TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Jan 29 16:41:28 EST 2025

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ABOUT

Electronic Font Foundry [Edward Detyna]

The Electronic Font Foundry (EFF) in Ascot, Berkshire, UK, sold most classical fonts at about 15 dollars per weight, and made custom fonts. Established in 1984, the foundry had 1300 fonts by 2012.

The font designer and owner was Edward Detyna, who died in March 2014. People are reporting to me that the fonts are in limbo, and that Detyna's family is not replying to requests for information.

On July 4, 2002, Apostrophe wrote this: I'm currently having a difficult time trying to predict the past of EFF LondonA, EFF Liz, EFF Eric and EFF Formal, to name a few. I have a feeling that these folks just happen to be twins with entities that are currently across the Atlantic from them, namely Adobe Garamond, Cooper Black, Gill Sans and Copperplate Gothic. A friend of Detyna's writes this: When I met him at least twenty years ago, Edward and his associates had a font design studio based in Ascot, near London. He is a mathematician/statistician turned typographer, and was really on top of type design at the time. There are academic articles published on mathematical subjects on the internet. He's an old man now, but still a very smart guy. When he started, with fonts for Acorn RISC-OS (now defunct, but leading-edge British computer of mid-eighties to -nineties), he had very advanced and sophisticated algorithms for anti-aliasing and hinting, and his hand-hinting is still better than almost any other fonts I have used for screen work. He still sells fonts and adapts to user requirements promptly. I recently asked him to adjust the hinting on a font and he turns it around in a day.

Jason Koxvold wrote to me in 2017: I knew Edward back in 1990 or so, when I was 13, and he mentored me to a great degree. For a while I worked an internship of sorts at EFF, and then one day, my mother came to see what I was up to---he gave her the job of office manager. He was a tremendously helpful and meaningful person to me then as a very young man with a passion for typography.

Closed captioning fonts for TV, made according to the EIA 708-B specifications, include EFF Sans Serif CC, EFF Serif CC, EFF Sans Serif Mono CC, EFF Serif Mono CC, EFF Casual CC, EFF Script CC, EFF Small Caps CC.

EFF also has fonts for Vietnamese, Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic.

EFF Primary is a large family of educational fonts.

EFF Utamaru is an oriental simulation font.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Electronic Font Foundry
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Extinct 20th century foundries ⦿ Font vendors ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Phonetic (IPAfonts) ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in the United Kingdom ⦿ Copperplate ⦿ Cooper Black ⦿ Type for TV ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Vietnamese ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ School fonts ⦿ Oriental simulation fonts ⦿ Courier and derived typefaces ⦿