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ABOUT

Ascender Corporation

Elk Grove Village, IL-based company established in 2004, which specializes in font development, licensing and IP protection. It rose from the ashes of a major fire at Agfa/Monotype at the end of 2003. Its founders are Steve Matteson (type designer, formerly with Agfa/Monotype), Thomas Rickner (of Microsoft fame, where he hinted many Microsoft families), Ira Mirochnick (founder and President of Monotype Typography Inc in 1989 (where he was until 2000) and a Senior Vice President and director of Agfa Monotype Corporation (2000-2003), a self-proclaimed expert in font licensing issues and IP protection), and Bill Davis (most recently the Vice President of Marketing for Agfa Monotype). Also included in this group are Josh Hadley, Brian Kraimer, Jim Ford (since 2005), and Jeff Finger (as Chief Research Scientist, since 2006). On December 8, 2010, Ascender was acquired by Monotype for 10.2 million dollars.

Their typefaces include Endurance (2004, Steve Matteson, an "industrial strength" Grotesk designed to compete with Helvetica and Arial; it supports Greek, Cyrillic and East European languages).

In April 2005, Ascender announced that it would start selling the Microsoft font collection, which is possibly their most popular collection to date. They also started selling and licensing IBM's Heisei family of Japanese fonts in April 2005: Heisei Kaku Gothic, Heisei Maru Gothic and Heisei Mincho. Ascender's version of the CJK font Heiti is called ASC Heiti. Also in 2005, they started distributing Y&Y's Lucida family.

In October 2005, Ascender announced the development of Convection, a font used for Xbox 360 video games. Their South Asian fonts cover Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu, and include Ascender Uni, Ascender UniDuo and Arial Unicode for general use across all Indic languages, and, in particular, the Microsoft fonts Vrinda (Bengali), Mangal (Devanagari), Shruti (Gujarati), Raavi (Gurmukhi), Tunga (Kannada), Kartika (Malayalam), Latha (Tamil) and Gautami (Telugu). Khmer SBBIC (2011) is a Khmer font at Open Font Library.

It does more type trading and licensing than type creation, although Steve Matteson has contributed fairly well to their new typefaces. Their brand value took a hit when they started selling scrapbook, handwriting and wedding fonts under the name FontMarketplace.com.

Recent contributions: Crestwood (2006, a house face, possibly by Steve Matteson) is an updated version of an elegant semi-formal script typeface originally released by the Ludlow Type Foundry in 1937.

In 2009, they started a subpage called GoudyFonts.Com to sell their Goudy revivals.

In 2010, they announced a new collection of OpenType fonts created specifically for use in Microsoft Office 2010: Comic Sans 2010 (including new italic and bold italic fonts), Trebuchet 2010 (including new black&black italic fonts), Impact 2010, Pokerface 2010, Rebekah 2010 and Rebus Script 2010. Ligatures in Comic Sans?

New releases.

View Ascender's typefaces.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Ascender Corporation
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INTERNAL LINKS
Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Eastern European fonts ⦿ Type design in Japan ⦿ Indic language fonts ⦿ Type design in India ⦿ Bengali fonts ⦿ Tamil fonts ⦿ Malayalam fonts ⦿ Telugu fonts ⦿ Gurmukhi/Punjabi fonts ⦿ Gujarati fonts ⦿ Kannada fonts ⦿ Type scene in Illinois ⦿ Cambodian (Khmer) fonts ⦿ Extinct 20th century foundries ⦿ Courier and derived typefaces ⦿ Frederic William Goudy ⦿