité is one of the most popular typefaces in the literary circuit and Lexicon is here particularly known as the body type of the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. He has won many awards not only for his type designs, but also for his book typography, including a ‘Goldene Letter’ in Leipzig, the Premio Felice Feliciano and the prestigious H.N. Werkmanprijs of the city of Amsterdam. This uniquely designed and executed book is the first substantial publication devoted to De Does’s life and work. His typography and text types are certainly classical but never ‘traditional’ or dogmatic.

DESIGNER: Bram De Does YEAR: 1992 RANK: 68

Lexicon

History Lexicon (designed in 1992 by Bram de Does) is pre-eminently suitable for output on laser and other low-resolution printers and for typesetting in small sizes. Lexicon is therefore the perfect typeface for use in office correspondence) and applications that require highly economical setting (dictionaries, Bibles, timetables, encyclopedias etc.). It’s reputation belies its fame among designers, perhaps because of its high price, but perhaps also because of its nuanced perfection, which perhaps makes it—like the obscure ‘musicians’ musician’,

the archetypal ‘type designer’s type design.’ The typeface shows a perfect understanding of the digital media, its limitations and potential. The treatment of thicks and thins through all its six weights shows that De Does understands the essence of digital type design. Lexicon came into being more or less spontaneously. In 1989 after being asked by Bernard van Bercum for a Medium Condensed version of its Trinité to be used on the twelfth edition of Van Dale’s dictionary Groot Woordenbock der Nederlandse Taal, Bram suggested that he

could make something specially for the purpose. At that time, the availability of digital fonts for text setting was limited. Working with Peter Matthias Noordzij of The Enschedé Font Foundry (TEFF), Bram de Does quickly produced a new design. The first proofs were made in 1991 and the publisher soon decided to use Lexicon for the Van Dale dictionary which came out the following year. This version has short extenders—ascenders and descenders—designed for the small text. The family was ready for publication in 1995 as part of the TEFF library.

“I tried to obtain what seemed to me the greatest possible legibility and utility, while naturally retaining proper harmony.” 19

GERARD UNGER Gerard Unger Born at Arnhem, Netherlands, 1942. Studied graphic design, typography and type design from 1963–’67 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. He teaches as visiting Professor at The University of Reading, UK, Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, and he is Professor of Typography at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Free lance designer from 1972. He has designed stamps, coins, magazines, newspapers, books, logo’s, corporate identities, annual reports and many other objects, and typefaces. He now lectures frequently in Holland and abroad, about his own work, type design, the reading process, and related subjects.

DESIGNER: Gerard Unger YEAR: 1987 RANK: 80

Swift

Gerard Unger developed Swift between 1984 and 1987, with the intention of making a modern digital type for newspapers. The project was undertaken for the German firm Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH. At that time, newspapers were produced on high-speed presses with low quality paper. Unger says Swift is designed to be a survivor. It has chunky triangular serifs, sturdy connections at junctures, condensed forms with open counters, and a tall x-height. The work of William A. Dwiggins (1880-1956) was Unger’s major design influence for Swift. Dwiggins was a American type designer for Mergenthaler Linotype who, as early as 1930, was focusing on legibility in the design of alternative fonts for newspaper printing.

Swift has become a contemporary classic, and is now used more often for corporate identities and magazines than for newspapers. Austere and concise, firm and original, Swift is a typeface suited to almost any purpose. Swift Pro is the OpenType version, and includes a full range of styles and weights from light to extra bold. In 1990, Linotype AG merged with Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH, forming the Linotype-Hell AG (today Linotype GmbH). Since then, Linotype has been the official source of all fonts that were originally designed for the Hell Corporation. Linotype has also improved the typefaces using new technologies, including OpenType. When the Swift font family was released, it found widespread success

in the printing industry. Its clarity on the high speed presses of the day made it a formidable force to be reckoned with in the typographic world. Almost immediately after its release, the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto began using the typeface for headlining purposes. Later, the Belgian newspaper De Morgen also started using Swift in its publications. Before being redesigned in 2000, How magazine used Swift extensively. Swift has found itself widely used in book publishing as well; one example is the well known Type and Typography by Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam. In the former case, the font was modified as an example of the process of utilizing a typeface for printing purposes.

“It is almost impossible to look and read at the same time: they are different actions.”

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG THE Q QUICK BROWN

Spreads

he Old Style or Humanist serif typefaces developed in the 15th and 16th centuries and are characterized by a low contrast in stroke weight and angled serifs.

Garamond

WILLIAM CASLON

DESIGNER: Claude Garamond YEAR: 1530 RANK: 6

Caslon is regarded by many to be the greatest of English letter writers. In the 18th century, English printing was at a low ebb and was dependent on Holland for its types. Caslon changed all this and stopped the importation of Dutch type. Thus, Caslon heralded a turning point for English type-founding. He started his career engraving government marks on gunlocks. Soon he was cutting his own font designs. Caslon types were actually modelled on Dutch type but were much more delicate and interesting. He went on to create a large number of ‘exotic’ typefaces. The taste for Caslon spread to America, and Caslon was the type used for the Declaration of Independence of the USA in 1776. In the 1840s in Britain, there was a revival of Caslon typefaces. George Bernard Shaw insisted that only Caslon be used for all his books.

CLAUDE GARAMOND

History

Garamond is the name given to many old-style serif typefaces, after the latinized name of the 16th-century punch-cutter Claude Garamont. Many Garamond faces are more closely related to the work of a later punch-cutter, Jean Jannon, or incorporate italic designs created by Robert Granjon. Among contemporary typefaces, the Roman versions of Adobe Garamond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Garamond are directly based on Garamond’s work.

Some unique characteristics in his letters are the small bowl of the a and eye of the e and the upper-case W that resembles two Vs superimposed. Long extenders and top serifs have a downward slope. Like all old-style designs, variation in stroke width is restrained in a way that resembles handwriting, creating a design that seems organic and unadorned. Although there is no conclusive evidence from legibility studies, Garamond is considered to be among the most legible and naturally readable serif typefaces when printed on paper.

A native of Paris, Garamond was an engraver and letter founder of high repute. He was regarded as the best typecutter of his day. He was commissioned by King Francis First of France to make a new cast of type for his own exclusive use, now known as Grecs du Roi. Garamond was the first to produce a reworking of the earlier typefaces of Aldus Manutius, creating a face called Garamond. This small roman type became the standard European type of the day and was still in use in the 18th century. During most of the 20th century, most leading foundries around the world have redrawn their own versions of Garamond’s typeface, and Garamond’s roman is still regarded today as one of the classic typefaces.

DESIGNER: William Caslon YEAR: 1725 RANK: 6

Caslon

History

William Caslon I was an English gunsmith and designer of typefaces. Around 1720 he created an extended set of serif typefaces. These as well as all of their consecutive revivals are referred to as Caslon. Among those revivals are two Adobe versions, called Adobe Caslon and Adobe Caslon Pro. Considered the first original English typeface, it shares many characteristics of the Dutch Baroque type fonts of the era, and may be a variation on the Dutch Fell type fonts cut by designers at that time.

From 1725 through to 1730 three books printed by William Bower used roman and italic fonts cut by Caslon. The popularity of the font diminished upon Caslon’s death but revived during the British Arts and Crafts movement of the 1840s to 1880s. Currently the Caslon font is in wide use and considered the standard for typesetters and printers. The rule of thumb continues to be, when in doubt use Caslon. Because a bold weight was not used commonly to create emphasis in type at the time of the development of the Caslon font,

OSWALD P. COOPER

S erif Geralde

“In the class of types which appear to be beyond criticism from the point of view of beauty and utility, the original Caslon type stands first.” —Updike (1922)

The Minion design is an old-style serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach of Adobe Systems and was released in 1990 by Linotype. This typeface encapsulates the aesthetic appeal of the Renaissance and the exceptional readability of typefaces of the day. For this reason, Minion has proved to be a popular font for on-screen use.

Design The inspiration for Slimbach’s design came from late Renaissance period classic typefaces in the old serif style. The Renaissance period was noted for its elegant and attractive typefaces that were also highly readable. The name Minion is derived from the traditional

RANK: 76

DESIGNER: Erhard Kaiser YEAR: 1997 RANK: 15

ERHARD KAISER

In late 1728, the 21-year-old Nuremberg punch cutter Johann Michael Fleischmann set off for Holland, where he looked for work at various type foundries. After four years as a journeyman, he set up on his own. From 1743 onwards, Fleischmann worked predominantly for the respected foundry Enschedé in Haarlem. By the time of his death in 1768, he had designed more

than 20 Latin Roman typefaces. In December 1992, the Leipzig designer Erhard Kaiser received a commission from DTL to design a new digital edition of Fleischmann’s Roman type. Kaiser extensively studied the wealth of forms in the original Fleischmann fonts, whose mechanically set appearance he intended—as much as possible—to retain.

After four years of work he had produced two Fleischmann font variations: a text version and a display version, each with a corresponding italic font. When demand grew for both a semi-bold and a bold font, Kaiser designed these without a historical model. Small capitals, 30 ligatures, alternatives and several sets of figures completed the DTL Fleischmann range.

“The range (of typefaces) in a workshop is half the issue—but the greatest problem is the very limited amount of freedom afforded to the designer due to the criteria of easy legibility and traditional perceptual habits.” 28

German type designer (born in Quedlinburg, near Leipzig, 1957), who made the extensive DTL Fleischmann family (1992) at the Dutch Type Library. The font is named after Johann Michael Fleischmann (1707–1768), a German punchcutter who lived and died in Amsterdam. From 1983 until 1991 Erhard Kaiser worked at TypeDesign for Typoart, Dresden and since 1993 has been with DutchTypeLibrary/ URW++. Still at DTL, he made the sans serif DTLProkyon family in 2002 around a curvy “4”. This family gets raves from many typographers. Among possible imitations, we cite Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu. Since 1998 he teaches at the Muthesius Hochschule in Kiel. In 2005, he created DTL Antares, a strangely proportioned serif to accompany DTL Prokyon. Some weights published in 2008 are called Evonik Antares and some Evonik Prokyon.

ROBERT SLIMBACH character has a thick stroke in perpendicularity to the “Y”, and though it may look a little odd on close examination, within a body of text it enhances readability by providing good differentiation between adjacent letters. The overall appearance of the Minion design is very much related to the appearance of massproduced publications of late Renaissance but there is an added touch of classic typography design not possible with older, inaccurate print machinery. This new take on those old styles has produced a crisper outline. The Minion typeface family has been expertly crafted to retain great readability by producing a print clarity that even the best of the Renaissance typographers could not manage.

Robert Slimbach was born in 1956 in Evanston, Illinois, USA, but grew up in South California. After leaving college he developed an interest in graphic design and typefaces while running a small screen printshop for manufacturing posters and greeting cards. This work brought him into contact with Autologic Incorporation in Newbury Park, California. From 1983 to 1985, he worked as a font designer with Autologic Incorporation, where Sumner Stone also worked for a short time. There he trained, not just as a font designer but also as a calligrapher. In 1987 he joined Adobe Systems. Ever since, he has been involved in developing new fonts for the Adobe Originals program.

sabon

The Sabon font was created by the well-known typographer Jan Tschichold over a three year period. It was released in 1967 as part of a joint venture by the Monotype, Linotype and Stempel foundries. It was inspired by an earlier Claude Garamond typeface Tschichold had seen on a 1592 specimen sheet printed by the Egenolff-Berner foundry.

History The Sabon design is closely related to the Garamond font styles of the sixteenth century and is considered a beautiful, highly legible typeface face. It was based upon a particular type cut

DESIGNER: Jan Tschichold YEAR: 1964 RANK: 23

However, although many type designers and manufacturers have tried to market similar designs, none has outdone Cooper Black. The blunt and rounded forms, blurred serifs, and very small counters make this a warm and friendly face. Its most distinctive features are the backward tilt of the counters on the ‘O’ and ‘Q’, as well as the elliptical dots in the ‘i’ and ‘j’. More than anything else, its blackness draws attention to Cooper Black. The lack of contrast in the design calls for using this font on a clearly divergent background.

Cooper Black is a very heavy version of Cooper Oldstyle (also known simply as Cooper), an innovative typeface with rounded serifs and long ascenders designed in 1919. The Cooper family was the work of Oswald Bruce Cooper, co-owner of the Bertsch & Cooper design firm in Chicago. Cooper Black set a trend in ad types which prompted such designers as Fred Goudy (one of Cooper’s early teachers) to follow suit with their own black faces (compare Goudy Heavyface).

"Cooper Black - for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers."

KRIS HOLMES DESIGNER: Robert Slimbach YEAR: 1990 RANK: 11

classification and naming of typeface sizes, minion being a size in between brevier and nonpareil. It approximates to a modern 7 point lettering size. The Minion design’s lowercase characters use old-style glyphs in keeping with its Baroque typeface roots. These are most noticeable on the lowercase “g” and “q”. Subtle, but important, details allow the upper and lower case to match well and sit comfortably next to each other. The letter “z” in both cases has the tell-tale heavy dropped serif and matching line thicknesses. The strokes of the upper and lower case “y”, with its italicized narrowing of the secondary stroke, reinforce the strength of the primary stroke. Interestingly, the “Z”

JAN TSCHICHOLD Tschichold is the best known publicist and practitioner of the ‘new typography’ that developed in Europe between the wars. Born in Leipzig to a sign-writer father, his first interest was in antiquarian lettering. In 1923, after his first exposure to the Bauhaus, Tschichold changed his style completely. At the Bauhaus, classical form was to be abandoned and the structure and function of everything was to be rethought. Tschichold was hooked. For a while, he even Russianised his name to Ivan to identify himself more closely with the Left. He was condemned by the Nazis for creating unGerman typography and accused of ‘Kulturbolschevismus’, and was arrested and interned for a while. He took refuge in Switzerland in 1935. While in Switzerland he published ‘Asymmetric Typography’ where he uncompromisingly advocated the new typography. He designed only one widely used typeface - Sabon. In England, he is best known for his redesign of Penguin books in 1946.

Cooper Black is a heavily weighted, old style serif typeface designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper in 1921 and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry in 1922. The typeface is drawn as an extra bold weight of Cooper Old Style. Cooper Black is a heavier version of Cooper Old Style which enjoyed particular popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, and also became somewhat iconic of the 1970s. Popular since it was designed in 1921, Cooper Black has inspired many imitations.

F leischmann

History

DESIGNER: Oswald P. Cooper YEAR: 1920

Minion

Caslon never designed a bold font weight. This peculiarity of the font style has stayed with it through several revivals. The close of the 19th Century has seen three major changes in the technology of typesetting that affected the Caslon font. Beginning with the introduction of hot type and then the development of phototypesetting in the 60s and 70s, we then saw the recent change to digital fonts that began in the mid 1980s. All of these technological changes have seen redesigns of the Caslon font.

Cooper BlaCk

Oz Cooper was born in Ohio and left school at 17. His goal was to become a famous illustrator. He was a correspondent student at the School of Illustration in Chicago. He later enrolled there and realized that he was “no good at drawing pictures”. He signed up for lettering class with Goudy and there found his metier. He joined up with a partner Fred Bertsch and they set up the design firm Bertsch & Cooper in Chicago. There he created Cooper Black, a superbold typeface that was an immediate success. It became one of the most popular typefaces to be released in America at that time and had a great influence on the style of the 1920s and 30s. His other typefaces include Cooper Old Style, Cooper Fullface, and Cooper Initials.

by Claude Garamond, a famous Parisian publisher and one of the most influential printers of all time. A serif roman type style was used extensively in book publications at that time, and later became favored by the Egenolff-Berner foundry based in Frankfurt, Germany. The Sabon design was initially created as the response to a request by a German type foundry for a face with equal spacing in the Roman and Italic versions, which would therefore create less of a workload when it came to typesetting. They also wanted a font that would behave the same

way across the three tangible forms of technology available at the time: single-type machine composition, foundry type for hand composition and linecasting.

Usage Upon its release, the Sabon design was well received by the printing industry and continues to be used frequently in digital typesetting. One of the most notable early uses of the font was in the 1973 release of the Washburn College Bible, by the US based graphic designer Bradbury Thompson. The font continues to be a very popular choice in the publication of religious texts.

"There can be neither a genuinely new, nor a 'reactionary' typography, but only good or bad typography."

Born in Reeley, California, Kris Holmes studied calligraphy with Robert Palladino and Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College, and modern dance with Judy Massee. She continued her education in New York, studying calligraphy and type design with Hermann Zapf, and lettering with Edward Benguiat, alongside modern dance at the Martha Graham and Alwin Nikolais schools. She gained a BA from Harvard and then a Master of Fine Arts in Animation from UCLA Film School.

Lucida

CHARLES BIGELOW Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1945, Charles Bigelow attained a BA from Reed College, where he studied anthropology and, with Lloyd Reynolds, calligraphy and the history of writing. Later he studied typography with Jack Stauffacher at the San Francisco Art Institute and with Hermann Zapf at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His other academic achievements include a Certificate of Advanced Studies from Harvard University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles.

YEAR: 1985 RANK: 12

The Lucida typeface was designed with on-screen legibility as a primary feature. Based on traditional Roman letterform shapes and proportions, the design also benefits from a large x-height, open counters and generous spacing. Originally drawn for low-resolution printers and early personal computer screens, Lucida has migrated to current imaging devices with grace and aplomb.

History

Usage

A design collaboration of Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1985, the Lucida family of typefaces has been enlarged over the years to include a variety of designs. Lucida is the serif branch of the very large Lucida family tree. The full family a is suite of harmonized typefaces that includes a variety of styles: serif and sans-serif, roman and italic, normal and bold weights, scripts, blackletter, icons, and symbols. Lucida Sans Unicode was designed in 1993 and was the first Unicode encoded font. It shipped with the Microsoft Windows NY 3.1 system.

Lucida is well suited to traditional and a growing range of interactive applications. The coordinated designs of the Lucida family also provides for the mixing and matching typestyles to create interface design and hierarchy in complex web content. Styles can be changed inside words or between capitals and lowercase. Icons, signs, and symbols can be more freely integrated with alphabetic characters.

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG THE Q QUICK BROWN

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gyptian, or slab-serifed, typefaces have heavy serifs and were used for decorative purposes and headlines because the heavy serifs impeded legibility at small point sizes.

DESIGNER: Frank H. Pierpont YEAR: 1934 RANK: 43

Rockwell

History Early slab serif fonts were created in the nineteenth century, usually from wood, which was notoriously hard to carve into the small details required for intricate type. Slab serif lettering rapidly became very popular in any areas in which wooden faces were commonly used. Later, smaller versions were deliberately cut in metal as an alternative to the regular serif and sans serif fonts available at the time. In January, 1910, ITF released a face known as Litho Antique, created by William Schraubstadter.

Later that decade, the font and several other similar types became popular around greater Europe, so American Type Founders decided to reissue the font. Morris Fuller Benton added a number of new characters to the original Litho Antique face and the modified result, named Rockwell Antique, was published by ATF in 1931. Later the same year, Benton redrew the font in a heavier style, naming it Stymie Bold. When Frank Hinman Pierpont, in collaboration with Monotype, decided to create and release the Rockwell typeface family in 1934,

several unique characteristics, including differences in spacing, letter weight and subtle changes in glyph formation, were included. Even so, the Stymie Bold and Rockwell designs are often confused for one another, not only because of their similarities but because of the fact that in an early Monotype document, the Rockwell font was accidentally referred to as Stymie Bold. While there are subtle differences between the two faces, this mistake continues to cause confusion today.

FRANK H. PIERPONT Born 1860 in New Haven, CT; died 1937 in London. Trained as a mechanic. By 1894, he was working for Loewe AG in Berlin, where the Typograph typesetting machine was designed. He was director of the Typograph typesetting machine factory from 1896. He moved to England in 1899 and became foundry manager at Monotype.

HOWARD KETTLER

c ouRieR

Howard Kettler (born 1919, died 1999) designed Courier in 1955 for IBM. Everyone recognizes it as the face originally designed for use on typewriters. A typical characteristic of older typewriters is that all characters are given the same amount of space regardless of their width. Hence, an i receives just as much room as an m, even though it is much thinner. This principle defined the look of Courier font. A line in this typeface has “holes” in what would otherwise be a homogenous look. Due to its origins, Courier is often associated with office and telegram-like text, as well as “top secret” or governmentclassified documents! Typewriters have all but disappeared from the office and the practical need for such a typeface with them. Nevertheless, the attractive imperfections of Courier have long been appreciated for their usefulness in design applications. It is therefore often seen in advertisements, especially when the subject deals with messages, telegrams, etc.

History Originally designed by Howard Kettler for IBM, in the 1950s, Courier became the most popular typeface used on typewriters for 30 years. During that period, versions of Courier were available for almost every typewriter on the market. Being a fixed pitch font, which means that every character has the same width and therefore requires no kerning, Courier did not require much memory and was desirable to be included

DESIGNER: Howard Kettler YEAR: 1955 RANK: 63

on the first personal computers. Its inclusion also ensured that the new generation of typesetters would be able to replicate “Typewriter-looking” documents in order to allow for a smooth transition into the new technology. As it has now become a standard “system font” on most computers and printers, many typesetters of today sadly associate Courier with missing fonts and postscript errors. Perhaps these new versions of Courier with ragged edges will encourage

BENJAMIN FOX

S erif Slab

History

DESIGNER: Benjamin Fox YEAR: 1845 RANK: 29

“A letter can be just an ordinary mesenger, or it can be the courier which radiates dignity, prestige and stability.”

DESIGNER: Andre Guertler YEAR: 1967 RANK: 61

ANDRE GUERTLER

History

Usage

Andre Gürtler created the typeface family Egyptian 505 in 1967, together with his lettering class at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel. In fact, the number 505” in the typeface family’s name refers to the school’s classroom number 505, where the work was done. Egyptian 505 is a slab serif style family; during the 19th Century, slab serif types were commonly referred to as “Egyptian”style faces. Gurtler designed Egyptian 505 in the strain of Adrian Frutiger’s famous Egyptienne typeface; Gurtler and Frutiger worked together on many occasions during their careers.

The type family is well suited for many uses, including magazines, brochures, text composition, business cards, newspaper advertising, book jackets, slides, menus, slides, posters, manuals and catalogues. Egyptian 505 won the first Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) type competition.

Born in 1936 in Basel, Switzerland, André Gürtler managed the design office at Deberny & Peignot in the late fifties and early sixties, then taught the only class in production letter design at the Künstgewerberschule at Basel. Some of his fonts include Egyptian 505 (1966), Media (1976, with Chr. Mengelt and E. Gschwind), Basilia (1978), Signa (1978), LinoLetter (with Reinhard Haus, Adobe) and Haas Unica (1980). He has recently been affiliated with the Haas typefoundry and also Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind under the name Team 77.

DESIGNER: Emil Rudolf Weiss YEAR: 1929 RANK: 79

EMIL RUDOLF WEISS

History

Usage

Weiss conceived of Memphis as the first revival of his time of the Egyptian slab serifs that had been so wildly popular in the beginning of the 19th century. He designed the Memphis typeface in 1929 during his tenure at the Stempel factory. Memphis quickly became one of the most popular typefaces of its time and began appearing in commercial print around the globe. As with the earlier Egyptian fonts, its high legibility and even weight values make the font highly effective in brand and display use. Its creation led to an extensive revival of slab serifs in foundries around the world.

Memphis’ block-like build makes it a great typeface for display applications including packaging, advertising, and headlines. Traditionally, it is only used for short text blocks and not in body text.

Media coverage Memphis was generally well received for its legibility and surprising flexibility. In ‘ABCs of Type’, Allan Haley described Memphis as “a sturdy typeface that provides the clarity of a sans serif with the readability of a serif. David Consuegra wrote in ‘American type design & designers’ that Memphis set off “a worldwide type trend”.

The German Emil Weiss originally studied painting in Paris where one of his fellow students was Toulouse Lautrec. He had poetic ambitions and to his surprise, it was not his poetry that impressed a literary magazine but, to his chagrin, his handwriting. This led on to a long and distinguished career in calligraphy, typography, and design. Though more or less self taught, he is regarded as one of the finest calligraphers ever. He was also greatly impressed with the ideals of William Morris. His most famous typeface is Weiss Fraktur which solved a longstanding problem—how to find a text book font for German which was readable.

elements in editorial text and signage. Up until that point, italics had been used to focus a reader’s attention on particular words or phrases. Besley wanted to create a bold typeface that would work cohesively with standard text. The result was Besley’s Clarendon. As the first related bold typeface, its applications were myriad and the typeface was a tremendous success. It was the first registered typeface in the history of typography; however, knock-offs soon appeared across London and in the U.S. The entire genre of slab serifs created in this period came to be known as “Clarendons”, or

“Egyptians” in some parts. After this commercial success, Besley would go on to become the mayor of London in 1869. Clarendon went on to do nothing less than set the tone for commercial and editorial printing for the remainder of the century. It also created the related bold standard that still exists today for emphasizing text. After a brief lapse in popularity, Clarendon made a comeback when Monotype Imaging released a version in 1935, then had Hermann Eidenbenz repurpose the typeface for modern usage in 1953.

CHAUNCEY H. GRI FFITH Chauncey H. Griffith (1879–1956), American printer and typeface designer. Griffith was born in the U.S. state of Ohio, and began his career as a compositor and pressman. In 1906 he joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company as part of their sales force. He became sales manager, and oversaw the entrenchment of Linotype equipment as the industry standard in newspaper and book composition. He developed the typeface Excelsior in 1931 and it was widely adopted as a text and display face for newspapers across the United States. While Griffith was head of typographic development, Linotype issued revivals of Baskerville, Granjon, and Janson. In 1938 Griffith designed the typeface Bell Gothic for the Bell Telephone Company’s directories.

ionic no . 5

Ionic No. 5 is a slab-serif typeface designed by Chauncey H. Griffith and presented by Mergenthaler Linotype in 1925. It is one of five typefaces in Griffith’s ‘Legibility Group’ which contains typefaces especially suited to newsprint including Corona, Excelsior, Opticon, Paragon,

and Textype. Griffith took Lanston’s sturdy 6 point Monotype Ionic 156-J as a starting point for Ionic No. 5, and in five trials produced the first contemporary typeface designed specifically to solve the technical problems posed by stereotyping and high speed printing of newspaper text.

DESIGNER: Chauncey H. Griffith YEAR: 1925 RANK: 53

MeMphis

Clarendon IT as we know it today is the result of a redesign and reissue of a historical typeface so seminal that its name came to be used for all bracketed slab serifs of its era. In London in the 1840s, the commercial applications of printing were increasing dramatically as the Industrial Revolution entered its second stage of expansion. In order to take advantage of this growing market, Robert Besley, a typographer for the Fann Street Foundry, set about finding a solution for one particular commercial printing problem that had arisen—how to pull out, or highlight, certain

E gypt ian

designers to continue using Kettler’s marvelous design to help communicate ideas. Courier Ragged is an attempt both to serve as a typeface which can recreate that “rough” typewriter feel of the past and also be used as a favourable contemporary face. The raggedness gives the characters a new flavour which is suitable today in a market seeking grunge and version faces.

C larendon

An exceptionally gift punch-cutter, Benjamin Fox cut the original Clarendon series, which was basically an egyptian with bracketed serifs. Clarendon proved extremely popular because it met demand for compact dictionary type, an application for which it is still used to this day. Fox went on to cut the medieval series, a revival of Miller ET Richards Old Style, which was popular as an alternative to the romans of Isaac More and Joseph Fry. Fox was a partner in the firm of R Besley ET Co. the type foundry of Robert Besley. Besley himself has previously been a partner in the type foundry of William Thorowgood.

PETER M. NOORDZIJ Peter Matthias Noordzij—born 1961 in The Hague, The Netherlands— typographer, type designer, teacher. In 1980-1985 he tudied at the Koninklijke Academie vor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague. Courses include lettering under his father, Gerrit Noordzij. In 1983 he roduced preliminary sketches for his PMN Caecilia typeface during his third year of study. 1985–86: period of practical training at a printing works. 1986: starts working as a typographer. Clients include the publishers Querido, Arbeiderpers and Meulenhoff and “de Volkskrant” daily newspaper. 1986–89: teaches typography in Arnhem. From 1988 onwards: teachesd type design at the art academy in The Hague. Since 1991: responsible for the new Enschedé Font Foundry in Haarlem.

DESIGNER: Peter M. Noordzij

CaeCilia

History Peter Matthias Noordzij was studying at Koninklijke Academie vor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, Netherlands in 1983 when he created the first sketches of what eventually became the PMN Caecilia design. Designed to represent the writing of a broad-nibbed pen, PMN Caecilia has curved, angled, and vertical strokes. When most people write, the direction and pressure of the pen change, but the angle of the pen in relation

to the line usually does not. This idea was built in to the PMN Caecilia design. Usage Its current name comes from his initials and his wife’s name, Marie-Cecile Noordzij-Pulles. However, the typeface was originally called Academic, and was shown in a small exhibition at an Atypl conference in London. Bitstream, Monotype, and ITC all showed interest in the typeface before an agreement was signed with

Linotype in 1986. Peter worked closely with Werner Schimpf of Linotype, sharing ideas and feedback until the typeface was neared its publication/release date. By this time the name, the name Academic did not seem appropriate, and the new name was chosen. Linotype released the font family in 1991. One of the most influential reading tools of the Information Age—the Amazon Kindle—uses the PMN Caecilia font family as a standard.

YEAR: 1990 RANK: 84 51

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odern serifed typefaces developed in the late 18th and early 19th century and were a radical break from the traditional typography of the time with high contrast of strokes, straight serifs and a totally vertical axis.

DESIGNER: Firmin Didot YEAR: 1799 RANK: 13

DiDot

History The Didot Font Family began in Paris when Firmin Didot began work on a collection of related type fonts. At the time the Didot family owned the most influential and successful print shop and font foundry in France. In fact, they were the King’s printers with seven members of the family working in some capacity in the varied branches of the book trade. Firman Didot completed the development and began to cut the letters and cast them between 1784 and 1811. His brother Pierre used the type for his printing business including the now famous edition of Voltaire’s La Henriade which has been long considered his masterpiece. The typeface was known for its increasing stroke contrast and more condensed armature, much like John Baskerville’s fonts of the time.

The font is considered a neoclassical font with a similar style because of its increased stress high contrast typeface to a contemporary family of fonts of the time, by the Italian Giambattista Bodoni, creator of the well-known Bodoni font family. Although not as common a sight today as it was, the logo is still very much a part of the modern media scene. The development of hot type and then digital type saw changes to the basic font style, due in part to a common problem with not only the Didot font family but also with the Bodoni fonts. The conversion to digital resulted in a problem called “dazzle” where the fine thin lines in the smaller point sizes would disappear. In 1991 Adrian Frutiger was one of the premier designers of the century and was working at Linotype.

He was inspired by the study of the early Didot fonts in the Voltaire publication. He came up with a solution for Dazzle by adapting the fonts with the creation of a heavier weighted stroke in the smaller sizes. A similar solution was created by Jonathan Hoefler in his adaptation that he named HTF Didot ’ when he was at H&FJ. The Linotype Didot and HTF Didot are still widely used to this day in many forms of digital printing, particularly in books and magazines where an elegant oldfashion look is desired. Today’s Linotype Didot has twelve weights that include Old Style Figures, beautifully designed graphic elements and an elegant headline version. Although there have been many reinterpretations of the original font design, the actual Didot font design remains available only in print version.

FIRMIN DIDOT Firmin Didot—born 1764 in Paris, France, died 1836 in Mesnil-surl’Estrée, France—was a punch cutter, type founder, printer, publisher, author. 1783: cuts his first typefaces and reworks his father’s roman alphabets. 1797: is granted a patent for his developments in the field of stereotype printing. His typefaces are used in his brother Pierre Didot’s “Editions du Louvre” series. 1812: he is made director of the Imprimerie Impériale type foundry. 1823: one of his tragedies is performed at the Théâtre de l’Odeon. Adrian Frutiger’s Didot font is a sensitive interpretation of the French Modern Face Didot by Firmin Didot.

JUSTUS WALBAUM

Justus Erich Walbaum—born 25. 1. 1768 in Steinlah, Germany, died 31. 1. 1839 in Weimar, Germany—was a type founder, type designer, punch cutter. Trained as a spice merchant and pastry cook in Braunschweig. He had further trainig as a form cutter, music engraver and punch cutter. 1796: buys printer Ernst Wilhem Kircher’s type foundy in Goslar. 1803: the type foundry moves to Weimar. 1828: Walbaum hands over the type foundry to his son, Theodor, who is killed in an accident in 1830. J. E. Walbaum continues to run the business. 1836: Walbaum sells his type foundry to F. A. Brockhaus in Leipzig. 1918: H. Berthold AG in Berlin gains possession of art of the Walbaum foundry and some of its matrices.

DESIGNER: Justus Erich Walbaum

WALBAUM

GIAMBATTISTA BODONI

Serif Didone

of Didot, Bodoni and Walbaum, the latter is always the forgotten type. But, as Erik Spiekermann has pointed out, it is the better one for text setting. However, it is important to note that there are two basic Walbaum designs available today, one derived from 8 to 10 pt samples and the other from a 16 pt sample. The former, a light (almost spindly) design, is Walbaum (Monotype Corporation, 1930s) or Walbaum Standard by Gunter Gerhard Lange (H. Berthold AG, 1976); the latter, a darker design with

a tall x-height, is Walbaum (Linotype), Walbaum Medium (Monotype Corporation, 1930s) or Walbaum Buch by Lange (H. Berthold AG, 1975). This second design is historically a display face but it is the one more commonly used for text today. Walbaum is not as dandyish as either Didot or Bodoni. It lacks spur serifs on C, G, S and s; a foot serif on b; and a beard on G. Its stroke contrast is not as severe and, at least in the text version, its serifs are slightly bracketed.

YEAR: 1800 RANK: 44 57

in 1912 and shaded initials in 1914. These were followed by subsequent versions in 1915 through 1926 to create a full family of fifteen font variations on Bodoni’s original font style.

Usage One of the earlier publications using Bodoni was Dante’s La Vita Nuova in 1925. A good example of the design capabilities is Chauncey H. Griffin’s Poster Bodoni used in neon signs and most recognizably in the poster for the movie and play Mama Mia! as well as the movie poster for Black Dahlia. The 1950 Museum of Modern Art publication What is Modern Design? was designed by leading modern designer Jack Dunbar and

features Bodoni as its title font. In advertising Bodoni has been used in many logos because of its classic style including Guerlain, Elizabeth Arden, Giorgio Armani and the classic “CK” for Calvin Klein. In magazine publications such icons as Harper’s Bazzar and the classic architecture magazine Metropolis both use Bodoni as their basic text font. In addition Elle magazine ahs used it for logo and titles.Variations on the Bodoni font have appeared in many places in the entertainment media including the cover slip for the single Britney Spears 3 was Bodoni Stn-Poster Italic as well as the show logo for The News Hour with Jim Lehr which is in Bodoni TS-Demi Bold.

“Beauty is founded on harmony, subordinate to the critique of reason.” 55

DESIGNER: Zuzana Licko YEAR: 1986 RANK: 48

LICKO Walbaum’s romans, along with those of Johann Carl Ludwig Prillwitz, represent the first important break from blackletter in German typographic history. Both men were inspired by the interest in classical art and literature shown by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller and their types were influenced by the work of Firmin Didot. Walbaum’s were the more polished types and the ones that were first revived in the 20th century. Within the Neoclassical trinity

It was first designed by Giambattisa Bodoni in 1798 and is generally considered a “transitional” font type. Bodoni was a prolific type font designer and this particular font was highly influenced by the work of John Baskerville, a designer whose work Bodoni followed. The font, with its highly recognizable centered “Q” tail and slight hook in the “J”, was widely accepted by printers and can be seen in a broad variety of publications and uses since the late 1700s. American Type Founders came out with a variant designed by Morris Fuller in 1909, followed by an italic and book version in 1910, italic and bold+italic in 1911, a bold shaded version

RANK: 3

ZUZANA Emigre released. PostScript, a programming language developed by Adobe—and made available to the public in 1985—replaced bitmap based fonts and made possible the drawing of glyphs as Bézier curve outlines which could then be rendered at any size or resolution. As software rapidly improved, hardware struggled to keep up. Memory space, processing power, rasterizers and output devices were still lacking in sophistication - at least for those computers that people could afford to buy. To address this issue, and in order to save as much memory space as possible, Matrix was based on a few simple ratios, and the points required to define the letter forms were limited to the essentials.

History

DESIGNER: Giambattista Bodoni YEAR: 1798

Matrix

The reason Matrix looks the way it does may seem quaint, if not incomprehensible, to those who were not around in 1985 when the idea for its design was born. The tool used to produce it, the Macintosh computer, had just appeared on the scene and its restrictions were many. It was on this computer that the basic ideas for Matrix were developed. While the proportions of Matrix were based on one of Zuzana Licko’s earlier bitmap fonts, its distinctive geometric character was the result of having to work around the Mac’s limitations and coarse resolution laser printers. After designing a number of low resolution bitmap fonts, Matrix was the first PostScript font that

Bodoni

Born near Turin, Giambattista Bodoni was the fourth son of a master printer. He was made director of the Royal Printing House of the Duke of Parma. No printer was more acclaimed in his own lifetime than Giambattista Bodoni. He did away with old-style letters and introduced a new clear simple type—the Modern typeface. The roman letter he cut in 1798 is usually what we mean by a Bodoni. His type was characterised by a severe simplicity. In his influential Manuale Tipografico of 1818, he laid down the four principles of type design “from which all beauty would seem to proceed”, which were: regularity, cleanness, good taste, and charm. His masterpiece was Homer’s Iliad, which was dedicated to Napoleon who made him a Chevalier. He died while at work on his Manuale. Bodoni’s influence was enormous and his design held sway throughout the 19th century. In 1907, Morris Fuller Benton recut Bodoni (BT) which is still in use today.

This is how Matrix acquired its geometric shapes and its distinctive triangular serifs which require fewer points than traditional square or curved serifs. Also, the 45 degree diagonals were the smoothest diagonal that digital printers could generate. Matrix thus consumed relatively little memory space to store in the printer and facilitated fast printing. After months of tedious work, Licko is satisfied with the result and relieved to have had the opportunity to revisit and improve Matrix. But she also realizes that a project like Matrix is never completely finished. The new release, of Matrix II however, should carry Matrix well into the future.

“You read best what you read most.”

Zuzana Licko was born in 1961 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and emigrated with her parents to the U. S. in 1968. She graduated with a degree in Graphic Communications from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Together with her husband, Rudy VanderLans, Licko started the design company Emigre Graphics in 1984. The company became world renowned for its self-published magazine and type foundry, which were greatly inspired by the new technical possibilities offered by the introduction of the Macintosh computer. Complete sets of Emigre magazine are in the permanent collections of many other institutions around the world.

MORRIS FULLER BENTON Benton was born into the type business. His father, Linn Boyd Benton, was a typefounder and the inventor of the matrix-cutting machine, which revolutionised printing. Morris Fuller Benton was born on November 30, 1872 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He died on June 30, 1948 in Morristown, New Jersey. Benton was the son of Linn Boyd Benton, inventor of the pantographic punch-cutting machine and founder of the American Typefounders agglomeration in 1892. In 1896, he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering; thereafter, he became his father’s assistant at ATF. He quickly began designing his first typefaces, and would later go on to become the company’s artistic director. Benton is also accredited with creating some order out of chaos in the typographical world, by establishing the concept of dividing up typefaces or fonts into families.

DESIGNER: Morris Fuller Benton YEAR: 1919 RANK: 50

Century

History The Century was a popular American magazine around the end of the 19th century. Its publisher, Theodore De Vinne, commissioned a new typeface for the magazine from his friend Linn Boyd Benton. The problem with the popular typefaces of the time, which were heavily influenced by Bodoni’s work, was that when the larger fonts were reduced in size for the magazine, their already thin lines became faint, rendering the text hard to read. Benton’s creation, simply named Century, included heavier hairlines and an increased x– height, resulting in a typeface that was much more readable at

smaller font sizes. In addition, to accommodate the magazine’s 2-column format, Century was compressed slightly to permit more characters per line. The Century typeface was successfully introduced in the magazine’s pages in late 1895. Benton’s son, Morris Fuller Benton, continued work on the typeface to bring it into line with the standards of the International Typographers Union. The new typeface, named Century Expanded, addressed the concern that original Century design was too condensed, and immediately became so popular that the original Century design was soon retired.

The younger Benton then developed additional designs within the Century Expanded typeface, pioneering the concept of typeface families and making Century Expanded the first “superfamily”. Among the many subfamilies in the Century Expanded superfamily, special attention should be paid to the Century Schoolbook design. It’s design relied on scientific studies into the way children learn to read, and employs an increased x-height and stroke width, as well as increased space between letters in order to achieve improved readability.

“Mr. Benton is, like most men who have accomplished much, modest in discussing his achievements” —Anonymous

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DESIGNER: Sumner Stone YEAR: 1987 RANK: 21

Stone

SUMNER STONE History The Stone Sans font started life a long time before its eventual realization in font form. Its typographer, Sumner Stone, studied at Reed College where he had to opportunity to undertake classes in calligraphy with Lloyd Reynolds. After graduation Stone worked for Hallmark in Missouri as a lettering artist from 1969 to 1971, going on to become the Principal at the Alpha and Omega Press in 1972. Re-entering college later that decade, Stone obtained another degree—this time in mathematics. It was this curious mix of calligraphy and mathematical ability that gave rise to the ITC Stone Sans font.

While it is clearly a humanist font, its letterforms are also very balanced. With a perfect combination of thicker and thinner strokes and a mixture of straight and slanted cuts on the ends of the letters, the Stone Sans design is an elegant and minimalistic typeface eminently suitable for a very wide range of applications.

Usage Being such a diverse font family, the ITC Stone series can be used in almost any application. The ITC Stone Sans in particular has many possible applications, as its elegant, unfussy styling is a perfect accompaniment to many forms of design, from logotype to print.

Some significant examples of the ITC Stone Sans design “in the wild” include its use in the National Geographic Channel logo. Naturally, in many corporate ventures the original letterforms are modified slightly, but several features—the capital “E” in particular—render the ITC Stone Sans design very conspicuous. Other logos include the Techfest 2011 logo and the Taylor & Francis Group logo (a publishing company based in the United Kingdom). In this last example, the most striking change to the font can be seen in the modified ampersand. In print, the ITC Stone Sans design can be seen regularly in the Tageblatt, a Luxembourgian daily newspaper.

“In typography there is a fundamental relationship between the physical image of the text and the visual apparatus of the reader...”

Sumner Stone is a type designer, type founder, author, and teacher. From 1984–1989 he was Director of Typography for Adobe Systems where he conceived and implemented Adobe’s typographic program including the Adobe Originals. In 1990 he founded Stone Type Foundry Inc., now located in Rumsey, California. The Foundry has produced a variety of prizewinning typefaces as well as custom type designs. As a teacher Mr. Stone has conducted many calligraphy and typography classes at several institutions. Over the past few years, Sumner has taught several different courses and type workshops in the Type@Cooper program at Cooper Union. He is the author of books, and many articles about typography and typeface design, and has lectured widely on these topics.

LUCAS DE GROOT

Luc(as) de Groot graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague, the Netherlands, under typography teacher Gerrit Noordzij. In 1993 he moved to Berlin, Germany, to become typographic director at the renowned company MetaDesign. At MetaDesign, Luc(as) worked on a large number of corporate identity projects, including the design of logos, magazine concepts and clientspecific type designs. He reworked Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta (which became MetaPlus) and during his evenings managed to finish the largest digital type family ever - which was released as Thesis in 1994. Luc(as)’ skills have been widely recognized within the international design community. Since the introduction of Microsoft’s Windows Vista system, two of his fonts have appeared on PC screens the world over as part of the ClearType Font Collection. Luc(as) designed both Consolas, the successor to Courier, and Calibri, the new default font of MS Word.

DESIGNER: Lucas De Groot YEAR: 1994 RANK: 26

Serif /SanS Serif

theSiS

DESIGNER: Otl Aicher YEAR: 1988 RANK: 30

Rotis

OTL AICHER History The Thesis superfamily was first published in 1994 as part of the FontFont collection, and became part of the LucasFonts type library in 2000. The family was conceived as a versatile typographic system of ambitious scope. It grew out of a dissatisfaction with the limited range of good typefaces available

for corporate identity projects. Thesis aims to fill that gap by providing the user with three compatible styles—TheSans, TheMix and TheSerif—in an optically harmonious range of eight weights, including real italics for each weight. Thesis pioneered the concept of the all-purpose type system or superfamily which has since

become such an important tool for the discerning typographer. The Thesis family has been expanded over the years. TheSans and TheMix are now available in three widths: Normal, Condensed and SemiCondensed. In addition, three ultra-narrow widths for TheSans are available on demand.

“Someone had written the page numbers in the school newspaper by hand. I found that very ugly and I wanted to do something about it. ”

History Frustrated with the conservative mentality of many typographers who were determined to draw a clearly defined line between serif and sans serif typefaces, Otl Aicher, an iconoclast of German graphic design during much of the 20th century, set out to develop a typeface that would challenge those traditionalists assumptions. He sought to create transitional elements within a super font family that would blend serif and sans serif designs. The result was the Rotis

superfamily. The standout amongst this superfamily of four was Rotis Sans Serif. Its controlled transitions and high legibility quickly earned it a place in logotype designs across Europe, while making it a go-to for body text as well. It is an entrenched part of the zeitgeist; in Germany, especially, it is almost impossible to encounter any media that does not contain Rotis Sans Serif. Otl Aicher continued to work at the studio where Rotis was created until his untimely death in 1991. Since that time, Monotype

Imaging has purchased and reissued Rotis Sans Serif and the rest of the Rotis superfamily.

Usage Rotis Sans is used in the branding elements and descriptive text for many international beauty brands like L’Oreal. It is prominent in advertising, street signage, and even publishing body text across Europe. Finnish technology giant Nokia was using Rotis Sans primarily until very recently when they switch to their own custom sans typeface.

“In design man becomes what he is. Animals have language and perception as well, but they do not design..”

DESIGNER: Martin Majoor

S cala

YEAR: 1991 RANK: 49

MARTIN MAJOOR

This graceful sans serif humanist font may have a recent design history, but its roots go all the way back to the late 1700s. The FF Scala Sans’ font is a companion font to the FF Scala’ font, both created by Dutch designer Martin Majoor in the early 1990s. History The old style FF Scala Sans font began in 1990 when its original FF Scala font was designed for the Vredenberg Music Center by Martin Majoor. Designer Majoor explains that the name was informed by the fact that he was designing it for a concert hall and that the font itself has its roots in the same time period that the Teatro alla Scala was built, the late 1700s. He points to the first

vertically-stressed typefaces, those of designer P.S. Fourneir as his principle influence on the design of the FF Scala. The font was designed with the concept that the new digital design technologies would open up novel possibilities for font design. When discussing the design philosophy behind the two fonts, Majoor explained that what he wanted to create was the basic principle of “two typefaces, one form principle” that he felt was central to all font design. The FF Scala Sans font was designed by basically cutting off the serifs and lowering the contrast. The addition of the FF Scala Jewel, a decorative variety of all capitals that was released in 1997 rounded out the family of fonts.

The FF Scala family includes Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold-Italic, Condensed, Bold-Condensed. The FF Scala Sans family includes Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold-Italic, Condensed, Bold-Condensed, Light, Light-Italic, Black, BlackItalic, Scala Hands. FF Scala Sans is the first ever sans serif font with italic small caps. Usage Popular for books, FF Scala in all three fonts styles (Scala, Scala Sans, and Jewel) was used in the publication of Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office by Ellen Lupton and Design Writing Research: Deconstruction and Graphic Design by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller.

“It is my conviction that you cannot be a good type designer if you are not a book typographer.”

Martin Majoor has been a type designer since the mid-1980s. Around 1990 he designed the award-winning typeface family FF Scala and FF Scala Sans. The Scala family has since been used worldwide as corporate identity typeface (KLM Royal Dutch Airlines), museums (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg), publishers (Taschen Verlag), and magazines (ID Magazine, Wall Paper). In 1994 Majoor designed the telephone directory for the Dutch telephone company KPN. For this purpose he also designed two complete new typefaces, Telefont List and Telefont Text, which are still in use today. His Nexus family (2004) is his latest super family, consisting of serif, sans serif and slab serif versions, which are all ‘connected’. In 2006 the Nexus family was the winner in The Creative Review Type Design Awards in the category Text Families. Majoor taught typography at several Schools of Fine Arts and gave lectures at TypeLab/ATypI conferences in Antwerp, Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona and Prague and during TypoBerlin 2005. He works as a book typographer and type designer in both Arnhem and Warsaw.

ZUZANA

BaSe

LICKO Zuzana Licko was born in 1961 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and emigrated with her parents to the U. S. in 1968. She graduated with a degree in Graphic Communications from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Together with her husband, Rudy VanderLans, Licko started the design company Emigre Graphics in 1984. The company became world renowned for its self-published magazine and type foundry, which were greatly inspired by the new technical possibilities offered by the introduction of the Macintosh computer. Complete sets of Emigre magazine are in the permanent collections of many other institutions around the world.

DESIGNER: Zuzana Licko YEAR: 1995 RANK: 55

Otl Aicher—born May 13, 1922 in Ulm, Germany, died September 1, 1991 in Rotis über Leutkirch, Germany—type designer, graphic designer, author, teacher. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. He produced graphics for: Braun Elektrogeräte (1954), Deutsche Lufthansa (1969), Westdeutsche Landesbank (1964), Blohm & Voss (1964), Bayrische Rückversicherung (1972), Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen ZDF (1974) and Erco (from 1976), among others. Aicher’s extensive practical and theoretical work represents an expanded and refined structural functionalism, and demonstrates an holistic and rational approach to visual communication on the basis of its social relevance.

DESIGNER: Peter Bil’ak

Fedra

YEAR: 2002 RANK: 62

PETER BILAK

Usage When using the Base-9 and Base-12 fonts in situations where character display and spacing on the screen are of primary importance, such as in multimedia, these fonts should be used at point sizes which are multiples of their “Base.” For example, Base-12 is best used at 12 point, 24 point and above. Base-9 is best used at 9 point, 18 point and above. Carefully hand-edited screen fonts are provided at these sizes for the best possible screen display. Of course, any other point sizes may be used as with

any other PostScript or TrueType outline fonts when print is the final product. ATM and TrueType rasterizers will generate acceptable screen fonts at sizes other than the hand-edited ones mentioned above, but such automatically generated screen fonts are not recommended for use where screen display is primary. When creating on-screen graphics, there is a temptation to use anti-aliased displays of typefaces to make them consistent with the smoothness of full color images. In fact, anti-aliased versions of fonts can be generated

by some programs, such as Adobe Photoshop. However, just like standard unedited screen fonts, these anti-aliased screen fonts will be plagued with distracting irregularities unless they are hand-edited. Therefore we do not recommend using automatically generated anti-aliased screen fonts below 18 point. Although the design of the Base-9 and Base-12 fonts was guided by a specific functional intent, the goal was also to create a comprehensive family of typefaces suitable for traditional print purposes.

“...Every time I asked for advice, people kept telling me it was really a lost cause, that it couldn’t be done. So I thought that anything I would do would be better than what was out there.”

History Fedra Sans was originally commissioned by Paris-based Ruedi Baur Integral Design and developed as a corporate font for Bayerische Rück, a German insurance company, as part of their new visual identity. According to the commissioner, the objective was to ‘de-protestantize Univers’, the typeface which Bayerische Rück had been using since Otl Aicher designed their first visual identity in the 1970s. The typeface reflects the original brief: it humanises the communicated message and adds simple, informal elegance. The

typeface attempts to reconcile two opposing design approaches: the rigidity of a typeface designed for the computer screen and the flexibility of handwriting. After first versions of the typeface were completed and digitised, the project was cancelled as Bayerische Rück was acquired by another even larger multinational corporation. This put an early end to the story of the custom font, but also freed the project to be further developed and independently published.

Fedra Mono Fedra Mono was developed for an annual report that required a

fixedwidth counterpart to Fedra Sans. All the letters in Fedra Mono share the same width, making the typeface suitable for tabular setting in layouts that benefit from the vertical alignment of characters.

Fedra Sans Display Instead of extrapolating lighter versions of Fedra Sans for display use, the the Fedra Sans Display family was specially designed. This allowed to change the spacing and kerning of the characters, based on the assumption that they would be used in larger sizes. Fedra Display was designed in collaboration with Dutch type designer Pieter van Rosmalen.

“Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.” 68

Peter Bil’ak is working in the field of editorial, graphic, type and web design, on a scope of cultural and commercial projects. He designed several fonts for FontShop International, and custom typefaces for visual identities. In 1999 he started his own type foundry Typotheque. In 2000, he organized and curated and exhibition of contemporary Dutch graphic design at the Biennale of graphic design in Brno, Czech Republic. He is the editor of dot dot dot, a graphic design and visual culture magazine (together with Stuart Bailey). The magazine offers inventive critical journalism on a variety of topics related both directly and indirectly to graphic design. His work has been presented in magazines such: Abitare, Étapes Graphiques, Graphics International, HOW, I.D., Items, Page, U&lc, and several books. In addition to daily design practice, Peter Bil’ak acts as a visiting tutor at the Royal Academy in The Hague, Art Academy in Arnhem, and regularly gives talks and workshops internationally. He based in The Hague, NL.

ERIK SPIEKERMANN Erik Spiekermann, born 1947, studied History of Art and English in Berlin. He is author, information architect, type designer (FF Meta, ITC Officina, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk and many corporate typefaces) and author of books and articles on type and typography. He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany’s largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. He is responsible for corporate design programs for Audi, Skoda,Volkswagen, Lexus, Heidelberg Printing, Bosch and way-finding projects like Berlin Transit, Düsseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts.

DESIGNER: Erik Speikermann YEAR: 1990 RANK: 38

o fficina

History The Officina Sans design was created in response to the popularity of inexpensive laser printers. Building on the typewriter fonts Courier™ and Letter Gothic™, Erik Spiekermann wanted to create a simple, useful typeface for business communication such as letters and emails. The ITC Officina Sans typeface was the result. After its release, the typeface became popular for use in other media as well. Spiekermann introduced additional weights and character options to the original

design, which featured only regular and bold weights. The arm and the leg of ITC Officina Sans make a right angle as they meet the vertical line, making a subtle but unique difference from other typefaces. The capital Q is more oval than in other typefaces, and the capital J has the top only to the left, not across the top. The ‘b’ and the‘d’ have are raised slightly and have a bowed shape - hardly noticeable unless looking for it. Small variations like these give this typeface an air of originality, yet keep it legible.

The ITC Officina Sans design has evolved over time in response to market needs, and continues to respond to the market. This may be one of the reasons why it is relied upon again and again.

Usage The complete ITC Officina Sans family includes weights such as Display Light, Medium, Bold, Extra Bold, and Black. ITC Officina Sans is used by the South Dakota Department of Tourism. The iomega company uses it in its logo.

“I’m very much a word person, so that’s why typography for me is the obvious extension. It just makes my words visible.” 65

FRED SMEIJERS Fred Smeijers is a type designer who specializes in typographic research and development for product manufacturers. Among his typeface designs are FF Quadraat and FF Quadraat Sans,TEFF Renard, and the typefaces published by OurType: Arnhem, Custodia, Fresco, Monitor, Sansa and Ludwig. Born in The Netherlands, Smeijers studied graphic design at the Academy of Art in Arnhem. His first practice came in the mid-1980s with the firm of Océ, just then entering the field of typography with laser printers. This set the pattern for Smeijers’s long engagement with type design in its most functional applications, as part of product design. After five years he left to work in graphic design, helping to establish the group Quadraat (in Arnhem). In addition, Fred Smeijers is the co-founder and creative director of OurType.

DESIGNER: Fred Smeijers YEAR: 1992 RANK: 99

Q uadraat

Quadraat began as a small serif family, designed by Fred Smeijers. Originally developed for the Dutch design company Quadraat (who since changed their name to “The Lab”), the initial FF Quadraat serif family combined Renaissance elegance with contemporary ideas on construction and shaping. The typeface was born out of careful research in form and function. Upon the release as a modest four weight family in 1992, the confident and accomplished nature of FF Quadraat immediately established the then 31-year-old Fred Smeijers as a force to be reckoned with. The resulting typeface is a wonderfully effective text typeface, with

unassuming yet highly original character shapes. The first additions to Smeijers’s family were FF Quadraat Sans and FF Quadraat 2 (a new variant). While the concept of type families crossing classifications only caught on in the late 1980s, FF Quadraat Sans follows a trend from Smeijers’s fellow Dutchman, Jan van Krimpen. Earlier in the 20th century, van Krimpen’s Romulus design was one of the first examples of a classic serif typeface to be augmented with a sans serif variant. FF Quadraat Sans however is a striking design in its own right; a subtly stressed, lively humanist sans serif with strong gestural shapes. This efficient

typeface is well suited for both display setting and longer texts. After examining the original designs, many character shapes were carefully redesigned and fine-tuned. Three delicate Light weights were added to the Sans and Sans Condensed families and new Demi weights for all variants to bridge the gap between Regular and Bold. Black was added in 2012. Every single weight in Serif, Sans and Sans Condensed now has small caps and a Pro character set layout, which includes both Latin and Cyrillic Extended glyphs, adding support for about 100 languages. Finally, the descending tails of the K and R can now be found among the alternative glyphs.

“To be blunt, and it is good advice to serious newcomers: do not make the mistake of being afraid to be labelled ‘conventional’, ‘traditional’, or any other such dusty term.” 69

HE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPS OVER HE LAZY DOG HE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPS OVER HE LAZY DOG HE QUICK BROWN

Spreads

losely related to the characteristics of transitional serifed typefaces, these typefaces include a more upright axis and a uniform stroke.

DESIGNER: Adrian Frutiger YEAR: 1954 RANK: 4

Univers

The Univers typeface family is one of the most prolific grotesque sans-serif typefaces of the century. Univers is unique in that the design lacks superfluous features of any type, creating a design that is versatile and distinctive without being obstrusive. The Univers type family has grown to 44 different weights and styles, some of which include Cyrillic characters. History A very important aspect of the Univers family is its modularity. Frutiger wanted to create a series of related designs that were absolutely harmonious with each other. This could only be

accomplished by determining the complete family range as part of the design process or by building the family within a strict modular framework. Frutiger did both. Frutiger has continued to improve and expand the Univers family, working with Linotype designers to add new weights and enlarging the character set to include many languages such as Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic. The final iteration of the family, Univers Next—a complete upgrading of the design—was released in 2010. Usage Univers has been employed in numerous applications including

corporate branding, signage, maps, standardized testing and consumer electronics devices. Apple used Univers on its laptop keyboards until switching to the VAG Rounded typeface in 2007. Univers is used in tandem with Frutiger in the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, as well as being the primary typeface used by Germany‘s Frankfurt International Airport and the Montreal Metro System. Rand McNally used Univers to label maps and atlases before switching to the Frutiger design in 2004. Univers is used on tests and exams in the UK, preferred for the clear distinction between similar characters such as I and 1.

“Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.” 74

ADRIAN FRUTIGER

Adrian Frutiger was born in 1928 at Unterseen near Interlaken, Switzerland. After an apprenticeship as a compositor, he continued his training in type and graphics at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) from 1949 to 1951, being taught by two renowned professors, Alfred Willimann and Walter Käch. He established his international position as a typeface designer with his Univers sans-serif font, produced for metal and film in 1957. Together with Bruno Pfäffli and André Gürtler, he founded his own studio in Arcueil near Paris in 1961. He was also Professor for ten years at the Ecole Estienne and eight years at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

HERMANN BERTHOLD Born in 1831, Hermann Berthold was the son of a calico-printer. On completion of his apprenticeship as a precision-instrument maker and after practical experience gained abroad in galvanography, Hermann Berthold founded his “Institute for Galvano Technology” in Berlin in 1858. Very quickly he discovered a method of producing circular lines from brass and not, as customary at that time, from lead or zinc. The soldering normally necessary could also be dispensed with. The lines were elastic and therefore highly durable. They produced outstandingly fine results. Most of German’s letterpress printers and many printers abroad placed their orders with Berthold. His products became so popular that the print trade popularized the saying “As precise as Berthold brass.”

Akzidenz-Grotesk

The roots of the AkzidenzGrotesk typeface date back as early as 1880. The designs are rumored to have been a derivative of the Walbaum or Didot serif fonts. When the serifs are removed from these designs, the proportions are very similar to those of Akzidenz-Grotesk. The Akzidenz-Grotesk family is actually a collection of numerous grotesque typefaces from different designers, unified to create a complete family.

History

DESIGNER: Hermann Berthold YEAR: 1896 RANK: 5

Once unified as a single family, Akzidenz-Grotesk remained unchanged until Berthold’s

Günter Gerhard Lange enhanced the family by adding an additional 33 styles. The revisions and extensions preserved the original 19th century details while adding additional versatility to the family. Berthold added to the family once again in 2006, releasing Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro in the OpenType format. With the release came Central European, Baltic, Turkish, Danish and Esperanto character sets. Cyrillic and Greek characters were added in 2007. Other variations of AkzidenzGrotesk have been created since its inception, including AkzidenzGrotesk Book, Akzidenz-

Grotesk Book Rounded, Akzidenz-Grotesk Old Face and Akzidenz-Grotesk Next.

MAX MIEDINGER

SanS - Serif Grotesque

DESIGNER: Max Miedinger YEAR: 1954

The initial design of AzidenzGrotesk was used in scientific publications by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in the 1800s. The American Red Cross uses Akzidenz-Grotesk in logos and printed materials. Akzidenz-Grotesk is commonly mistaken for the Helvetica and Univers designs. All three typefaces are grotesque sans serifs; however, differences lie in subtle proportional and weight changes.

“As precise as Berthold brass.” 75

DESIGNER: Tobias Frere-Jones YEAR: 1993 RANK: 31

TOBIAS FRERE-JONES

History Created by Tobias Frere-Jones, the Interstate font family has grown since its introduction in 1993. With the assistance of Cyrus Highsmith, the Interstate typeface has been expanded into a versatile range of text and display designs that now includes 40 fonts. The Interstate typeface offers compressed, condensed and regular widths and weights that range from hairline to ultra black. Also available is a series of pi fonts featuring symbols inspired by traffic signs. The terminals of ascending and descending strokes are cut at an angle to the stroke, and curved stroke

terminals are drawn at a 90 degree angle to the stroke. Lowercase x-heights are ample and counters are open—even in the bold and bold condensed weights contributing to legibility.

Usage In addition to its original intention for text and display copy in print, Interstate excels when used on screen. The family has been adopted by a number of large organizations in their corporate branding and marketing materials. Companies include Sainsbury’s, Southwest Airlines, Invesco Perpetual, Lamborghini, and Ernst & Young.

“The day we stop needing new type will be the same day that we stop needing new stories and new songs.” 78

Tobias Frere-Jones was born in 1970 in New York, where he would come to appreciate the elegant and cultured, as well as the derelict and corrupt. His adolescence was divided between the galleries of Manhattan and the dockyards of Brooklyn. At fourteen he began exhibiting paintings, sculptures and photographs in New York galleries. An artist being raised in a family of writers and printers, he learned the power of written text, and naturally slipped into design of letterforms. Feeling that experience from one style can inform new efforts in another, he aims for the widest possible range in his work. He feels equally at home with a traditional text face as with a grungy display face. He seeks inspiration from deliberately non-typographic sources: the music of Schoenberg, the theories of Tesla and Pythagoras, and a row of shopping carts have all provided the initial spark.

LUDWIG GOLLER Ludwig Goller was a German engineer who worked at Siemens in Berlin. His commitee developed and established DIN 1451 which provides standard typefaces fo public signage. First issued as a pre-norm in 1931, and released as a norm in 1936, DIN 1451 includes DIN Engschrift and DIN Mittelschrift until today. The role of Ludwig Goller in the actual design process has not been clarified yet. It is known that DIN Engschrift origins in the so-called KPEV typeface as defined in the master drawings by the Prussian Railways in 1905. Being the chairman of the comittee in charge, it is likely that the synchronization of these designs has been supervised by Ludwig Goller, who also edited the accompanying literature on the use of the DIN typefaces issued in 1931, 1936 and 1942. The actual draughtsman may have been Ludwig Goller himself, but it is also possible that a draughtsman at Siemens, or at the Deutsche Reichsbahn actually did the job.

DESIGNER: Chauncey H. Griffith YEAR: 1938 RANK: 16

Bell G othic

CHAUNCEY H. GRI FFITH

When the AT&T corporation commissioned Chauncey H. Griffith to create the Bell font, they were looking for a number of useful features for inclusion in the finished typeface. Attractiveness was an important factor: so too the ability to print the font at fairly high speed on thin paper without loss of clarity. The font also had to be legible at very small sizes, as it would be used in their telephone books. For the same reason, Bell Gothic also had to be spatially economical, given the constraints of the medium it was to be published on. At the time of the font’s creation, Griffith was heading the typographic development

DIn

History The history of the realist sans-serif known today as DIN goes back to 1905. At the time, the Prussian railway created a set of lettering with the purpose of unifying the descriptions on their freight cars. Following a merger of all German state railways in 1920, the master drawings of the Prussian railway became the reference for most railway lettering. Based on the master drawings, the D. Stempel AG foundry released the earliest version of a DIN face in 1923.

program at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Earlier in his career with Linotype, Griffith had been responsible for the production of a typeface known as the Excelsior™ font family, which had taken the newspaper industry by storm because of its impressive readability at tiny point sizes as well as its attractiveness. When Bell Gothic was replaced by Bell Centennial in 1978, the original font was licensed for widespread use and released by Linotype. It later became very popular with the design community in publishing, logotype and informal use. Currently, the font is available in six variants including italic, bold and black.

Usage After its release to the general populous in the late seventies, Bell Gothic became the subject of extensive experimentation in type at modern creative locations like the Cranbrook Academy of Art, RISD and the Design Academy Eindhoven. The usage of Bell Gothic in design has continued to be widely debated and slightly controversial, as creative artists utilize the face in increasingly unusual ways, straying from its “intended use.” Nevertheless, the versatility of the font continues to inspire in the creation of corporate identities and published materials all over the world.

Letter Gothic

Usage The typeface was adopted by Germany in 1936 as a standard known as DIN 1451 (DIN is an acronym for Deutsches Institut für Normung—in English, the German Institute for Standardization). The typeface became a standard for traffic signs, street signs, house numbers and license plates. Over the next decades the typeface also found use on various household goods and products, making it synonymous with German design.

Usage Letter Gothic is a monospaced sans-serif typeface. It was created between 1956 and 1962 by Roger Roberson for IBM in their Lexington plant. It was initially intended to be used in Selectric electric typewriters. It is readable and is recommended for technical documentation and for sheets including columnar data. Gayaneh Bagdasaryan designed a

“DIN...is the magic word for everything that can be measured in Germany, including the official German typeface, appropriately...called DIN-Schrift. Since it is available in digital form, this typeface has been picked up by many graphic designers who like it for its lean, geometric lines.” —Erik Speikermann

RANK: 40

proportional font called New Letter Gothic, based on Letter Gothic, for ParaType. Letter Gothic was included in Windows 95. It was replaced by Andalé Mono in Windows 98 and in 2001, Windows XP replaced it with Lucida Console. Letter Gothic is a monospaced, sans serif face that can be useful for technical documentation and tabular work.

““Designers provide ways into—and out of—the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. (...) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design’s most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading.”

DESIGNER: Ludwig Goller YEAR: 1926

—Ellen Upton 79

History The story of Helvetica began in the fall of 1956 in the small Swiss town of Münchenstein. This is where Eduard Hoffmann, managing director of the Haas Type Foundry, commissioned Max Miedinger to draw a typeface that would unseat a popular family offered by one his company’s competitors. Miedinger, who was an artist and graphic designer before training as a typesetter, came up with a design based on Hoffmann’s instructions, and by the summer or 1957, produced a new sans serif typeface which was given the name “Neue Haas Grotesk.” Simply translated this meant “New Haas Sans Serif.” The Stempel type foundry, the parent company of Haas, decided

to offer the design to its customers in Germany, where Stempel was based. The company, however, felt it would be too difficult to market a new face under another foundry’s name and looked for one that would embody the spirit and heritage of the face. The two companies settled on “Helvetica,” which was a close approximation of “Helvetia,” the Latin name for Switzerland. (“Helvetia” was not chosen because a Swiss sewing machine company and an insurance firm had already taken the name.) Over the years, the Helvetica family was expanded to encompass an extensive selection of weights and proportions and has been adapted for every typesetting technology.

Usage Helvetica is among the most widely used sans serif typefaces and has been a popular choice for corporate logos, including those for 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, BMW, Jeep, JCPenney, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Orange, Target, Toyota, Panasonic, Motorola, Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless. Apple has incorporated Helvetica in the iOS platform and the iPod device. Helvetica is widely used by the U.S. government, most notably on federal income tax forms, and NASA selected the type for the space shuttle orbiters.

“...easy, lazy way to look cool”. —Stephen Banham

I nterstate

Helvetica

RANK: 1

History

Usage

Born December 24, 1910 in Zurich, died March 8, 1980 in Zurich. After finishing school in 1926, Max Miedinger was urged by his father to complete an apprenticeship in typesetting at Jacques Bollmann printing office in Zurich. From 1930 to 1936 he worked as a typesetter for various companies and also took evening courses at the art school in Zurich. From 1936 he worked as a typographer in the advertising department at Globus, Zurich’s renowned chain of department stores. In 1946 he started a new position as salesman at Haas Typefoundry in Münchenstein. In 1954 he created his first typeface design: Pro Arte. Eduard Hoffmann, head of the Haas Typefoundry, was convinced of his talent and shortly thereafter commissioned him to design a new sans serif typeface, the Neue Haas Grotesk. Horizontal, in 1965, was the third and final typeface he created for Haas.

Chauncey H. Griffith (1879–1956), American printer and typeface designer. Griffith was born in the U.S. state of Ohio, and began his career as a compositor and pressman. In 1906 he joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company as part of their sales force. He became sales manager, and oversaw the entrenchment of Linotype equipment as the industry standard in newspaper and book composition. He developed the typeface Excelsior in 1931 and it was widely adopted as a text and display face for newspapers across the United States. While Griffith was head of typographic development, Linotype issued revivals of Baskerville, Granjon, and Janson. In 1938 Griffith designed the typeface Bell Gothic for the Bell Telephone Company’s directories.

DESIGNER: Roger Roberson YEAR: 1956 RANK: 54

MORRIS FULLER BENTON Benton was born into the type business. His father, Linn Boyd Benton, was a type founder and the inventor of the matrix-cutting machine, which revolutionised printing. Morris Fuller Benton was born on November 30, 1872 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He died on June 30, 1948 in Morristown, New Jersey. Benton was the son of Linn Boyd Benton, inventor of the pantographic punch-cutting machine and founder of the American Typefounders agglomeration in 1892. In 1896, he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering; thereafter, he became his father’s assistant at ATF. He quickly began designing his first typefaces, and would later go on to become the company’s artistic director. Benton is also accredited with creating some order out of chaos in the typographical world, by establishing the concept of dividing up typefaces or fonts into families.

DESIGNER: Morris Fuller Benton YEAR: 1902 RANK: 27

History In the early 1900s, ATF’s head of typeface development, Morris Fuller Benton, began to create the type designs that would influence American type design for more than 40 years. The Globe Gothic face was his first sans serif design, which was followed shortly thereafter by Alternate Gothic. Around 1902, Franklin Gothic was cut, although it was not released as a font of metal type until 1905. As he designed Franklin Gothic, Benton was likely influenced by the earlier sans serif designs

released in Germany. Berthold had issued the Akzidenz Grotesk series of typefaces (later known to American printers as “Standard”) in 1898. Akzidenz Grotesk inspired the cutting of Reform Grotesk by the Stempel foundry of Frankfurt in 1903, and the Venus™ series of typefaces by the Bauer foundry, also of Frankfurt, in 1907.

Usage Best used as a display face, ITC Franklin Gothic is considered a standard in the newspaper and advertising fields. With its conservative design traits and

economy of space, ITC Franklin Gothic is a typeface that has, and will continue to stand the test of time. In the world of fine art, ITC Franklin Gothic is the official typeface of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it is often the font of choice for many of Lawrence Weiner’s art works. In films, ITC Franklin Gothic was used for the title of “Rocky,” in addition to subtitles for the “Star Wars” franchise, as well as promotional material for “The Dark Knight.”

ADRIAN FRUTIGER Adrian Frutiger was born in 1928 at Unterseen near Interlaken, Switzerland. After an apprenticeship as a compositor, he continued his training in type and graphics at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) from 1949 to 1951, being taught by two renowned professors, Alfred Willimann and Walter Käch. He established his international position as a typeface designer with his Univers sans-serif font, produced for metal and film in 1957. Together with Bruno Pfäffli and André Gürtler, he founded his own studio in Arcueil near Paris in 1961. He was also Professor for ten years at the Ecole Estienne and eight years at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

ROGER ROBERSON American designer Roger Roberson created the font Letter Gothic in 1962. Roberson created the font for IBM. Inspired by Optima, the font originally had flared stems. A monospaced sans serif font designed for use on an IBM Selectric typewriter, Letter Gothic is a good choice for tabular material.

Frankl in Gothic

DESIGNER: Adrian Frutiger YEAR: 1988 RANK: 58

Avenir

History

Usage

Avenir was originally released in 1988 with three weights, each with a roman and oblique version, all using Frutiger’s two-digit weight and width convention for names. The typeface family was later expanded to six weights, each with a roman and oblique version. Together with Akira Kobayashi, Frutiger completely reworked the Avenir family in 2004. The result is Avenir Next. The original Avenir family is made up of designs with gradual weight changes in order to satisfy the needs of specific text applications. While the book and light weights have similar stroke widths, the book weight is well suited for body text, whereas the light was designed for captions and subhead text.

Dwell magazine switched to Avenir during a 2007 rebrand. Key Bank adopted Avenir for advertising and in-bank signage. Japan Airlines, Banrisul, Scottish Water, Susquehanna International Group and Red Lion Hotels use Avenir for corporate branding. Avenir is employed on signage at Dallas Fort Worth and Hong Kong international airports. The city of Amsterdam adopted Avenir as its corporate typeface in 2003. The Girl Scouts of America created a modified version of Avenir for its 2010 rebrand. LG Electronics uses Avenir extensively in branding, advertising and hardware such as cell phone keypads.

“From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should only be felt but not percieved by the reader. ” 81

HE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPS OVER HE LAZY DOG HE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPS OVER HE LAZY DOG HE QUICK BROWN

Spreads

umanist characteristics include proportions that were modeled on old style typefaces, open strokes and a slightly higher contrast in strokes in comparison to other sans-serif typefaces.

SanS-Serif

ERIC GILL

Gill was born in Brighton, the son of non-conformist minister. While apprenticed to an architect in London, he became smitten with the world of calligraphy, which he entered by attending classes given by Edward Johnston. He was profoundly influenced by Johnston’s dedicated approach to work and decided to join the world of the Arts and Crafts. During his lifetime he set up three self-sufficient religious communities where, surrounded by his retinue, he worked as sculptor, wood-engraver, and type designer. He also wrote constantly and prodigiously on his favourite topics: social reform; the integration of the body and spirit; the evils of industrialisation; and the importance of the working man. Of all the 11 typefaces that he designed, Gill Sans is his most famous; it is a clear modern type and became the letter of the railways— appearing on their signs, engine plates, and timetables.

G ill SanS

While many consider it to be the quintessential British type style, the Gill Sans® typeface family has been used in virtually every country – and for every application imaginable. The reason for Gill Sans’ near ubiquity is because it is an exceptionally distinctive design with a potential range of use that is almost limitless.

History and Design

One of reasons for the enduring success of Gill Sans is that it is based on Roman character shapes and proportions and is unlike virtually any other sans serif typeface. There is also warmth and humanity found in Gill Sans that is found in few

DESIGNER: Eric Gill YEAR: 1930 86

RANK: 8

sans serif typefaces. In addition, each weight in the family retains a distinct character of its own. They were not “mechanically” produced from a single design, as is the case with many other sans serif designs. The light is open and elegant. The regular, with its flat-bottomed d, flat-topped p and q and triangular-topped t, has a more compact and muscular appearance. The bold tends to echo the softer, more open style of the light, while the extra bold and ultra bold have their own vivid personalities.

Usage

Gill Sans has been popular almost from its inception. In the year following its release, it was chosen

to be the official font for the LNER railway system. Gill Sans would go on to appear on nearly everything associated with the company, from the menus used in its dining cars to the timetables printed for use in its stations to posters advertising the railway. In 1948, the newly created British Railways also opted to use Gill Sans for all printed media, including its timetables. Gill Sans continues to be a popular choice, as it has been featured prominently by the Church of England, which adopted the typeface in 2000 when publishing its series of books known as Common Worship.

“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.”

HERMANN ZAPF

Hermann Zapf was born into a turbulent time in 1918 in Nuremberg, Germany. On the same day a worker’s and soldiers’ council took political control of the city, Munich and Berlin were in revolution, and the following day Kaiser Wilhelm fled to Holland. In addition to the political unrest, there was an epidemic of Spanish flu which is estimated to have killed some 20 million people. Zapf lost two of his siblings to the epidemic. He joined the Karl Ulrich and Company printing firm, as an apprentice, in 1934. After this apprenticeship he worked with Paul Koch in Frankfurt. From his first typeface designed when he was just 20 years old (Gilgengart), through more than 200 others right up to the present day, Zapf ’s work has achieved an unmatched popular success, while maintaining an aesthetic level which has earned him praise from professionals throughout the world.

DESIGNER: Hermann Zapf YEAR: 1954 RANK: 9

O ptima

History

In 1950, Zapf was researching Italian typeface design at the Basilica di Santa Croce, in Florence, and happened upon an ancient Roman gravestone that would have been missed by most tourists and casual observers. The letters cut into the gravestone were unusual in that they lacked the traditional serifs. These delighted Zapf and appealed to his classic sense of design. The problem was that he had run out of drawing paper just prior to finding the gravestone. As a result, the first sketches for Optima were made on a 1,000lire bank note. Zapf worked on the design, refining character shapes and proportions for two years before he turned final drawings over to

Stempel’s master punchcutter, who made the first test font. This was in 1952; however, because making fonts in metal was much more complicated and timeconsuming than making fonts using current digital tools, it wasn’t until 1958 that Optima was made available as handset metal fonts. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, fullbodied characters—especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are two-storied designs.

Humanist

DESIGNER: Adrian Frutiger YEAR: 1977 RANK: 14

Frutiger

Design

Optima can be set within a wide choice of line spacing values, from very tight to very open. For example, Zapf once created an exceptionally lovely and highly readable book using Optima set nine on 24 point. Optima also benefits from a wide range of letterspacing capability. The design can be set quite tight, with spacing as established by Linotype, or even letter spaced. If there are any guidelines, Optima should be set more open than tight. It’s not that readability is affected much when Optima is set on the snug side; it’s just that the unhurried elegance and light gray color created by the face are disrupted by letters that are set too tight.

“Type design is one of the most visible and widespread forms of graphic expression in daily life.” 87

World renowned typeface designer, Adrian Frutiger, was commissioned by the Charles De Gaulle Airport near Paris in the late 1960s to develop a typeface for airport signage. Instead of adapting his previously designed Univers family, he developed something new that would also go on to become a classic – the Frutiger typeface. The new design was completed in 1975 and installed at the airport that same year.

History

Frutiger was originally contacted in 1968 by representatives of France’s Charles De Gaulle Airport to create a typeface for

use both in and outdoors. Seven years later, Frutiger—then called Roissy—was completed and applied throughout the recently opened airport. Frutiger set off to develop a typeface that combined the legibility of humanistic sans serif typefaces with the geometric lines of Univers. Given the intended application of airport signage, the Frutiger typeface family had to be legible from a large variety of distances and angles. The typeface was released to the public by the Germany-based Stempel typeface foundry in 1976. Frutiger has since been adopted by many corporations and governments for its modern yet warm look.

Usage In addition to being used throughout the Charles De Gaulle Airport, Frutiger is used in the identity of brands such as the British Royal Navy, Telefónica O2, DHL and Raytheon. Passengers on California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system may recognize Frutiger in use on signage and route maps. Frutiger has been improved and re-released numerous times since its 1976 debut. Additional versions include Frutiger Next, Frutiger Arabic, Neue Frutiger, and Frutiger Greek variants.

“When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.” 88

DESIGNER: Erik Speikermann YEAR: 1991

Meta

RANK: 20

ERIK SPIEKERMANN n early 1985, Erik Spiekermann was working for the high-end design company Sedley Place, who had offices in Berlin, Germany. Spiekermann and Sedley Place were responsible for some large scale branding and marketing exercises for well-known, multinational corporations. The Deutsche Bundespost commissioned Sedley Place to produce a new corporate branding initiative. It called for a typeface that was easy to read in small point sizes and came out well on poor quality paper stock. The design brief included some very precise character set requirements, including that the new typeface not to be confused with one of the many variations of Helvetica. Spiekermann,

with the assistance of Michael Bitter, went ahead and set about designing this new typeface. After the original design work was completed in Berlin. Gerry Barney and Mike Pratley of Sedley Place in London completed the design, producing full alphabets based on the design specifications of Spiekermann and Bitter. The outcome of all this design work was a 3-weight font family available in Regular, Regular Italic and Bold. Despite the fact that the Deutsche Bundespost had spent considerable time and expense on the project, the executive management decided not to go ahead with its implementation for fear of causing too much disruption; they continued instead with their use

of a variety of Helvetica fonts and FF Meta never became part of their corporate branding. The FF Meta family, initially released as a commercial font in 1991, now comprises over sixty fonts. Usage FF Meta is commonly used in the Netherlands in signage and on a huge range of product labeling from wellknown products throughout the world. From 24 variations on the FF Meta font family, the typeface has now been expanded to include over 60 fonts with a wide variation of weights and styles available.

“In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design.” 90

Erik Spiekermann, born 1947, studied History of Art and English in Berlin. He is author, information architect, type designer (FF Meta, ITC Officina, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk and many corporate typefaces) and author of books and articles on type and typography. He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany’s largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. He is responsible for corporate design programs for Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, Heidelberg Printing, Bosch and way-finding projects like Berlin Transit, Düsseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts.

CAROL TWOMBLY Born in 1959, Twombly studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she became interested in type design and typography under Professor Charles Bigelow. After graduation, she embarked on a Master’s course in digital typography at Stanford University also under Bigelow. She went on to work with him at the Bigelow & Holmes studio. She won first prize in the Morisawa Typeface Design Competition in 1984 for her typeface Mirarae, a Latin design which went on to be licensed and released by Bitstream. Since 1988 she has been a staff designer at Adobe Systems, and was awarded the prestigious Prix Charles Peignot at the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, given to outstanding type designers under the age of 35. Twombly retired from type design in 1999.

DESIGNER: Carol Twombly YEAR: 1992 RANK: 32

Myriad

Bell Centennial

DESIGNER: Matthew Carter YEAR: 1978 RANK: 91

MATTHEW CARTER

Released in 1992, the Myriad typeface family has become a popular choice for both text and display composition. Since it was made available in a Pro character set in the OpenType® format, Myriad’s considerable reach was increased though the addition of Greek and Cyrillic glyphs, as well as old style figures. The Myriad family includes condensed, normal and extended widths in a full range of weights. Well-drawn letter proportions, clean, open shapes and extensive kerning pairs ensure that the design retains a comfortable level of readability across all of its variants.

History

Usage

Myriad is the result of a collaboration between type designers Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach. The design was introduced originally in the multiple master format, which enabled the design to be rendered dynamically from light to extra bold weights, and from condensed to extended widths. When Adobe stopped making multiple masters fonts, a new version of the family, which also included an extended character set, was developed in 2000 by Fred Brady and Christopher Slye.

Because of its readability and accessibility, Myriad – and now Myriad Pro – has been adopted by a wide variety of small and large companies alike. Noteworthy companies using the Myriad typeface include Apple, Wells Fargo, Modern Telegraph, Nippon Airways and various North American universities (including the University of Nevada and the University of Ottawa). Additionally, recent additions to the Myriad fold include Walmart’s corporate rebranding in 2008.

In 1976, AT&T commissioned the design of a new typeface whose sole purpose would be for use in their telephone directories. The design had to solve multiple technical and visual problems related with the existing phonebook typeface, Bell Gothic. The solution, named in honor of the company’s 100th anniversary, was Bell Centennial.

Design Bell Centennial is a family of four weights, designed by Matthew Carter at Mergenthaler, to take advantage of the then-newer composing and printing technologies, while still compensating for the limitations that did exist. Bell Centennial is a condensed sans-serif design that maintains legibility at very small sizes, allows for clear information

structures, is economical on space, and accommodates for adverse production conditions; all while keeping to an intended typographic style. Since the intended final use was so specific, the restrictions on the design were extremely stringent, down to the minimum thousandth-of-an-inch in stroke weight, but this was all solved through careful planning and extreme attention to detail.

“Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.” 100

Son of Harry Carter, Royal Designer for Industry, contemporary British type designer and ultimate craftsman, trained as a punchcutter at Enschedé by Paul Rädisch, Mergenthaler Linotype’s house designer. Carter co-founded Bitstream with Mike Parker in 1981. In 1991 he left Bitstream to form Carter & Cone with Cherie Cone. He has in recent years designed Verdana and Georgia for Microsoft; these fonts are tuned to be extremely legible even at very small sizes on the screen. In 1997 he was awarded the TDC Medal, the award from the Type Directors Club presented to those “who have made significant contributions to the life, art, and craft of typography”. In 2010, he won a MacArthur Fellowship based on his “exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances”.

HANS EDUARD MEI ER Meier was a typographer and graphic designer, trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich. He taught in the same school for more than 30 years. In 1955 he began work on the design of a new Sans (Grotesk) typeface, which was named ‘Syntax’ after production from 1968–72 at Stempel Type Foundry. Meier’s design idea was based on the principles of the humanistic types of the Renaissance. (At the same time Adrian Frutiger designed his ‘Univers’ in Paris, whereas Hoffmann/ Miedinger designed ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ in Basle. Neither of those designers had contact with the others.) With Meier’s well known ‘Syntax’ he gave birth to many successors (not to say copies) with a similar form. They also have reached world wide usage. Hans Meier was a very quiet, soft and gentle person, his type unique in style. One of the last of this generation.

Syntax

The Syntax Font is a humanist sans-serif typeface with a connection to both Roman lapidary capitals and miniscule writing from the Renaissance period. It was one of the earlier examples of a designer who successfully integrated the design of sans serif into serif forms. It was believed to be the final hot metal type family designed and released by D. Stemple Schriftgiesserei type foundry of Frankfurt am Main.

History

DESIGNER: Hans Eduard Meier YEAR: 1968 RANK: 18

The Syntax font was originally designed by brush by Swiss typeface designer Hans Eduard Meier in the early 1950s. He began to have it redrawn by hand to define essential linear forms

and then finally completed the font design fifteen years after it was begun with the addition of balanced weight to create a visually singular design. In all, designer Meier completed the original drawings for the font in 1954 with the redrawing completed in 1968 and the final font form released in 1969 in three weights light, semi-bold and extra bold. Between 1968 and 1972 Meier went on to complete a variety of weights and variations to the basic font family. In 1989 Adobe digitized the original metal foundry designs at the same time expanding into bold and ultra bold weights. The end result at that time was a family of five fonts: 4 Roman and 1 Italic.

Usage The Linotype Syntax Font is widely used for captions and text, in advertising for packaging and signage5, and in a variety of publications including the European newspapers OÖ Nachrichten and The Deccan Herald and the German Style magazine impulse 2000. It has also seen wide use as a type font for a variety of books including The Best German Book Design, and Lonely Planet Guidebooks. The British Library has specified the use of the Syntax font across all external and internal communications and that it is to be the only font used for such communications.

FREDERIC W. GROUDY Goudy is probably the best known of American typographers and exemplifies the Golden Age of American Printing. He is famous for his prodigious output; he designed over one-hundred typefaces, yet did not start design in earnest until he was 45. Born in Bloomington, Illinois, he studied at the Chicago School of Lettering. He best and most popular types are Goudy Old Style and Goudy Text. He was also well-known as a spokesperson for the trade and spent a great deal of time speaking in clubs, associations etc. He was not a 'modern’; he loved the 15th century and found much of his inspiration there.

C opperplate GothiC

Copperplate typeface is as much common today as it was in past history. Although it was a very common typeface, it has many unique characteristics that separate it from the more modern typefaces. It’s also an essential typeface that many present day designer should learn about.

Design The typeface has been constructed out of capital letters and small caps. This would make it most usable for headlines and header design. It is essential to know that the small caps of the

DESIGNER: Frederic W. Goudy YEAR: 1901 RANK: 94

character are not just a smaller version of the capital letter. Although it has the x-height of a lowercase letter the thickness of the horizontal stroke remains the same as the capital letter of the typeface. It would not be beneficial to use it in large body copy because it would make it more difficult to read. Having the body text in all capital letter would make it difficult to read because it would give the illusion of block like shapes and it would not have the visual contras that upper and lowercase letter create to help us read more rapidly.

The typeface is classified as a serif typeface but it has similar characteristics of a sanserif. The stroke and with of the typeface is similar to sanserif, such as Univers. The typefaces serifs are bracketed and are constant trough. The serifs are not noticeable at first glance when used in smaller point sizes but can still be visible within inspection. The serifs have a design and look of letters that were engraved in actual copperplate. There is a distinctive design to the serifs that some might consider a drawback.

“It is hardly possible to create a good typeface that will differ radically from the established forms of the past; nevertheless, it is still possible to secure new expressions of life and vigour.” 101

HE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPS OVER HE LAZY DOG HE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPS OVER HE LAZY DOG HE QUICK BROWN

Spreads

eometric sans-serif typefaces, as their name implies, are based on geometric forms. In some cases letters, such as the lower case 'o’, are perfect geometric forms.

AvAnt GArde

DESIGNER: Herb Lubalin YEAR: 1968 RANK: 22

HERB

LUBALIN

History Avant Garde Gothic is classified as a geometric sans serif design, meaning that its basic shapes appear to be constructed from circles and straight lines. The design’s heritage has sometimes been traced to the geometric sans serifs produced by Bauhaus designers in the mid-1920s. However, the design has its foundation in the first sans serif ever produced—a cap-only face issued by the Caslon Type Foundry in 1816. Lubalin’s logo for Avant Garde was an exciting construction of overlapping and tightly

set geometric capitals. After developing the groundbreaking logo, Lubalin turned his rough sketch over to lettering artist and type designer Tom Carnase, his partner at Lubalin Smith Carnase. Carnase rendered the final art and designed additional characters and ligatures to set the headline for each department of the magazine. Soon there were nearly enough characters to complete an entire alphabet— and the Avant Garde Gothic design was born. This was later licensed to ITC. The ITC Avant Garde Gothic family is made up of five weights

and four condensed designs, all with corresponding italics

Usage ITC Avant Garde Gothic design has become a solid staple in the repertoire of today’s graphic designer. The lowercase x-height and open counters help to make this family ideal for display copy and short blocks of text content. The ITC Avant Garde Gothic design is used in the corporate logo of Adidas and is one of the main typefaces in Sony’s corporate marketing programs.

“I have just completed my internship.” 106

Most people recognize the name Herb Lubalin in association with the typeface Avant Garde. And he was the typographer and designer behind its creation, after the success of Avant Garde Magazine and its typographic logo. But, his career spanned a much wider scope than that. One of the people behind the cultureshocking magazines Avant-Garde, Eros and Fact, he was a constant boundary breaker on both a visual and social level. Part of the founding team of the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) and the principal of Herb Lubalin, Inc it was hard to escape the reach of Herb during the 1960s and 70s. His constant search for something new and a passion for inventiveness made him one of the most successful art directors of the 20th century. Constantly working and achieving much success throughout his career, at the age of 59 he proclaimed “I have just completed my internship.”

ALDO NOVARESE

Aldo Novarese was born in 1920 in Pontestura, a small town of the Monferrato region, Italy. The family later relocated to Turin, where Novarese’s father worked as a customs agent, and it was in there that in 1930 Novarese began his studies at the Sculoa Artieri Stampatori (School of printing crafts). Under Francesco Menyey, Novarese studied woodcut, copper engraving, and lithography. Following this he spent three years at a specialist typography school, The Scuola di Tipographica Paravia. At sixteen he joined the Nebilolo foundry in Turin as a draftsman. The Turinese Nebiolo had been the main Italian font foundry and printing machine factory since the fourteenth century. He continued to work up until his death in 1995, with his final typeface, Nadianne, being completed just before his death.

DESIGNER: Aldo Novarese YEAR: 1962

eurostile

Microgramma and Eurostile were both released originally as fonts of handset metal type. Later they were interpreted as fonts for phototypesetting, dry transfer letterings and finally as digital fonts. In the spirit of design programs like the Neue Helvetica and Frutiger Next typeface families, Linotype took the basic Eurostile design, in 2008, and created the Eurostile Next typeface, a remarkably fresh and improved version of the family. The new rendition is the work of Akira Kobayashi, director of typeface design at Linotype. Eurostile’s long-standing success is because it elegantly treads the fine line between being distinctive and versatile. Generally, the more distinctive a typeface design is, the less it can be used in a variety

of applications. Not so with Eurostile. It is distinctive without being flamboyant. Translation: while it is not a replacement for the Helvetica or Frutiger designs, Eurostile is easy to use well and will stand out from the crowd of other sans serif typefaces. Eurostile language character sets are available in Western and Eastern European languages, in addition to Turkish, Baltic, Romanian, Cyrillic and Greek. The most obvious attribute of Eurostile, aside from its lack of serifs, is that it is square in design. Many of the letters look as if they got their start by being traced around an old television picture tube. There is also a symmetry and implied mathematical quality to the design that is found in few other faces outside the likes of the

Avenir, Avant Garde Gothic and Harmonia Sans typefaces. Many individual letters distinguish Eurostile, but some of the more obvious are the ‘Ks’ which have diagonals that do not touch the vertical stroke, and the lowercase ‘t’ which has a crossbar that is long on the right and a long tail that curves all the way back to vertical. The ‘A,’ ‘M,’ ‘N,’ ‘V’ and ‘W’ all have flat apexes and the ‘Q’ has the distinction of having the tail longer on the inside of the character than on the outside. Eurostile’s lowercase ‘a’ is the traditional two-storied design found in 19th century grotesques and most roman types; the ‘f ’ crossbar mimics that of the ‘t,’ and the ‘g’ is a single-storied design, like that found in the Frutiger or ITC Franklin typefaces.

PAUL RENNER

SanS-Serif Geometric

DESIGNER: Paul Renner YEAR: 1927

DESIGNER: Tobias Frere-Jones YEAR: 2000 RANK: 60

G otham

TOBIAS FRERE-JONES agenda in the design,” Frere-Jones said, “to preserve those old pieces of New York that could be wiped out before they’re appreciated. Having grown up here, I was always fond of the ‘old’ New York and its lettering.” The lettering that inspired this typeface originated from the style of 1920s era sans-serifs like Futura, where “Type, like architecture, like the organization of society itself, was to be reduced to its bare, efficient essentials, rid of undesirable, local or ethnic elements.” This theme was found frequently in Depression-era type in both North America and Europe, particularly Germany. This simplification of type is characterized by Frere-Jones as “not the kind of letter a type

designer would make. It’s the kind of letter an engineer would make. It was born outside the type design in some other world and has a very distinct flavor from that.” Reviews of Gotham focus on its identity as something both American and specific to New York City. According to David Dunlap of The New York Times, Gotham “deliberately evokes the blocky no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the [New York] streetscape from the 1930s through the 1960s.” Andrew Romano of Newsweek concurs. “Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it’s not German, it’s not French, it’s not Swiss,” he said. “It’s very American.”

“The day we stop needing new type will be the same day that we stop needing new stories and new songs.”

107

108

F utura

History While the forms of Futura’s capital letters can be traced back to ancient Greek lapidary letters, Renner’s sketches for the lower case were quirky, forced and at times barely recognizable as letters. The Bauer production department reinterpreted his design, removing many of the odd shapes while maintaining the basic notion of letters reflecting simple geometric shapes. The ascenders were redrawn taller than the capitals, and character widths were adjusted to reflect traditional 16th century proportions. Even the lowercase ‘t’ was redrawn as an

asymmetrical design—like many old style typefaces. Other typefaces predate Futura’s 1927 release date, but Renner’s is generally credited as the most influential in stimulating the development of typefaces based on geometric forms. This is due primarily to the immediate and overwhelming success of the family. Renner also made many presentations and lectures about his new design prior to its release, and some believe that other designers and type foundries took his concept and turned it into fonts of type prior to the Bauer release of Futura.

Usage Futura is an exceptionally versatile typeface. Its bold and condensed variants are especially powerful display designs. Futura is also a good choice for spacesensitive environments. Its simple letterforms allow it to be set at surprisingly small sizes with little drop in legibility levels. Futura also works well for short blocks of text copy, captions and pullquotes.

“The goal of all design is to make a whole from the variety.”

RANK: 2

The Gotham typeface was initially commissioned by GQ magazine, whose editors wanted to display a sans-serif with a “geometric structure” that would look “masculine, new, and fresh” for their magazine. GQ agreed that they needed something “that was going to be very fresh and very established to have a sort of credible voice to it,” according to Jonathan Hoefler. Frere-Jones’ inspiration for the typeface came from time spent walking block-by-block through Manhattan with a camera to find source material, and he based the font on the lettering seen in older buildings, especially the sign on the Eighth Avenue façade of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. “I suppose there’s a hidden personal

RANK: 47

Paul Renner was born in Prussia and had a strict Protestant upbringing being educated in 19th century Gymnasium. He was brought up to have a very German sense of leadership, of duty and responsibility. He was suspicious of abstract art and disliked many forms of modern culture, such as jazz, cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism. Thus, Renner can be seen as a bridge between the traditional (19th century) and the modern (20th century). He attempted to fuse the Gothic and the roman typefaces. As well as being most famous as designer of the typeface Futura, he made a significant contribution to modern typography through his teaching and writing. His principal book is Die Kunst der Typographie (1939). He was arrested in 1933 and made to leave his post as director of the Meister schule in Munich. He was hounded by the Gestapo in 1944 after an assassination attempt had been made on Hitler, in which some of his relatives had been implicated.

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CHRISTIAN SCHWARTZ Christian Schwartz was born in 1977 and grew up in a small town in New Hampshire. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 with a degree in Communication Design, and then spent 3 months as the in-house type designer at MetaDesign Berlin. He joined Font Bureau as a member of the full-time design staff in 2000. Christian founded Orange Italic with Chicago-based designer Dino Sanchez at the end of 2000, and left Font Bureau in August 2001 to work as an independent designer in the New York area. Christian has designed commercial fonts for Emigre, FontShop, House Industries (including the popular Neutraface family), and Font Bureau, as well as proprietary designs for corporations and publications. His work has been honored by the New York Type Directors club and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.

DESIGNER: Christian Schwartz YEAR: 2002 RANK: 96

Neutraface

History Although better known for his residential buildings, Richard Neutra’s commercial projects nevertheless resonate the same holistic ecology-unity with the surrounding landscape and uncompromising functionalism. His attention to detail even extended to the selection of signage for his buildings. It is no wonder that Neutra specified lettering that was open and unobtrusive, the same characteristics which typified his progressive architecture. House Industries brings the same linear geometry to Neutraface without sacrificing an unmistakably warm and human feel.

House Industries began the inter-disciplinary task of adapting sign lettering to typography by consulting with Dion and closely studying the archives of acclaimed photographer Julius Shulman. With limited source imagery, Christian Schwartz composed an entire alphabet and added a complementary lowercase which previously did not exist. An alternate font was also developed by following certain letter forms which often varied from building to building. The final Neutraface Display family includes five weights in regular and alternate variations and a unique titling font.

The font family’s architectural origins lent to its initial creation as a headline typeface. However, in the spirit of Richard Neutra’s approach, a text version of Neutraface was conceived. Departing from the unusual proportions and stylized fashion of the display version, Neutraface Text features a larger x-height and increased contrast in its strokes for enhanced readability in lengthy passages. True to the International Style, Neutraface supports over two dozen languages including Central European writing systems.

“Please stop making the text on your site so huge. I have run out of space to push back my chair, and my arms are only so long.” 109

Spreads ixel fonts developed from the invention of the computer and were based on the on-screen display format of pixels. They are based on an array of pixels, are often called Bitmap fonts and are often designed only for a specific point size. Many type foundries offer a selection of bitmap fonts and some, like Fonts For Flash create only bitmap fonts.

AMERICAN TYPE FOUNDERS American typefounding agglomeration formed in 1892, eventually containing most of the American typefounding industry. ATF owns the rights to one of the world’s greatest libraries of original typefaces, largely directed and created by Morris Fuller Benton. By the 1920s ATF was the dominant player in the world’s printing equipment market. Not just fonts, but entire printing plants were on offer. This strong position did not continue, due to the ever-changing nature of the printing industry. The foundry closed in 1993 with an ingominious backruptcy auction. These days the only sign of ATF fonts is in licensing deals with experienced digital foundries such as Bitstream and Adobe. There were attempts to regain their lost position at the forefront of the type industry, including an interesting attempt to get PostScript Type 3 fonts to handle optical size differences.

SanS-Serif Display

DESIGNER: American Type Founders YEAR: 1965 RANK: 24

OCR

The OCR Typeface is divided into two variations - OCR-A and OCR-B.

History The OCR-A font was designed for usage by OCR applications in an era when computers still had far less horsepower than they have today. All characters have the same thickness and width. To improve the recognition accuracy all the glyph or characters shapes are distinctly different. This explains for instance the funny look of the upper case ‘Q’. The original version of OCR-A was released by ATF in 1968 to meet the

specifications of the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Nowadays there are several implementations from different foundries, one of which ships with Microsoft Vista. Several regulation bodies including the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), ISO and DIN have standardized the font. Adrian Frutiger designed OCR-B, the European counterpart, for Monotype. It was meant to be easily readable by both machines and humans. It became an international standard in 1973. OCRA and OCRB are monospaced fonts that are

optimized for use by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applications. The quirky looks of the uppercase OCR-A characters make them stand out.

Usage Obviously both fonts go well with bar codes or designs for credit cards. Its distinct look also makes OCR A suitable for use in advertising, display graphics or covers. It has a kind of retrofuturistic look to it. OCR B is less flashy but still popular for projects that require a more technical appearance.

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DESIGNER: Susan Kare YEAR: 1984 RANK: 45

ChiCago

SUSAN KARE Chicago is a sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare for Apple Computer. It was used in the Macintosh operating system user interface between 1984 and 1997 and was an important part of Apple’s brand identity. It is also used in early versions of the iPod user interface. Chicago was initially a bitmap font; as the Apple OS’s capabilities improved, Apple commissioned the type foundry Bigelow & Holmes to create a vector-based TrueType version. The typeface is named after the U.S. city of Chicago. Susan Kare has stated that Chicago was the first font to be developed for the Macintosh. Before the team settled on the convention of naming fonts after “world cities”, it was called Elefont (Elefont is also the name of

a bold semi-serif typeface designed by Bob McGrath in 1978).The first bitmap version included only a 12 pt. version. This font, with only very minor changes to spacing, was used for menus, dialogs, window titles, and text labels, through version 7.6 of the system. The TrueType version had many differences from the bitmap version, which became more apparent at greater sizes. One of Chicago’s features was that it could remain legible while being made “grey” (to indicate a disabled menu item) by the removal of every other pixel (since actual grey type was not supported by the original Macintosh graphics hardware). The zero was even slashed to distinguish it from capital “O”. Chicago was also used in Apple marketing materials. It was common

to find this font in early amateur desktop publishing productions, since it was available as part of the system. While Apple gravitated away from Chicago following the adoption of Charcoal as part of the platinum theme in Mac OS, it was later revived in the user interface for the iPod music player, where legibility on a low resolution two-color screen once again became an asset. With the introduction of the iPod mini, a smaller typeface was needed, and the Espy Sans font from the Apple Newton was used. Finally, with the introduction of the iPod Photo, the color iPod interface changed to Podium Sans—a bitmap font similar to the Myriad Pro typeface which Apple has adopted gradually for its marketing since 2002.

“The best icons are more like traffic signs than graphic illustrations.” 114

Susan Kare User Interface Graphics is a digital design practice in San Francisco, California. According to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Susan Kare is “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, Kare has designed thousands of icons for the world’s leading software companies. Utilizing a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style. She began her career at Apple, Inc. as the screen graphics and digital font designer for the original Macintosh computer, initially advertised as the “computer for the rest of us.” Her studio’s work has continued to optimize for clarity and simplicity and to present concepts in clear, concise, and memorable ways.

A.M. CASSANDRE A student of the École des BeauxArts in Paris, France, Adolphe Mouron Cassandre was a painter, commercial poster artist and typeface designer. His inventive graphic techniques show influences of Surrealism and Cubism and became very popular in Europe and the US during the 1930s. He and several other partners formed the advertising agency Alliance Graphiqe, which worked for a broad client base throughout the 1930s. One of his most well recognized posters was the Normandie Poster and while his primary success stemmed from designing posters he also designed magazine covers, advertisements, logos and typefaces. In 1937 he designed the typeface Peignot for the Deberny & Peignot type foundry in Paris, France. He joined the French army during the German invasion of World War II, after the devastating effects of the war he found work designing sets for ballet and theater production. In 1968, after a severe battle with depression, he ended his own life.

DESIGNER: A.M Cassandre YEAR: 1937 RANK: 46

P eignot

DESIGNER: Zuzana Licko YEAR: 1985 RANK: 92

Oakland

ZUZANA A.M. Cassandre designed Peignot in the 1930s and the font reflects a feel of the times. It is a product of the New Typography, to which Bauhaus artists like MoholyNagy contributed. Peignot’s most outstanding characteristic is found in the lower case alphabet, which is actually composed of a mixture of lower case and upper case forms. Especially popular for advertisements, Peignot font makes a unique, experimental impression.

History Peignot is constructed sans-serif display typeface, designed by A. M. Cassandre in 1937. It was commissioned by the French foundry Deberny & Peignot. The typeface is notable for not having a traditional lowercase, but in its place a “multi-case” combining traditional lowercase and small capital characters. The typeface achieved some popularity in poster and advertising publishing from its release through the late 1940s. Use of Peignot declined with the growth of the

International Typographic Style, which favored less decorative, more objective typefaces such as Akzidenz-Grotesk. While often classified as “decorative”, the face is a serious exploration of typographic form and legibility. It is now owned by Linotype Corp. and is distributed both by Linotype and by Adobe. A font resembling Peignot was used for the Intellivision video game system. Derek Vogelpohl distributes a digital version of that font as freeware under the name SF Intellivised.

“Paradoxical as it may seem, Peignot is neither a “creation” nor an “innovation” in the commercial sense given too often to these words—a sense so vague that it is bound to create the wrong impression.”

The Emperor, Universal, Oakland, and Emigre faces were originally designed in 1985 as bitmap fonts for use on the 72 dot per inch computer screen and dot matrix printer before high resolution outline fonts were available. In 2001 these fonts were replaced by the Lo-Res font family. Oakland typeface, which Licko later named as Lo-Res series, was born in 1985. It was the first font designed with a Mac and based on bitmap structure. Since the coarse resolution does not allow for a faithful representation of the same design

for a variety of sizes, these faces relate by a system of whole pixel increments. Regardless of resolution, all digital type and images are built out of blocks on a grid structure. These building elements are called “pixels” (picture elements) and the resulting image is the “bitmap,” literally the “map of bits.” By the early 1990s the introduction of high-resolution laser printers and outline font technologies allowed typedesigners to design more sophisticated typefaces. The rise of the Internet and other digital

platforms later ensured the relevance of pixel-based fonts, as information is designed to be read and seen from the screen and often in quite a tiny scale. Pixel-based typefaces have also gained a nostalgic value. Oakland typeface is easy to translate as cross-stitched format because of the bitmap structure. The amount of pixels also remains the same whether the font is 8 points or 100. It is just the pixel that grows larger. Translated as a stitch, it means that the bigger the amount of points, the longer the stitch.

“It forced us to question everything we had learnt about design.” 115

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NEVILLE BRODY Neville Brody was born in Britain, and studied graphic design at the London College of Printing. After designing record covers for the independent labels Still Records and Fetish Records, he became art director of The Face, a British style magazine. Between 1983 and 1990 he provided art direction for several other magazines, including City Limits, a London weekly guide, Arena, a style magazine, Per Lui and Lei (Italy), and Actuel (France). In 1987 he founded his own London-based design practice, The Studio, which worked on several corporate identities and fashion projects for clients including Nike, the Dutch Postal Service, and the German cable channel Premiere. He has designed several popular typefaces including Arcadia, Industria, Insignia, FF Blur, FF Pop, FF Gothic, and FF Harlem. He is also a partner of FontShop International in Berlin and FontWorks in London, and founding editor of the digital magazine FUSE.

DESIGNER: Neville Brody YEAR: 1992 RANK: 97

Blur

FF Blur is punk sophisticated. Intentionally out-of-focus Blur has it’s ancestors among the letters that were copied and recopied with a Xerox machine to the posters and record covers. With the developed computer technology it was possible to make the late 70’s punk rock aesthetic look tidy and designed. Postmodernism came to typography in the early 90’s. Designers wanted to push the limits of visual communication. Typeface was sampled, layered, mutilated and deconstructed. Neville Brody’s FF Blur and Erik van Blokland’s

and Just van Rossum’s FF Beowulf are often mentioned as the limit strechers. The family contains 3 weights: Light, Medium, and Bold and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, festive occasions, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries as well as poster and billboards. FF Blur provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, and case-sensitive forms. It comes with tabular lining and proportional lining figures.

“Design is more than just a few tricks to the eye. It’s a few tricks to the brain.” 117

Spreads

Glyphic inscriptional

DESIGNER: Carol Twombly YEAR: 1989 RANK: 25

Trajan

History The Trajan design was named after the 13th Emperor of Rome (circa. 100AD), who was a keen builder of public buildings. As was customary for Roman buildings of the time, his buildings bore distinctive stone-chiseled plaques to honor those who built them. Wherever you went in Rome, you could be sure of seeing his name adorning an edifice somewhere. Trajan ’ s Column, a large column dedicated to him, bears inscriptions in the distinctive style and is one of the most famous examples of Roman square capitals.

Characteristic of the Roman typeface is a dot placed midcharacter height like a hyphen, generally to separate words – although not in between every word. Titles most often had these abbreviations possibly in an attempt to increase the amount of information in the small space available most likely because they had a tendency to have a long public office title and even longer personal names. Font designer Carol Twombly took this research and created a typeface that had many of the features of the original Trajan Column. She included a number

of modern punctuation marks and symbols such as the copyright “ © ” and the Euro “ € ” symbols. The typeface has a number of mathematical symbols including all the commonly used Greek Symbols used such as pi, Epsilon, Delta and common operators such as Square Root and Greater than/equal to. These symbols are most often found in more the extensive glyph coverage that common fonts have, but the style of the Trajan font family makes it especially suitable for typing equations that, assuming one understands math, are easy to visually comprehend.

“Drawing with a pencil often helps because my hand can usually make pleasing curves intuitively, and then I can go back to the screen to re-create what my hand has realized on paper... The shapes drawn with the hand are more organic and unpredictable, and therefore more lively.” 121

Spreads

lackletter typefaces are a script style of calligraphy that were popularized in Germany, although they were used all over Europe from the middle ages through the Renaissance. A highly ornamental style of typgraphy, different styles are often associated with the different regions in which they were developed and used. The main classifications include Textura, Schwabacher, Cursiva and Fraktur. Textura is the most closely related to the calligraphic style and often includes a large number of ligatures. Schwabacher typefaces have a simplified, rounded stroke and several of their lowercase letters, including 'o’, are often analogous forms. Cursiva, as the name suggests, is closely related to cursive letters and can be recognized by the more frequent presence of descenders and looped ascenders. Fraktur is the most common form of Blackletter and is characterized by broken strokes.

JOHANNES GUTENBERG

GutenberG b-42

Johannes Gutenberg was born 1395, in Mainz, Germany. He started experimenting with printing by 1438. He obtained backing in 1450 from the financier Johann Fust, whose impatience and other factors led to Gutenberg’s loss of his establishment to Fust in 1455. Gutenberg’s masterpiece, and the first book ever printed from movable type, is the “Forty-Two-Line” Bible, completed no later than 1455. Not much is known of his early life except that he borrowed large sums of money to work on his invention. This led to a partnership with his lawyer, Fust, who obviously realised that the printing press was going to be the Next Big Thing. Fust then went on to trick him, through legal means, out of his presses, type, money and foreman. Mainz became the centre of the printing trade. We don’t know what happened to Gutenberg after this, but luckily for him, his name lives on and not that of Fust.

B lacklette r

History A clean, smooth rendition of the magnificent B42-type used by Johann Gutenberg in his famous 42-line Bible. [Also available in a slightly roughened style as the Oldtype “Gutenberg C” Font.] In addition to the usual standard characters for typesetting modern texts, the font includes a comprehensive set of special characters, alternates and ligatures, plus Opentype features, that can be used for typesetting (almost) exactly as in Gutenberg’s Bible and later incunabula. The main historical sources used during the font design process were high-resolution scans from several printings of Gutenberg’s Bible.

DESIGNER: Johannes Gutenberg YEAR: ca. 1450 RANK: 33

Other sources were as follows: Kapr, A. (1996), Johann Gutenberg - The Man and his Invention, Aldershot: Scolar Press (ch. 7); De Hamel, C. (2001), The Book - A History of The Bible, London: Phaidon Press (ch. 8); Füssel, S. (2005), Gutenberg and the impact of printing, Burlington: Ashgate (ch. 1); and Man, J. (2009), The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Bantam (ch. 7). Updates in Version 2.0 include new figures and currency symbols, fixed kerning for pairs with second element starting with an ‘a’, and some ligature refinements.

“Yes, it is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams, the most abundant and most marvelous liquor that has ever flowed to relieve the thirst of men! Through it, God will spread His Word. A spring of truth shall flow from it: like a new star it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light heretofore unknown to shine amongst men.”

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gebetbUch F raktUr

Unger FraktUr

Manuskript Gotisch

Breitkopf f raktur

History History The first of Emperor Maximillian’s magnificent books was a prayer book, 10 copies printed on parchment. It was for this book that the first Fraktur font was commissioned because all other available types were either too common or too antiquated. This Fraktur was based on drawings

Enlightenment, French Revolution and the beginning development of the classicist style in art and architecture made a renewal of the traditional typefaces unavoidable. Johann Friedrich Unger, a renowned Berlin printer and publisher, took on the task and presented this light, sharplycontrasted Fraktur in 1793. It was very well received by the luminaries of the time; Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister” was one of the first books printed in Unger Fraktur.

by Leonhard Wagner. The punches were cut by Johann Schonsperger, who also printed the prayer illustration. The result were books of such high artistic quality and excellent workmanship that they stand up to Gutenberg’s 42-line bibles.

“Typography is a minor technicality of civilised life.”

History The manuscript is based on the Gothic Textura by Wolfgang Hopyl, 1514. It was published in 1899 as a house cut of Bauer’s foundry FFM. Albert Kapr discovered in the book “W. Thorowgood’s Specimen “(published in 1824 in London) is a similar font that could potentially have served as a template for the manuscript-Gothic.

“I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.”

RANK: 39

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DESIGNER: Johann F. Unger YEAR: 1793 RANK: 56

While Luther based his font on Maximilian’s Gebetbuch Fraktur, Johann Gottlieb Immanuel Breitkopf took the younger Neudörffer-Andrea Fraktur as his model, a font that was used by Dürer to print several of his theoretical works.

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”

—Ed Benguiat

DESIGNER: Hans Schonsperger YEAR: ca. 1514

History

“I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.”

—Robert Bringhurst

—Ed Benguiat

DESIGNER: Wolfgang Hopyl YEAR: 1514

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Fette F raKtur

History Fette Fraktur is a Blackletter typeface derived from an original Fraktur typeface. The word Fette is a German word and means bold in English, and makes the English equivalent of this font, Bold Fraktur. This evolution of the Fraktur font was not used much for text purposes but for advertisements. The Fette Fraktur was originally released sometime before 1842 by the Joh.Peter Nees Company in Offenbach, Germany. Blackletter typefaces, also know as Gothic scripts, were used mainly in Germany well into the 1900’s

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for the German language. Another commonly used Blackletter typefaces is Textura, which was used in the first ever Bible. There is also Bastarda and Rotunda faces. The typeface was typically used for books and newspapers during the Third Reich, where it was preferred in favour of sans-serif faces. The approved use of Fette Fraktur by the Nazi regime continued until January 3rd, 1941. A man named Martin Bormann, who was the director of the Party Chancellery , issued a direct discontinuation of the Fette Fraktur typeface. This was due to the alleged

Wilhelm Klingspor gotisch

involvement of a Jew in the early development of the face. During World War II the German Allies also banned the font due to its illegibility, as the troops struggled to read it. To this day it is one of the most commonly used Blackletter faces and continues to be used in advertising and packaging to communicate a sense of traditionalism in places such as Austria, Bavaria and Germany. The Fette Fraktur font has been confused for the Blackletter script often mislabelled as Old English script, and is now very popular in the world of Hip-hop music and fashion.

DESIGNER: Johann C. Bauer YEAR: 1850 RANK: 82

The Breitkopf Fraktur represents what is commonly thought of as “classic” Fraktur. It gained immediate success and remained the most popuar Fraktur well into the last century, but then fell into disuse until 1989, when it was recast by a number of foundries.

Weiss runDgotisch

History The German designer Emil Rudolf Weiss originally created Weiss Rundgotisch for the Bauer typefoundry in 1937. In their catalog for the typeface, Bauer began with this quote from Leonhard Wagner: The round gothic (rundgotisch) script is the most beautiful kind of script; she is called the mother and the queen of all the rest. While designing Weiss Rundgotisch, Weiss was inspired by Renaissance types cut by the Augsberg printer Erhard Ratdolt.

Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch was designed by Rudolf Koch from 1924 to 1926 for the Klingspor foundry. Koch was a talented calligrapher, and he put this skill to use in this blackletter design. Also known as Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift, this is one of the most magnificent and legible blackletters, and is in the textura style with traditional flourished capitals.

Ratdolt had spent some time in Venice, which is most likely where he became familiar with round gothic letters. This sort of letterform was never as popular in Germany as Fraktur or Gotisch may have been, but round gothic types were used there for centuries to represent arts and craft feelings, as well as old-fashioned handwork. For a blackletter typeface, Weiss Rundgotisch is very similar to normal serif and sans serif designs,

DESIGNER: Johann G.I Breitkopf YEAR: 1793 129

RANK: 67

Fette Deutsche schriFt

especially its uppercase letters, which seem to have some uncial influence in them as well. Therefore, Weiss Rundgotisch is more legible for contemporary readers, making this an excellent choice for anyone looking to set text, logos, or headlines with in blackletter. He began work on the face in 1915; Weiss Rundgotisch’s development took over 20 years to complete.

History Koch’s debut, initially called “Deutsche Schrift”, was such a bestseller that they later only called it KochFraktur. The adaptation of the written submissions to the needs of printing and typesetting employed the budding writing master for years. Koch himself stated that the reason for the success of the German magazine in its ability to bring the spirit

of the times expressed. The expressed concentrated principally in Antiqua and manicured fractures, but the young talent Koch presented with the German magazine something that literally jumped to the viewer’s eyes–strong, vivid, black and alive. This document was headstrong, but compelling in a new direction. Over the years emerged boldface, oblique, Narrow and lean cuts of German writing.

“Embossed letters represent the topography of typography.” —Jarod Kintz

DESIGNER: Rudolf Koch YEAR: 1925 RANK: 85

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DESIGNER: Emil Rudolf Weiss YEAR: 1936 RANK: 86

DESIGNER: Rudolf Koch YEAR: 1910 RANK: 93

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The quick brown fox umps over the lazy The quick brown fox ver the lazy dog T uick brown fox jump y dog The quick b

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cript typefaces are based on the forms made with a flexible brush or pen and often have varied strokes reminiscent of handwriting. There are many different classifications including Brush Script, English Roundhand and Rationalized Script. However, the broadest forms of classification are Formal Script and Casual Script. Formal Scripts are based on the developments and writings of 17th and 18th century handwriting masters such as George Bickham, George Shelley and George Snell. Casual scripts developed in the 20th century as a result of photo-typesetting and are more varied and the inconsistencies appear to have been a result of using a wet pen rather than a pen nib.

DESIGNER: Hermann Zapf YEAR: 1998 RANK: 51

Zapfino

HERMANN ZAPF

The Zapfino font family is an elegantly flowing, sumptuously designed humanist calligraphic font based on a WWII era notebook containing a character set penned by the celebrated German typographer, Hermann Zapf. The font contains a variety of glyphs and ligatures, making its resemblance to custom calligraphy very striking.

Usage Zapfino is a fantastic font for many different types of creative undertaking from advertising to wedding invitations. It is a popular choice because of its beauty – but that does not have to mean the results of its use have to look the same as other projects. The large number of glyphs and ligatures included with the font mean that Zapfino handles like a cipher, with an almost limitless

number of combinations in any given sentence structure. Utilizing Zapfino in a design does take some ingenuity. For example, unless Zapfino is the only type you will be using, combining such an exuberant face with another font can be a challenge. Examples of suitable typefaces to pair with Zapfino include the Futura® and Calibri™ families.

“Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability.” 136

ROGER EXCOFFON

M istral

Excoffon was a French graphic designer whose flamboyant typefaces were to shake up French advertising. Born in Marseilles, he went to Paris to study painting. He then became design director of a small type foundry in Marseilles, the Fonderie Olive. His Antique Olive family of types is regarded as his masterpiece. His exuberant typefaces—Calypso, Choc, and others—became symbolic of the stylish modernity and exuberance of post-war nouvelle vague France, and a benchmark for French graphic design.

are carefully designed to connect on a line to an extent unusual in script fonts. Descenders are long, and increase the sense of motion. The face has several specially-designed ligatures (which have not been duplicated in digital versions). In lowercase Mistral is a true connecting script, similar to cursive writing.

“Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response.” —April Greiman

DESIGNER: Roger Excoffon YEAR: 1953 RANK: 69

DESIGNER: LettError YEAR: 1991 RANK: 70

H ands

History

Mistral is a casual script typeface designed by Roger Excoffon for the Fonderie Olive type foundry, and released in 1953. The Amsterdam Type foundry released a version in 1955. Excoffon based the form of the typeface on his own handwriting. The stroke has an informal graphic quality similar to brush and ink. The lowercase letters

S cript

The typefaces FF JustLeftHand and FF ErikRightHand were originally conceived as joke fonts. The real story can be found as a comic strip in the book “Made with FontFont”: In late 1990, Erik van Blokland was living in New York, while his “random twin” Just van Rossum was in Berlin. One evening it occurred to them that they were still due to contribute two script fonts to the recently founded FontFont Library, one light and one bold. Because of the distance and the Stone Age

communication technology—a fax machine—Erik drew strong letters on a fax form with his right hand, using a felt-tip pen, and Just took a fineliner in his left hand and did the same in lighter lettering. The typefaces were expected to dissapear after a while but surprisingly folks kept coming back for more. Yet ErikRightHand and JustLeftHand reman quite different from the rest. A couple of small regrets though. ErikRightHand’s lower case i has a very thick, slanted dot

LETTERROR which gets mistaken for an acute quite often. And some of the counters are too small, but cleaning it up now would be a mistake. Many handwriting fonts get too pretty because the shapes are regularised too much. Hands are just fine! A scanner and the software programs Photoshop, Streamline and Fontographer were subsequently put to the task, and the 4-font FF Hands package was finished. The fonts fell straight into a gap in the market for unpretentious script typefaces and became famous around the world.

“Made with FontFont”

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A discussion from the late 1990s with Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum about their work as type designers designing programmers. Just van Rossum,(1966) Erik van Blokland (1967), are known for their work that they done separately together under the name Letterror. They are both graduates from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. After a short work for companies abroad (MetaDesign, FontBureau) they started to work freelanced in The Hague. In 1990 they have introduced “random fonts”, computer programmed outlines that print differently in each impression. They have designed over 50 fonts for FontShop and FUSE. In their typographic work they extensively use programming.

MATTHEW CARTER Son of Harry Carter, Royal Designer for Industry, contemporary British type designer and ultimate craftsman, trained as a punchcutter at Enschedé by Paul Rädisch, Mergenthaler Linotype’s house designer. Carter co-founded Bitstream with Mike Parker in 1981. In 1991 he left Bitstream to form Carter & Cone with Cherie Cone. He has in recent years designed Verdana and Georgia for Microsoft; these fonts are tuned to be extremely legible even at very small sizes on the screen. In 1997 he was awarded the TDC Medal, the award from the Type Directors Club presented to those “who have made significant contributions to the life, art, and craft of typography”. In 2010, he won a MacArthur Fellowship based on his “exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances”.

St. AuguStin Civilite

RANK: 81

History The Civilité is a form of script that flourished in northern Europe in the sixteenth century. The Civilité was originally used to render contracts, which explains the theatrical flourishes with which its lines are ended: like the trailing stroke written on a bank check, these gestures ensured that no additional terms could be added. Of the many vernacular scripts that were adapted for printing types, the Civilité was among the most challenging, and it was in the hands of typefounder Robert Granjon that it achieved its highest form. Granjon, a French punchcutter working in Antwerp,

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was perhaps the best punchcutter of the sixteenth century; he was certainly the most versatile. Granjon’s italics have served as the basis for most of the twentieth century’s Garamond revivals, including Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond (1989). Granjon’s fiery romans, and some of his saucier italics, have been perfectly captured by Matthew Carter’s Galliard (1978). This typeface is a digitization of Granjon’s “St. Augustin Lettre Francoise” of circa 1562, “St. Augustin” describing the size of the type, roughly equivalent to a modern 18 point. It is reproduced from Civilité Types by Harry Carter and

H. D. L.Vervliet, The Oxford Bibliographical Society, Oxford University Press, 1966. A few modifications have been introduced in the interest of readability: the lowercase o has been lightened, the lowercase t and j have been heavied, and a lowercase w—absent in the original French—has been created from the more familiar form of the v. The numbers and punctuation in the font are not from the “Lettre Francoise,” but from a later Granjon Civilité, the “Courante” which first appeared in 1567. As with the Fell Types, characters that postdate the original source have been fabricated in a sympathetic style.

ROBERT GRANJON Robert Granjon was a French designer of type and printer. He began his work in Paris and afterward worked in Lyons, Antwerp, and Rome. The types that he designed and made included roman, italic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac. He is known especially for his caractères de civilité, based on a beautiful French handwriting and intended to take the place in France that italic type then held in Italy. The greater legibility of italic caused the Granjon style to fall into disuse. Printers who used types designed and made by Granjon included Christophe Plantin, of Antwerp.

RICHARD LIPTON Richard Lipton, a native New Yorker, studied art and design at Harpur College in upstate New York and began his professional lettering career in 1974 as a calligrapher, sign painter, and graphic designer. His exhibition and commercial work has been shown internationally. He established a successful freelance calligraphy studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in 1983 went to work for Bitstream Inc., an independent digital type foundry. In his eight years at Bitstream, Lipton was prolific in design and production, helping to make Bitstream’s type library one of the most respected in the industry. In his tenure as senior designer, Lipton developed two original type families: Arrus BT, and Cataneo BT with Jacqueline Sakwa. In 1991, Lipton started an independent type and calligraphy studio where he designs original typefaces on the Macintosh, including custom fonts for international clients, pursues his calligraphy, and plays with his five-year-old daughter, Rachel, who just won’t stay out of the studio.

Inspired by Puritan ideals, 17th century writing master Charles Snell began developing a roundhand script based on the principles of simplicity and efficiency. The resulting script lacked the ornaments of other

DESIGNER: Matthew Carter YEAR: 1966

YEAR: 1997 RANK: 83

calligraphic forms of the day. Its straightforward, functional tone was well-suited for use in the burgeoning industrial economy of Snell’s day. When a transition was eventually made to mechanical type, Snell’s roundhand design was left out in the cold, thanks in large part to the large overhangs of its capitals. Etching them into the metal type blocks was too difficult and the script fell into disuse. In 1965, Matthew Carter, who had already established a reputation leading the typographic program at Crosfield,

DESIGNER:Victor Hammer

Uncial

was hired by Linotype to develop new typefaces. One of his first efforts at the company was the Snell Roundhand design, a reinterpretation of Snell’s original roundhand. Technological advancements had made the photocomposition of joined scripts possible; the Snell Roundhand design was intended as homage to the rejuvenating effects of this new technology. The formal script eventually became a modern classic. Its refined, simple touch of elegance makes it an excellent calligraphic script for modern sensibilities.

“Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.”

RANK: 77

BiCkhAm S Cript

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BeowUlf

YEAR: 1923 RANK: 95

VICTOR HAMMER The Bickham Script typeface is a sure-fire way to get the attention of the most distinguished audiences. What sets this font apart is not only its formal design, but also its variety. Designer Richard Lipton included variations of many characters that show themselves according to where the character is in a word or phrase.

History George Bickham had been an engraver who was known for his skill. In 1733 he brought together twenty five calligraphers to contribute designs to his

DESIGNER: Richard Lipton

The Snell Roundhand font family was developed by Matthew Carter in 1965. This connecting script was based on the roundhand script of Charles Snell, a writing master from the 1600s. Carter later expanded on the design by adding two additional weights.

History

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DESIGNER: Robert Granjon YEAR: 1652

s nell RoundHand

book. This work was not only influential in the 18th century, but served as Lipton’s inspiration for most of his designs culminating in his design of the Bickham Script design in 1996-97. Lipton was mesmerized by what he called the ‘drama’ of Bickham’s lettering. This ‘drama’ Lipton refers to is the combination of letter and symbol variations based on the context and location of each letter. With the advent of OpenType®, each letter now has twenty versions. Emphasis on repeated letters is a hallmark of this typeface. The capital letters have variants too, showing elegance and luxury for

titles and signatures. Lipton attributes the popularity of the Bickham Script design to the OpenType technology that allows the variations in style and lettering to combine automatically. These unique combinations were conscious choices in the design, but the use of the script is simple.

Usage The Bickham Script design is widely used for formal documents, especially as titles and signatures. Certificates, diplomas, and formal invitations are also very common uses.

History Early uncial script is likely to have developed from late Old Roman cursive. Early forms are characterized by broad single stroke letters using simple round forms taking advantage of the new parchment and vellum surfaces, as opposed to the angular, multiple stroke letters, which are more suited for rougher surfaces, such as papyrus. In the oldest examples of uncial, such as the De bellis macedonicis manuscript in

the tool in the basic stroke and overlapping. By the time the more compact minuscule scripts arose circa AD 800, some of the evolved uncial styles formed the basis for these simplified, smaller scripts. Uncial was still used, particularly for copies of the Bible, tapering off until around the 10th century. There are over 500 surviving copies of uncial script, by far the largest number prior to the Carolingian Renaissance.

“It is my conviction that the type designer should do his work in the service of the language.”

“I like to keep a low profile. I am best represented by my work.” 141

the British Library, all of the letters are disconnected from one another, and word separation is typically not used. Word separation, however, is characteristic of later uncial usage. As the script evolved over the centuries, the characters became more complex. Specifically, around AD 600, flourishes and exaggerations of the basic strokes began to appear in more manuscripts. Ascenders and descenders were the first major alterations, followed by twists of

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Victor Hammer was a craftsman par excellence, who, incredibly, dedicated his life to one single letter form. He devoted more than 40 years perfecting his typefaces based on the uncial—a medieval script used by monks in the 4th century. He was born in Vienna where he worked as a portraitist and sculptor. He worked as a war artist during World War 1. Early in life, he had been inspired by the ideals and work of William Morris and believed in the holiness of work. His first design -Hammer Uncial—was produced in 1921. He set up a printing press in Florence in 1929. In 1939, he was forced to leave his post as a professor at the Viennese Academy and to flee to America. Here he produced American Uncial - his best known of his five typefaces.

“Embossed letters represent the topography of typography.” —Jarod Kintz

DESIGNER: Peter Baker YEAR: 1996 RANK: 98

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Changes Time Management Typos Contents Bibliography

have

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About so many typefaces About many typographers Can recognise a lot more typefaces How hard it is to find information for Blackletter fonts