100types
[Ben Archer]

Educational and reference site run by Ben Archer, a designer, educator and type enthusiast located in England (who was in Auckland, New Zealand, before that). Glossary. Timeline. Type categories. Paul Shaw's list of the 100 most significant typefaces of all times were recategorized by Archer:

• Religious/Devotional: Gutenbergs B-42 type, Gebetbuch type, Wolfgang Hoppyl's Textura, Breitkopf Fraktur, Ehrhard Ratdolt's Rotunda, Hammer Uncial, Zapf Chancery, Peter Jessenschrift, Cancellaresca Bastarda, Poetica.
• Book Publishing&General Purpose Text Setting: Nicolas Jenson's roman, Francesco Griffo's italic, Claude Garamond's roman, Firmin Didot's roman, Cheltenham family, Aldus Manutius' roman, William Caslon's roman, Pierre-Simon Fournier's italic, Ludovico Arrighi da Vicenza's italic, Johann Michael Fleischmann's roman, ATF Garamond, Giambattista Bodoni's roman, Nicolas Kis' roman, Minion multiple master, Unger Fraktur, John Baskerville's roman, Lucida, Optima, Bauer Bodoni, Adobe Garamond, Scotch Roman, Romanée, ITC Stone family, Trinité, ITC Garamond, Sabon, ITC Novarese, Charter, Joanna, Marconi, PMN Caecilia, Souvenir, Apollo, Melior, ITC Flora, Digi-Grotesk Series S.
• Business/Corporate: Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica, Univers, Syntax, Courier, Meta, Rotis, Thesis, Antique Olive.
• Newspaper Publishing: Times Roman, Bell, Clarendon, Century Old Style, Ionic, Imprint.
• Advertising and Display: Futura, Robert Thorne's fat typeface roman, Vincent Figgins' antique roman (Egyptian), Memphis, Fette Fraktur, Avant-Garde Gothic, Deutschschrift, Peignot, Erbar, Stadia/Insignia, Penumbra, Compacta, Bodoni 26, WTC Our Bodoni.
• Prestige and Private Press: Romain du Roi, Golden Type, Johnston's Railway Sans, Doves Type, Walker.
• Signage: William Caslon IV's sans serif, Trajan.
• Historical Script: Snell Roundhand, Robert Granjon's civilité, Excelsior Script.
• Experimental/expressive: Mistral, Beowolf, Dead History, Behrensschrift, Eckmannschrift, Neuland, Element, Remedy, Template Gothic.
• Onscreen/multimedia: Chicago, Oakland, OCR-A, Base Nine and Base Twelve, Evans and Epps Alphabet.
• Telephone Directory publishing: Bell Gothic.

Link to Archer Design Work. [Google] [More]  ⦿

101 Editions
[Carolina de Bartolo]

Founded by Carolina de Bartolo, 101 Editions is the San Anselmo, CA-based publisher of the book Explorations in Typography: Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting and its iOS companion app. 101 Editions also offers full-service creative direction for a wide range of visual communications. It specializes in contract publishing, typographic consulting and custom typefaces.

Explorations in Typography Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting is both the title of a 2011 book and the name of a web site by Carolina de Bartolo and Erik Spiekermann. The site is worth a visit, as users can "set" their own text. Their own blurb: [The book] is a vast collection of beautiful typesetting examples. Page after page, a brief article by Erik Spiekermann has been set in hundreds of different ways in hundreds of different typefaces, creating an extended visual taxonomy of typesetting that allows you to learn by looking. With complete type specifications on every page and examples set in hundreds of typefaces (many from the FontFont library), the aggregate effect is an ersatz type catalog as well as an extensive resource of typesetting ideas.

Her typefaces include Txt101 (2014: a fresh typeface for mock text and borders, designed in collaboration with Chiharu Tanaka at Psy/Ops).

Carolina graduated from the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

27 TTC Fonts

Nick Shinn ran an interesting project in his 2009 class at Humber College in Toronto. In the 1950s, Toronto built a subway system [which is run by the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission], with comprehensively modernist architecture. As part of the program, a geometric, all-caps typeface was designed (anonymously), for use in signage [read Joe Clark's article about the type and its history]. Nick Shinn's course began with digitizing the original drawings, to introduce the technicalities of font production in FontLab, and then proceeded with students producing their own designs for a matching lower case. The 27 students each produced a typeface. The results are here: Alex Plociennik, Andrea Luis, Andrew Clanahan, Andrew Hodge, Chris Bacchus, Cornelius Quiring, Craig Steffan, Daniel Marcus, Dan Mitchell, Danny Wu, Darren Ray, David Spindler, Gurchan Birdi, Jackie Saik, Joe Beausoleil, Katie Short, Mag Ciemiega, Michael Cirillo, Michael Lao, Michael Neto, Nick Seeger, Nik Firka, Orlena Chan, Piotr Dymura, Scott Krysa, Tiffany Delve, Todd Haskins. [Google] [More]  ⦿

A Case For Type Design Education
[Patrick Griffin]

An article by Patrick Griffin in Applied Arts Mag, 2010. Patrick makes the point that type design should be taken seriously as a subject. [Google] [More]  ⦿

A Treatise on Font Rasterisation
[Freddie Witherden]

The title of this informative article is A Treatise on Font Rasterisation With an Emphasis on Free Software. It explains font hinting, anti-aliasing, subpixel rendering and positioning, and gives a survey of the state of the art, and pays special attention to X11 and Unix. The following Unix tools are discussed: Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Qt and Xft. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Aasawari Kulkarni on Helvetica

In an article entitled Why We Need to Stop Advocating Helvetica as the Best Typeface (February 2021), Aasawari Kulkarni writes: Every good typeface---in my opinion---has been designed with the intent, to be used to fulfill a certain purpose. That might be one of the answers to the question why do we need more typefacesâ (if not the ultimate answer to the question). Living amidst a thousand fonts then, why do we still keep spotting and using just a few "normal" ones time and time again? Why do we keep falling on Helvetica's (and its counterparts') back for safety, like going back to an ex merely for the sake of familiarity and comfort? We put hours into making full proof concepts and sketches for our designs, spend waking nights selecting the perfect color pallets, making original forms. And yet when it comes to tying it all together, we simply select a beautiful, no-nonsense, Swiss typeface from our back pocket of the many Helvetica-like typefaces. There is no way we can go wrong with that. But must "not going wrong" be the only ultimate aim for a designer? We have been taught to keep things simple, to use proportions that work, and use forms that are comfortable, agreeable to all. And using Helvetica-like typefaces reinstates this need to be conventionally correct. It also helps that these fonts complement the rest of our careful considerations. As Jen Wang says in Helvetica, Modernism and the Status Quo of Design, "Although design contributes to the culture it perpetuates and reflects upon, it is seen as the stage for the message, not as part of the message itself." Even today, many Neue fonts masquerading as rebrands and brand refreshes are plastering on to thick layers of, excessively prim, Swiss, barren walls of redundant, monotonous design. To me, this looks like a missed opportunity, to not let type do the talking, beyond just the words it has been set in; to not let your type choices truly elevate your design on top of that indistinguishable wall. Why would you paint the town all in yellow when there are in fact a thousand different colours that could be more appropriate for different parts of the town?

References: Jen Wang: Helvetica, Modernism and the Status Quo of Design, Dangerous Objects, Medium, 8 December, 2016. Peter Bilak: We don't need new fonts, 8 Faces Magazine, issue 3, 2011. [Google] [More]  ⦿

About fonts

Short intro to fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

About fonts (Indiana U)

Intro to fonts for students. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Access Factory

US-based design outfit. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Acrobat Reader 7

Reactions by typophiles to Acrobat Reader 7, released in December 2004. Good news: It includes Myriad and Minion Pro (for free). Bad news: read on. Grant Hutchinson writes: "Every release since 4.0 has been bigger, slower and more bloated with creeping featuritis to the point of disfunction. Meh, indeed. Do yourself a favor... download version 7, install the free fonts and turf the rest." The general feeling is to hang on as long as possible to the Acrobat Reader 3 and 4 versions. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Acute Systems

Font software company that offers a nice intro to the font formats, and sells conversion software such as Crossfont, Wrefont and TransMac. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Adam Twardoch
[Zielona gruzińska katapulta]

[More]  ⦿

Adobe Type Topics

Discussion of font technology at Adobe. News bits. Links. Visit it often! [Google] [More]  ⦿

Adobe's designers

Adobe's designers highlighted. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Adrian Täckman
[Deote]

[More]  ⦿

afii

Association for Font Information Interchange. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Agate

Agate is an old size type of approximately 5.5 points, a size that mattered for small print such as in newspapers. In newspaper advertising, fourteen agate lines made one inch of matter. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Agfa -- Monotype Sackers

The Sackers family (Monotype, and before that Agfa) is a vintage typeface family. Its members:

• Sackers
• Sackers Gothic (1994).
• Sackers Roman
• Sackers Script
• Sackers Antique Roman
• Sackers Italian Script
• Sackers Classic Roman
• Sackers Light Classic Roman
• Sackers Square Gothic
• Sackers English Script

As a whole, this is an elegant but curious collection. There are few clues as to its origins, which may be a bit louche because we can easily recognize Engravers Gothic in the Sackers Gothic, for example. All typefaces look like they originate in the 19th century, and started probably out as engraved (copperplate) lettering.

View the sackers typeface family. See also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

AIAP

Associazione Italiana Progettazione per la Communicazione Visiva, located in Italy. It has a publishing branch. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Airtable: List of type foundries

A 323-strong list of type foundries. It is quite useless considering that Linotype, FontShop, Adobe, Production Type and Monotype are absent. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alain Hurtig

Great pages about typography (in French). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alan Fletcher

Alan Fletcher (1931-2006) once said, A typeface is an alphabet in a straightjacket, Inhibition is a nail in your head, and A person without imagination is like a teabag without hot water. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Albert-Jan Pool
[FF DIN]

[More]  ⦿

Albion

A modern font family with Didot influences published by Monotype in 1910. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Aldine Italic: Fourier Analysis

Planar Fourier analysis of a text set in Aldine italic, based on Alex Chirokov's FFT plugins. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alexander Overdiep
[Collegium Graficum]

[More]  ⦿

Alexander Phemister
[Bookman]

[More]  ⦿

Alisa Flahert on kerning, leading, tracking

Alisa Flahert (Rexburg, ID) gives great examples of good and bad kerning and leading, using Monotype Bodoni as a prototype example. Behance link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

All Good Things Typography
[Kevin Woodward]

Dead link. Archive (FontPool), history of type, type classification (by Matthias Neuber and Morton K. Pedersen), page layout guide, type choice guide, logo type guide, mixing type guide, Windows software guide, Mac type software guide, glossary. By Kevin Woodward. [Google] [More]  ⦿

All in the Font Family

Fonts in web pages: tips by Eric A. Meyer at Case Western University. [Google] [More]  ⦿

All Type

Brazilian type site. Links. Museum. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alois Studnicka
[Czech Design and Typography (studio experimentalniho design)]

[More]  ⦿

Alphabets and Writing Systems

A bit of history on writing systems. Links to many ancient scripts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alphabettes

Alphabettes is a showcase for work, commentary, and research on lettering, typography, and type design, organized by and for women. The original group of 98 that started the site: Alessia Mazzarella, Alice Savoie, Alisa Nowak, Amy Papaelias, Andrea Tinnes, Annica Lydenberg, Aoife Mooney, Bianca Berning, Barbara Bigosinska, Caren Litherland, Chavelli Tsui, Danielle Evans, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Catherine Griffiths, Catherine Schmidt, Dana Tanamachi, Diana Ovezea, Dyana Weissman, Elena Abertoni, Elena Veguillas, Elizabeth CareySmith, Emilie Rigaud, Emma Laiho, Erin Ellis, Erin McLaughlin, Hendrika Makilya, Indra Kupferschmid, Isabel Urbina Peña, Isabella Aragão, Jeannette Weber, Jen Mussari, Jessica Hische, Jillian AdelJulia Sysmäläinen, Kali Nikitas, Karolina Lach, Kathleen Sleboda, Kimya Gandhi, Ksenya Samarskaya, Laura Meseguer, Laura Serra, Laura Worthington, Lila Symons, Lily Feinberg, Linda Hintz, Linda Kudrnovska, Liron Lavi, Liza Enebeis, Luisa Baeta, Lynne Yun, Maria Doreuli, Mariko Takagi, Marina Chaccur, Marta Bernstein, Martina Flor, Mary Catherine Pflug, Mary Kate McDevitt, Meghan Arnold, Michelle Perham, Moeko Yamaguchi, Nadine Chahine, Nadine Roßa, Naomi Abel, Nicole Dotin, Nicole Phillips, Nina Stössinger, Nora Gummert-Hauser, Petra Cerne Oven, Pilar Cano, Pooja Saxena, Rathna Ramanathan, Roxane Gataud, Ruxandra Duru, Sandrine Nugue, Sara Soskolne, Sarah Maxey, Shauna Lynn Panczyszyn, Shelley Gruendler, Shoko Mugikura, Sibylle Hagmann, Slávka Paulikova, Sol Kawage, Sol Matas, Sonja Hernandez, Sonja Knecht, Sonja Stange, Spike Spondike, Susanne Dechant, Tiffany Wardle de Sousa, Tania Raposo, Ulrike Rausch, Verena Gerlach, Veronika Burian, Victoria Rushton, Wendy Xu, Xandra Zamora, Zeynep Akay. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alpha-Blox

In 1944, American Type Founders (ATF) introduced Alpha-Blox. Quoting Jennifer Farrell, this is an impressive system of both solid and linear shapes that could be combined to create all manner of typefaces, ornament and pattern in 1- or 2-colors. The design possibilities were endless and limited only to the imagination of the printer/designer.

Digital revivals of this modular typeface family include

• P22 Blox (2015). Designed by Richard Kegler (P22 Type Foundry) and Jennifer Farrell (Starshaped Press, Chicago, IL).
• Type Tiles JNL (2021, Jeff Levine).
• Pone (2019, Ivan Moreno.

AlphaBot: Nikita Pashenkov
[Nikita Pashenkov]

Alphabot "is a virtual robot that is able to take the shape of any letter in the English alphabet as you type them on a keyboard. A software application written in C++/OpenGL features 12 alphabots loosely arranged in a 3D landsape that the user can traverse using arrow keys or a mouse." Dated 2000. See also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alphaquark

French typographical rules. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alte Schwabacher

A classic form of blackletter first seen in 1472 in Augsburg where Johann Bämler created a version. It was very popular in the 16th century. Revived, e.g., by the following foundries: Drugulin/D. Stempel (1919), Benjamin Krebs (1918), Genzsch&Heyse (1835), Berthold, C.F. Rühl (1903). [Google] [More]  ⦿

American Amateur Press Association (AAPA)
[Dave Tribby]

Organization with many type pages related to letterpress, and run mostly by Dave Tribby. I quote Tribby: From its formation in 1892 (from the merger of 23 leading foundries) to its demise in the late twentieth century, American Type Founders was the dominant force in foundry type. Throughout its existence, ATF produced some of the most beautiful printing fonts. During its first half century, those typefaces were displayed in a series of substantial catalogs.

Chicago's Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry chose not to join the ATF combine in the 1890s. It finally became part of ATF in 1911, but continued to operate under its own name until it was closed in 1933.

Based upon Mac McGrew's American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century, Maurice Annenberg's Type Foundries of America and their Catalogs, and a review of ATF type catalogs published in 1897, 1899, 1900, 1903, 1906, 1909, 1912, 1923, 1934, 1941, 1960, and 1971 (plus BB&S catalog No. 25), Tribby has compiled a spreadsheet of ATF typefaces, their identification numbers, and which page numbers they appeared on in those catalogs. He put together a similar spreadsheet for BB&S catalogs that were published in 1897, 1909, and 1925.

Excel spreadsheet.

The following PDF files were prepared from the individual worksheets in the spreadsheet file.

• Typefaces appearing in selected American Type Founders catalogs between 1897 and 1971. (24 printed pages; File size: 123 Kbytes)

• Typefaces appearing in selected Barnhart Brothers & Spindler catalogs between 1895 and 1925. (12 printed pages; File size: 97 Kbytes)

• ATF typefaces sold after 1941, listed in numeric order; great for identifying a font when it's got an ID number on the lower case "m" or capital "H" characters. (2 printed pages; file size: 77 Kbytes)

• A list of ATF and BB&S catalogs issued in the United States. (2 printed pages; file size: 59 Kbytes)

American Center for Design

Nonprofit national membership organization. [Google] [More]  ⦿

American Institute of Graphic Arts

[More]  ⦿

Ampersand
[Cameron Moll]

Article by Artemy Lebedev on the history of the ampersand. Marcus Tullius Tiro, Ciceros faithful slave and secretary, is credited with inventing ampersand. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ana Berden

Ljubljana, Slovenia-based designer of the type design version of Monopoly, called Fontopoly (2016). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Anatomy of fonts

A Russian language page with visual illustrations of font terminology. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ann Wroe
[Handwriting: An Elegy]

[More]  ⦿

Anti-aliasing

Joe Gillespie's colorful explanation of anti-aliasing. Pixel font FAQ. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Antique (McGrew's definition)

Mac McGrew writes: Antique in general is a generic nineteenth-century term applied to a variety of old type styles. A few that were given a new lease on life by Monotype and the slug machines are listed here; others were similar to the older Clarendons, Dorics, Ionics, etc. Also see Bold Antique and Bold Condensed Antique, Modern Antique and Modern Antique Condensed, and Old Style Antique, also Cushing Antique, Latin Antique, etc. Antique No.1 is similar to Bookman. Antique No.2 (Lino) is equivalent to Antique No.6 (Mono) and comes from BB&S, where it was later known as Antique Bold. Antique No.3 is equivalent to Modern Antique. Antique No. 525 (ATF) is very similar to Antique [No. 53] (BB&S) and Antique No.1 (Inland); also to Consort Light, the 1950s English revival (see Clarendon). Hansen's Antique No.1 was slightly lighter than the others. Antique Condensed comes from BB&S. Antique Extra Condensed was shown as Skeleton Antique by Marder, Luse in 1886 or earlier and by BB&S somewhat later, with many sources producing the same or very similar designs. Antique Shaded was designed by Morris F. Benton in 1910 but not introduced until 1913, when it was described as "the first of a series of shaded typefaces." It was later promoted as part of "the new gray typography." This typeface was the first one cut on a new shading machine invented by the designer's father, Linn B. Benton. When Monotype copied it, the typeface was named Rockwell Antique Shaded, to tie it in with that company's Rockwell series (q. v.), but since Rockwell is often confused with Stymie, it is perhaps natural that Antique Shaded is sometimes though incorrectly called Stymie Shaded. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Antique Olive
[Roger Excoffon]

Antique Olive is a brash humanist sans-serif typeface designed in 1959 by French type designer Roger Excoffon for an Air France logo. It was released at Fonderie Olive (Marseille, France) as a retail typeface in 1962 with further development occurring until 1968. In addition to a basic weight, Antique Olive was produced in medium, condensed, wide, bold, condensed bold, extra bold (known as Antique Olive Compact), and ultra bold (known as Nord). Its almost reverse stress disqualifies Antique Olive from use as a body typeface. It was effectively used, e.g., in the Sesame Street credits from 1969 until 1983.

Digital revivals:

• Antique Olive (Adobe).
• Antique Olive (Linotype).
• Antique Olive (URW).
• Bitstream: Incised 901.
• Antique Oakland (Brother Industries Ltd), late 1990s.
• Antigone (Infinitype).
• Antigone (Softmaker).
• Ravenna Serial (Softmaker).
• Oliva (Autologic).
• AO (Itek).
• Olive (Varityper).
• OPTI Ancienta (Castcraft).
• Antique Olive Heavy (1992, Gary Elfring).
• Other names used by smaller outfits: Alphavanti, Berry Roman, Gibson Antique, Olivanti, Olive Antique, Oliver, Olivette, Olivette Antique, Olivia, Provence.

Digital typefaces influenced by Antique Olive:

• Anton Moglia's Paysage (2020).
• Kia Tasbihgou's Propos (2018).
• Lena Douani's Teelay Sans (2017).
• Aero (2011, Chester Jenkins and Jeremy Mickel).
• Aurelien Vret's Prosaic Black (2017) is a distant cousin on Antique Olive Nord.
• Kelly Media's Antiqua 1010 (1994).
• Zizou or Clouseau (2011), by Christian schwartz. A reworking (from memory) of Antique Olive. This was published at the end of 2013 as Duplicate (2013, with Miguel Reyes). In three styles, Slab, Sans and Ionic. Commercial Type writes: Christian Schwartz wanted to see what the result would be if he tried to draw Antique Olive from memory. He was curious whether this could be a route to something that felt contemporary and original, or if the result would be a pale imitation of the original. Most of all, he wanted to see what he would remember correctly and what he would get wrong, and what relationship this would create between the inspiration and the result. Though it shares some structural similarities with Antique Olive and a handful of details, like the shape of the lowercase a, Duplicate Sans is not a revival, but rather a thoroughly contemporary homage to Excoffon. Duplicate Sans was finally finished at the request of Florian Bachleda for his 2011 redesign of Fast Company. Bachleda wanted a slab companion for the sans, so Schwartz decided to take the most direct route: he simply added slabs to the sans in a straightforward manner, doing as little as he could to alter the proportions, contrast, and stylistic details in the process. The bracketed serifs and ball terminals that define the Clarendon genre (also known as Ionic) first emerged in Britain in the middle of the 19th century. While combining these structures with a contemporary interpretation of a mid-20th century French sans serif seems counterintutive, the final result feels suprisingly natural. The romans are a collaboration between Christian Schwartz and Miguel Reyes, but the italic is fully Reyes's creation, departing from the sloped romans seen in Duplicate Sans and Slab with a true cursive. Mark Porter and Simon Esterson were the first to use the family, in their 2013 redesign of the Neue Züricher Zeitung am Sonntag. Because the Ionic genre has ll ong been a common choice for text in newspapers, Duplicate Ionic is a natural choice for long texts. Duplicate Ionic won an award at TDC 2014.
• Utile (2020, Kontour Type). Utile was influenced by Hermann Zapf's Optima in its flaring and by Roger Excoffon's Antique Olive in its brashness.
• Oliver New (1995, Anastasia Babalyan at TypeMarket).
• Filt (Martin Fredrikson Core).
• Chalfont (2003, Alan Meeks).

Antitype

Experimental typography. Under construction. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Antonio Carusone
[The Grid System]

[More]  ⦿

APHA

The American Printing History Association. Its journal is called "Printing History". [Google] [More]  ⦿

Apple: font page

Basic font page at Apple. International fonts. Techical type page.

Find the San Francisco fonts (SF Compasct, SF Pro, SF Mono) and Apple's New York font. Github page. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Apple Fonts

Alternate URL. The history of all fonts used and produced by Cupertino, CA-based Apple. A brief summary of this:

• Corporate fonts and brand identity
  • Motter Tektura (designed by Othmar Motter of Voralberger Graphic in 1975): before the first Macintosh, Apple used Motter Tektura to accompany the Apple logo. "According to the logo designer, Rob Janoff, the typeface was selected for its playful qualities and techno look, in line with Apple's mission statement of making high-technology accessible to anyone."
  • Apple Garamond, the new corporate font used when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984. ITC Garamond (Tony Stan, 1977) was condensed to 80% of its normal width by Bitstream, who also adjusted and hinted it. Apple Garamond was used in most of Apple's marketing. The Wikipedia comment: "Many typographers consider ITC Garamond in general, and Apple Garamond in particular, to be poorly designed typefaces. A common viewpoint is that the algorithmic scaling distorted the typeface."
  • Myriad Pro: starting in 2002, Apple began using Myriad Pro Semibold (a sans serif face) in its marketing, gradually replacing Apple Garamond. MyriadPro and MyriadApple can be downloaded here.
  • Gill Sans Regular: used in the marketing of the Newton PDA.
• Fonts of the original Macintosh All but one of these bitmap fonts were due to Susan Kare. The fonts were originally named after stops along the Paoli, Pennsylvania commuter train line: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. Later, under pressure from Steve Jobs, names of world cities were chosen. A number of different variants of each font were algorithmically generated on-the-fly from the standard fonts. Bold, italic, outlined, underlined and shaded variations were the most common.
  • Cairo: a bitmap dingbat font, most famous for the dogcow at the 'z' character position.
  • Chicago (sans-serif): the default Macintosh system font in System 17.6.
  • Geneva (sans-serif): designed for small point sizes and prevalent in all versions of the Mac user interface.
  • London (blackletter): an Old English-style font.
  • Los Angeles (script): a thin font that emulated handwriting.
  • Monaco (sans-serif, monospaced): a fixed-width font well-suited for 912 pt use.
  • New York (serif): a Times Roman-inspired font family. Freely avaliable from Apple.
  • San Francisco: a ransom note face.
  • Venice (script): a calligraphic font designed by Bill Atkinson.
• Fonts in Mac OS X
  • Lucida Grande: the primary system font in Mac OS X (all versions). Lucida Grande looks like Lucida Sans, but has more glyphs. It covers Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai and Greek. Many of its 2800+ glyphs were added by Michael Everson to the original collection.
  • Mac OS X ships with a number of high-quality typefaces, for a number of different scripts, licensed from several sources.
  • LastResort (designed by Michael Everson of Evertype): used by the system to display reference glyphs in the event that real glyphs needed to display a given character are not found in any other available font. Wikipedia states: "The glyphs are square with rounded corners with a bold outline. In the left and right sides of the outline, the Unicode range that the character belongs to is given using hexadecimal digits. Top and bottom are used for one or two descriptions of the Unicode block name. A symbol representative of the block is centered inside the square. By Everson's design, the typeface used for the text cut-outs in the outline is Chicago, otherwise not included with Mac OS X. The LastResort font has been part of Mac OS since version 8.5, but the limited success of ATSUI on the classic Mac OS means that only users of Mac OS X are regularly exposed to it."
  • Apple Symbols (2003-2006): a 4000+-glyph dingbat font that complements the symbols from Lucida Grande, inttroduced first in Mac OS X 10.3 ("Panther").
  • Zapfino (a calligraphic typeface designed by and named after renowned typeface designer Hermann Zapf for Linotype, based on an example he first drew in 1944): Zapfino utilizes the most advanced typographic features of the truetype format, and is partially included in OS X as a technology demo for ligatures and character substitutions.
  • Mac OS X Snow Leopard comes with four new fonts in 2009: Chalkduster (emulating chalk on a blackboard), Menlo (a monospaced family based on Bitstream's Vera Sans Mono that replaces Monaco for applications such as Terminal and code editors; see also Deja Vu Sans Serif Mono), Heiti SC and TC and Hiragino Sans GB.
• Fonts used in other devices
  • Espy Sans: designed in 1993 by Apple's Human Interface Group designed the typeface Espy Sans specifically for on-screen use. It was first used for the Newton OS GUI and later integrated into Apple's eWorld online service.
  • eWorld Tight: a bitmap font used for headlines in Apple's eWorld. The metrics of eWorld Tight were based on Helvetica Ultra Compressed.
  • Chicago (see above): bitmap typeface used in Apple's iPod music player since 2001.

The Apple Design team won two awards at 25 TDC in 2022, pne for SF Arabic (a contemporary interpretation of the Naskh style with a rational and flexible design; this extension of San Francisco serves as the Arabic system font on Apple platforms. Like San Francisco, SF Arabic features nine weights and variable optical sizes that automatically adjust spacing and contrast based on the point size of text. The typeface features an extensive repertoire that covers numerous vocalization, tone and poetic marks, extended vowel signs, honorifics and Quranic annotations. SF Arabic provides support across the following languages: Arabic, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Sorani, Mazanderani, Northern Luri, Pashto, Persian, Rohingiya, Sindhi, Urdu, and Uyghur) and SF Symbols 3 (over 600 new symbols including representations of devices, game controllers, health, communication, objects, and tools; it prides greater control over how color is applied to symbols, and has a variable font srtyle as well). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Apple GX fonts

This discussion walks us through the original Apple GX fonts, such as Tekton GX, Skia (Matthew Carter), Buffalo Gal (Thomas Rickner), Jam (Erik van Blokland), Chunk (Matthew Butterick) and Zycon (Font Bureau). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Archive.org: Type and Typefounding

Copyright-free type and typefounding books. Several type specimen books from the University of California Library Collection have been scanned in by Microsoft. Other libraries are participating as well. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Arial: ein Nekrolog
[Ralf Turtschi]

German article by Ralf Turtschi (Swiss, b. 1955) on the history of Arial from its genesis in 1982 as a Helvetica "clone" to its present status as most-used font. Ralf goes on to warn his readers that Microsoft is repeating history by pushing, very soon, its own Segoe, a Frutiger clone. Notable German quotes in which he performs a damning autopsy on Arial: Die Arial ist weder als Textschrift noch als Headlineschrift zu empfehlen, da fehlt einiges an Klasse. [...] Eine unausgeglichene Laufweite, also die Proportionen und der Abstand zwischen den Zeichen, gibt der Arial einem miserablen Grauwert. Das Verhältnis von schwarzen Linien und weissen Flächen lässt sie plump und charakterlos auf dem Papier kleben. Besonders hässlich sind die angeschrägten Endstriche bei a, e, s und t. Die Proportionen und die Form des t sind eine Zumutung und das a sieht wie nach einem Hagelschlag verformt aus. [...] Die Arial ist lieblos, unausgeglichen und verbeult, sie hat mir noch nie Freude bereitet. About the Segoe drama (Trauerspiel), he writes: Die Geschichte wiederholt sich hier, Die Segoe atmet den Geist der Frutiger von Adrian Frutiger, die sich in den 80er-Jahren zur Alternative der viel benutzten Helvetica anbot. Hier springt Microsoft 20 Jahre zu spät dem vermeintlichen Lifestyle nach, und statt eine eigenständige Schrift zu entwickeln, kupfert die Branchenführerin eine der erfolgreichsten und schönsten Schriften ab. Man könnte ja auch eine bestehende Schrift ordentlich lizenzieren. Ein Trauerspiel. So, why did Microsoft not properly license Frutiger from the man himself? After Adobe had to rip off Frutiger with its Myriad, now Microsoft joins the corporate theft business. Why not reward type designers properly? Fontshop joined Turtschi in his analysis. See also this brilliant piece by Fred Nader from 2003. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Arial versus Helvetica

Yet another comparison between Helvetica and its sometimes maligned Monotype "clone" [not my words], Arial. And a test to tell one from the other. Footnote: Arial is designed to compete with Helvetica, yes, but it is based on Monotype Grotesque (early 1900s) and not on Helvetica. Pic with a comparison. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Art directors versus designers

Apostrophe laments the little credit art directors get in font design, and cites Sumner Stone, Jeff Level, Alex Kaczun and Albert-Jan Pool as examples. [Google] [More]  ⦿

artcon

Graphic design students write web pages on designers and typographers such as Rodchenko, Brody, Zapf, Morison and Tschichold. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Arts&Letters

Type outfit in Dallas, TX, with some free fonts, some commercial fonts (BOSS fonts: 4000 fonts for 30 USD), and some typography essays on anti-aliasing. There seems to be a connection withComputer Support Corporation. It released at one point in 1996 a big CD of fonts called Arts&Letters, which I believe is related to Bay Animation. These were renamed fonts from elsewhere. About 100 fonts were at this site. A sampling of the free fonts: Amos-Normal, ArcherNormal, Asia-Extended-Bold, Banco-Normal, Barrett-Condensed-BoldItalic, CallimarkerItalic, Cane-StripedNormal, Cane-Hollow, CoffeeSackExtendedItalic, CraneNormal, Dominon-Normal, Enview-Bold, Glaze-Normal, Gorgio-Normal, Leo-Normal, Matterhorn, Orient2Normal (oriental simulation), PennantNormal, Plank-ExtendedNormal, RoninNormal, ShalomNormal (Hebrew simulation), Tangiers-Normal, ThreeDeeNormal, WampumNormal. The list of about 2000 fonts I am aware of, all made between 1995 and 2001, is here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ascender: Newspaper font study

An in-depth study of font usage in American newspapers, carried out by Bill Davis of Ascender Corporation in 2004. A brief summary of its findings:

• The ten most popular typefaces are Poynter, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica, Utopia, Times, Nimrod, Century Old Style, Interstate (1993, Tobias Frere-Jones), Bureau Grotesque and Miller.
• Many newspapers, including the top seven nationally, use custom designed typefaces.
• The most popular foundry for newspaper design, by far, is Font Bureau. It is followed by Adobe, Linotype, ITC, Bitstream, Hoefler&Frere-Jones, Monotype and Carter&Cone.
• The custom fonts are listed in the article. They include, for the top seven newspapers, USA Roman (a modification by Gerard Unger of his Gulliver for USA Today), DJ4Scotch (a modification of Escrow by Font Bureau for The Wall Street Journal), NY Cheltenham (by Carter&Cone for the New York Times), LA Text (by Font Bureau for the LA Times), Post Roman (by Font Bureau for the Washington Post), CustomNewsOneDN (used by Daily News, NY), and Tribune Century and Eclipse (by Font Bureau and Jim Parkinson, respectively, for the Chicago Tribune).

Ascender: Study of Free--Shareware Web Fonts

Ascender claims to have the ultimate proof that freeware/shareware fonts are inferior to commercial fonts. Statistics are only given for 4572 freeware TTF and OTF fonts, so we don't know how they compare, but that does not deter Ascender. The findings and my comments in italics:

• TrueType hinting tables 8.9% failed (404 TrueType fonts had improper/incomplete tables): Considering that about 8% are pixel fonts anyway, what is the big deal? And how about automatic hinting in both freeware and commercial fonts? In fact, how many fonts, commercial or otherwise, are hand-hinted?
• Code Page 1252 character set 80.8% failed (3696 fonts missing one or more characters): Most freeware fonts are playful---they are designed for a special purpose such as a poster or an announcement of an event or a digitization of a rock band's lettering.
• Mac Roman character set 95.9% failed (4385 fonts missing one or more characters): Same comment as above. And where are the stats for commercial fonts?
• Trademark string 1.7% failed (78 fonts missing a trademark string): Great. Passed this test.
• Copyright string 68.9% failed (3152 fonts missing a copyright string): I am a little dismayed that so few freeware fonts do not have this. But then again, copyright does not have to be explicitly mentioned. Copyright is born when a creative piece is published, with or without copyright statement. Also, those who do not support intellectual property rights are not motivated to include copyright strings...
• Embedding restriction 30.3% failed (1386 fonts set to Restricted or improper fsType): What a useless item! Each font designer is allowed to set the fsType bits to anything he/she likes. Most (more than 30%?) commercial fonts have restricted fsType bits, so what? Are freeware painters not allowed to use white paint? Are freeware writers not allowed to use four-letter words?

Association for Font Information Interchange

International non-profit professional association. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Atelier Beinert München

Atelier for design and typography run by Wolfgang Beinert. Classification of type. Roman numerals. Interesting sub-page on typographical rules for numbers. Make sure to visit his award-winning designs of calendars. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Atelier Perrousseaux

Interesting font links. In French, by Yves Perrousseaux. Jef Tombeur describes this as follows: "The Atelier Perrousseaux is a small publishing house having on its catalogue the founder's books but also books, essays, studies by the late Gérard Blanchard, Adrian Frutiger, Ladislas Mandel, François Richaudeau (a linguist) and, soon, René Ponot." [Google] [More]  ⦿

ATF: Railroad Gothic

This ATF classic headline sans was first introduced in 1906. Mac McGrew writes: Railroad Gothic is a plain, traditional form of heavy, condensed gothic, first shown by ATF early in the century, although it has the appearance of a nineteenth-century face, as some characters seem disproportionate to the others. There is no lowercase. It has long been popular for newspaper headlines, especially in the very large sizes, some of which continue to be shown in recent ATF lists. Ludlow makes the same design in some large sizes as Gothic Bold Condensed Title. Compare Headline Gothic (ATF). ATF Type adds: Railroad Gothic was the quintessential typographic expression of turn-of-the-century industrial spirit---bold and brash in tone, and a little rough around the edges. A favorite for the plain speak of big headlines, Railroad Gothic quickly gained popularity among printers. Its condensed but robust forms were likely a source of inspiration for later families of industrial sans serifs.

For revivals and extensions:

• ATF Railroad Gothic (2016, Mark van Bronkhorst, Luis Batlle, Igino Marini, & Ben Kiel). This is an extension with four new weights.
• Opti Railroad Gothic (Castcraft).
• Railroad Gothic (Steve Jackaman, Red Rooster) and Railroad Gothic Pro (2017, Steve Jackaman).
• Railroad Gothic (Linotype).
• FB Titling Gothic (2005, David Berlow). According to Font Bureau, Titling Gothic was inspired by Railroad Gothic.
• Railroad Gothic CC (2020, Owen Earl).

AtMahogany Script

This script started out in 1958 as Intertype's reaction to ATF's successful script typeface Murray Hill. AtMahogany Script, or simply Mahogany Script was a Compugrapghic / Agfa typeface. Today, it is sold by Monotype Imaging. Solo called it Hallmark Script, while Linotype and Bitstream call it Monterey. Copies in the Castcraft collection include OPTI Mahogany Script and OPTI Mountain Script. [Google] [More]  ⦿

at-sign
[Karl-Erik Tallmo]

An article from P22 on the at-sign, written by Karl-Erik Tallmo. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ATypI

ATypI, Association Typographique Internationale, is the type community's premier organization. Founded in 1957 by Charles Peignot. Its goals are

• to promote contemporary digital fonts
• to encourage outstanding typography and typographic design
• to campaign for the protection of typeface designs
• to offer an arbitration service for disputes between members
• to influence legislators around the world
• to run conferences
• to publish journals, newsletters and other publications

Past presidents:

• Charles Peignot, 1957-1968.
• John Dreyfus, 1968-1973.
• Tage Bolander, 1973-1977.
• Martin Fehle, 1977-1992.
• Ernst-Erich Marhencke, 1992-1995.
• Mark Batty, 1995-2004.
• Jean François Porchez, 2004-2007.
• John D. Berry, 2007-2013.
• José Scaglione, 2013-2017.
• Gerry Leonidas, 2017-2020.
• Carolina Laudon, 2020-2023.

ATypI 2001 Country delegate report

Porchez's 2001 report on the type situation in France in 2001. Report for 2000. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ATypI 2006 Type Tech presentations

ATypI 2006 Type Tech presentations in PDF format by Thomas Phinney (Adobe) and some others. More specifically:

• Character Set Journeys. Thomas Phinney about the evolution of character sets and how they keep on expanding.
• CSS-based font menus, Windows Presentation Foundation, and OpenType 1.5. By Thomas Phinney.
• Advanced MM theory. By Thomas Phinney.
• Is it okay to lie? (in a font). By Thomas Phinney.
• Intro to SING technology. As Thomas Phinney puts it: SING is Adobe's "next big font thing," a technology for dynamically extending fonts on the fly. This PDF file is largely a copy of a 2004 presentation by Jim DeLaHunt, also at Adobe.
• Sweeping overview of OpenType support and limitations in applications and operating systems. Talk by Jürgen Willrodt (URW).
• OpenType feature files. Christopher Slye (Adobe) talks about OpenType feature files.
• Adventures in Class Kerning. By Miguel Sousa (Adobe).

ATypI: Association Typographique Internationale

The Association Typographique Internationale was created by Charles Peignot. It is interested in the development and protection of fonts, organizes an annual meeting on typography, and has a large international membership. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ATypI membership list

This list of members comes with addresses and other data. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Aura Seltzer
[Type Connection]

[More]  ⦿

Aurora Grotesk

The original Aurora Grotesk dates back to the Johannes Wagner Foundry (1912), but Paul Barnes points out that the same typeface appears under multiple names in the Handbuch der Schriftarten, 1926:

• Akzidenz-Grotesk, Breite fette, Haas'sche Schriftgießerei
• Aurora Grotesk, C.E. Weber (12 styles; scan by Ulrich Stiehl)
• Edel-Grotesk, Fette, Ludwig Wagner
• Favorit-Grotesk, Otto Weisert
• Klassische Grotesk, Breite fette, J. D. Trennert&Sohn
• Koloß, Breite, J. John Söhne, Hamburg
• Krupp-Hallo, Wagner&Schmidt and then Ludwig&Mayer
• Progreß-Grotesk, C. E. Weber
• Siegfried-Grotesk, D. Stempel
• Venus-Grotesk, Breite fette, Bauersche Gießerei

On the digital side, in chronological order:

• Swiss 939, aka AuroraBT Bold Condensed and AuroraBT Roman Condensed (between 1990 and 1999): two narrow Aurora styles by Bitstream (see also Uli Stiehl's charts). Now called Aurora Condensed and Aurora Bold Condensed). In the old days, we also had News 706 at Bitstream.
• Reservoir Grunge (1999: a free font by Frank E. Bailey, South Africa).
• Annonce (2006, Canada Type) by Hans van Maanen: a revival of the original Aurora Grotesk from Johannes Wagner Foundry (1912).
• Dada Grotesk (2007, Optimo) by Alexandre Dimos and Gaël Étienne (deValence).
• Castcraft has Aurora Bold Condensed (like ), Aurora Condensed (like Inserat Grotesk), Aurora Grotesk No8 (like Aurora Condensed and Wotan BoldCond), Aurora Grotesk No9 (like Aurora Condensed and Wotan XBoldCond).

Dead link by the Typophiles on this subject. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Autologic Information International

Thousand Oaks, CA-based developer of electronic prepress technologies. Active in the newspaper industry. Bought by Agfa on October 4, 2001. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Avant Garde: John Berry

John Berry muses about the quintessential seventies font, Avant Garde (Herb Lubalin) and the downfall of multiple master technology. Alex White explains its development, and how sublime it is when used as intended---all caps with lots of ligatures, crossing legs, and so forth. It was created for the cover of Avant Garde Magazine by Herb Lubalin and his group. This racy magazine (Jan 1968-mid 1971) was edited by Ralph Ginzburg (Eros). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Avil

Inland Type Foundry font made in 1904. With its tall ascenders and small x-height, and irregular edges, it is similar to Pabst Old Style (1902, Goudy). Avil was in the 1911 ATF catalog, but not in the 1923 ATF catalog. People suspect that ATF went with Pabst Old Style, and chose not to continue Avil. For a full specimen, see Sheperd in Dan X. Solo's Rustic and Rough-Hewn Alphabets: 100 Complete Fonts by Dan X. Solo (1991, Dover).

Mac McGrew: Advil was advertised by Inland Type Foundry in 1904 as "a new typeface, most excellent for fine booklet and catalog work." It follows a popular style of the day, with tall ascenders, small x-height, and irregular edges. It is very similar to Pabst Oldstyle (q.v.), but narrower. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ballfont Project

Tom White's solution to a class project at MIT assigned by John Maeda. Just a few parameters, taken from sample scribbles suffice to describe the entire typeface. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Baskerville

Baskerville is a transitional typeface originally designed by English type designer John Baskerville, circa 1754. Baskerville Old Face was designed by Isaac Moore in 1768. Various versions of these two type families are sold throughout the world. Some discussion here. Here is a quick overview:

• Baskerville Original Pro (or Baskerville 10 and 120 Pro) by Frantisek Storm (2010). Based on original documents and developed and extended with great care.
• ITC New Baskerville. George Jones designed this version of Baskerville for Linotype-Hell in 1930. The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) licensed it in 1982. At Electronic Font Foundry. Bitstream's version is called NewBaskervilleITCbyBT.
• BaskervilleMT (1990): Monotype Baskerville (Agfa). Note: The 1989 versions floating around are called MBaskerville. Monotype Baskerville eText was published in 2013 by Linotype.
• BaskervilleEF is the Elsner&Flake Baskerville. See also Visual Graphics Corporation.
• Berthold Baskerville (1992, Günter Gerhard Lange), aka BaskervilleBQ. Adobe sells BaskervilleBE (1992). A version of this used to be at BSK (Babylon Schrift Kontor).
• Baskerville AI (URW).
• JohnBaskerville: The great 48-weight family made by Frantisek Storm in 2000 at Storm Type.
• BaskervilleBT: Bitstream's version, 1990. Bitstream also offers Baskerville No.2BT.
• URW Baskerville (1994), an extensive family sold by URW. They also have their own collection of NewBaskervilleItc, as well as BaskervilleOldFace.
• Mrs Eaves (1996): Zuzana Licko's revival of Baskerville, published by Emigre in 1996. Comments here.
• Baskerville 1757 is a family published by Timberwolf Type. It was drawn by Lars Bergquist and is directly based on Baskerville's 1757 edition of Virgil. It comes with a wonderful Baskerville Caps font.
• Baskerville Classico is a font drawn by Franko Luin (1995, of Omnibus) and available from Linotype.
• FrysBaskervilleBT is Bitstream's version of Baskerville Old Face, and they attribute it to Edmund Fry and Isaac Moore.
• URW Baskerville Old Face (Stephenson Blake, vendor: URW).
• BaskervilleOldFaceEF by Elsner&Flake.
• Among the derived fonts, we cite these sources: BaskervilleSSi is Southern Software's family. Image Club Graphics has a set of NewBaskerville fonts. Mannesmann-Scangraphic has ShNewBaskervilITC and ShBaskervilleNr1 (1991). EFF Baskerville is available at BuyFonts.Com. Digital Typeface Corporation has BaskervilleHandcut, a 4-weight family (1991). Primafont offers Nebenan and Nuabaum (which are ITCNewBaskerville versions) and Basel. SWFTE offers Baskerton. Softmaker has a range of Baskerville fonts. Qualitype has a QTBasker family. BP Graphics has a Baskerville family.

Baskerville posters by Andrew Henderson (2010), Sara Lee (2010), Edna Marcela Pena Fajardo (2011), and Gracemarie Louis (2013).

View over 80 Baskerville typefaces. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Baskerville: metal type

Typophiles with opinions on metal versions of Baskerville, giving a nod to Monotype Baskeville, and voicing concern that the digital Baskervilles are too anemic. Wikipedia: Interest in Baskerville seems to have revived in the early 20th century, with Bruce Rogers among others taking an interest in him. [...] Not surprisingly, therefore, the type was revived for mechanical composition in the 20th century. ATF was first, followed by English Monotype in 1923, and thereafter other manufacturers (notably Linotype) followed suit. Monotype Baskerville (Series 169), perhaps the best-known of these revivals was a commercially successful type despite (or perhaps because) it was heavily "cleaned up" by the Monotype drawing office Monotype's was based on a font designed for use at a fairly large size in an edition of Terence's comedies published in 1772. ATF and Linotype used strikes from genuine punches of a smaller size type; it is not therefore surprising that different versions of Baskerville look noticeably different: they are (or may) still be 'authentic'.

Mac McGrew's discussion, mainly regarding metal Baskervilles in America: There are two distinct varieties of Baskerville in America. Both based on the types of John Baskerville, distinguished eighteenth-century English printer and typefounder, who was noted for his quest for perfection. His types are based on Caslon and other popular typefaces of the day, but are more precise and have a little more contrast, with stress more nearly vertical, making them the first transitional designs between oldstyles typified by Caslon and moderns typified by Bodoni. A consistently noticeable characteristic is the lowercase g, with its lower loop not completely closed. All versions have rather long ascenders, and present an appearance of dignity and refinement.

On ATF's Baskerville, he writes: The ATF version, which is called Baskerville Roman in foundry specimens but which most typesetters call American Baskerville, is produced from strikes (unfinished matrices) brought from Stephenson Blake, English typefounders, in 1915. In England it is known as the Fry Foundry version, and is said to have been cast from original matrices cut about 1795 by Isaac Moore as a close copy of Baskerville's own types. Small sizes to 14-point tend to be rather light and narrow, while sizes from 3D-point up have more weight and vigor. Production was discontinued about 1950, perhaps because most specimens didn't show the handsome larger sizes in sufficient detail; it was reinstated in 1957 without the sizes below 18-point. ATF Baskerville Italic was designed in 1915 by Morris F. Benton. It is a handsome typeface in itself, but has little in common with its roman mate other than adjustment to the narrowness of small sizes. It is not made above 18- point, nor-since it was reinstated-below small 18-point. Compare Century Catalogue Italic.

About Linotype Baskerville: Linotype Baskerville, said to be based on original punches which are still in existence, is much like the ATF face, but differs in details of capitals C, Q, W, and lowercase w, y, and &. It was cut in 1926 under the direction of George W. Jones, British typographer. The italic was recut in 1936 under Linotype's program of typographic refinements. Lanston Monotype Baskerville is virtually a duplicate of the English Monotype face, which is based on original letters but is more regularized and has somewhat less contrast between thick and thin strokes than the Fry and Linotype versions. It was cut in 1923 under the direction of Stanley Morison, being derived from the great primer (18-point) size of Baskerville's type, and copied by Lanston in 1931. The Intertype roman typeface is substantially the same as Monotype except for adaptation to mechanical requirements. But while the Monotype italic is considerably narrower than the roman, on Intertype the two typefaces are necessarily the same width.

Finally, McGrew evaluates Monotype Baskerville: Monotype Baskerville Italic has only the swash-like capitals JKNTYZ of the original, while both Linotype and Intertype have replaced these letters with regular characters in standard fonts, but offer a variety of swashes as alternates. Linotype, Monotype, and Intertype each provide their own versions of Baskerville Bold. All are similar, but the Monotype version is slightly heavier over all; this version was designed by Sol Hess, and is claimed to have been adapted from an original heavy typeface created by John Baskerville about 1757 and not generally known. Linotype and Intertype also have bold italics, the former designed by C. H. Griffith in 1939. (Latin Condensed was called "Baskerville" in ATF's 1898 book.) [Google] [More]  ⦿

Beatrice L. Warde

Born in New York in 1900, she died in London in 1969. A typographer, writer, and art historian, she worked for the British Monotype Corporation for most of her life, and was famous for her energy, enthusiasm and speeches. Collaborator of Stanley Morison. She created a typeface called Arrighi. She is famous for The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible (The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography, Cleveland, 1956, and Sylvan Press, London, 1955), which is also reproduced here and here. The text was originally printed in London in 1932, under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon. Here are two passages:

• Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.
• Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of 'doubling' lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

Drawing of her by Eric Gill. Life story.

Beatrice Warde was educated at Barnard College, Columbia, where she studied calligraphy and letterforms. From 1921 until 1925, she was the assistant librarian at American Type Founders. In 1925, she married the book and type designer Frederic Warde, who was Director of Printing at the Princeton University Press. Together, they moved to Europe, where Beatrice worked on The Fleuron: A Journal of Typography (Cambridge, England: At the University Press, and New York: Doubleday Doran, 1923-1930), which was at that time edited by Stanley Morison. As explained above, she is best known for an article she published in the 1926 issue of The Fleuron, written under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon, which traced types mistakenly attributed to Garamond back to Jean Jannon. In 1927, she became editor of The Monotype Recorder in London. Rebecca Davidson of the Princeton University Library wrote in 2004: Beatrice Warde was a believer in the power of the printed word to defend freedom, and she designed and printed her famous manifesto, This Is A Printing Office, in 1932, using Eric Gill's Perpetua typeface. She rejected the avant-garde in typography, believing that classical forms provided a "clearly polished window" through which ideas could be communicated. The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography (1955) is an anthology of her writings. Wood engraved portrait of Warde by Bernard Brussel-Smith (1950). [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Beatrice Warde's The Crystal Goblet

A fantastic essay by Beatrice Warde in Sixteen Essays on Typography, Cleveland, 1956. She compares typography with wine tasting. See also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Beautiful Web Type
[Chad Mazzola]

Stockholm-based Chad Mazzola's selection of best free typefaces. Chad holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Hampshire College and has worked as a designer, product manager, and executive at technology companies in both the US and Sweden. His recommendations:

• Serif typefaces: Alegreya, Crimson Pro, IBM Plex Serif, Inria Serif, Lora, Source Serif Pro, Vollkorn, Zilla Slab.
• Sans typefaces: Alegreya Sans, Archivo Black, Archivo, Cooper Hewitt, FiraGO, Fivo Sans, iA Writer Quattro, IBM Plex Sans Condensed, IBM Plex Sans, Inria Sans, Inter, Jost, Libre Franklin, Manrope, Poppins, Source Sans Pro, Space grotesk, Work Sans.
• Display typefaces: BioRhyme Expanded, BioRhyme, Fivo Sans Modern, Fraunces, Le Murmure, Messapia, Oswald, Playfair Display, Rakkas.
• Monospaced typefaces: Fira Code, IBM Plex Mono, Source Code Pro, Space Mono.

Beginners guides to type design: Justin Penner
[Justin Penner]

A list of beginner's guide to type design resources compiled by Justin Penner:

• Design with FontForge. A great introduction to type design.
• Glyphs Tutorials.
• Ohno Type School.

BEMANI fonts

A comparison of some fonts by Miffies. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ben Archer
[100types]

[More]  ⦿

Ben Archer
[Gill Sans: Critique by Ben Archer]

[More]  ⦿

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, Typefounder (1925, Douglas C. McMurtie, New York) describes Benjamin Franklin as typefounder. McGrew writes about Franklin: Prior to 1722 English typefounding was at a low ebb, and most printers in that country used Dutch types. But in that year William Caslon completed the first sizes of his new style, which quickly gained dominance over the Dutch types. This new English style was also extensively exported to other countries, including the American Colonies, where it was popular before the Revolution. In fact, the Declaration of Independence of the new United States was first printed in Caslon's types. Benjamin Franklin met Caslon in London, admired and recommended his types, and used them extensively in his printshop. F. Kerdijk penned the Dutch book Benjamin Franklin. Drukker - Postmeester - Uitvinder en Gezant, 1706-1790 (1956, Drukkerij Trio, 's-Gravenhage), a 16-page booklet that further explains Franklin's multidimensional persona. Further books on Franklin's sideline include Typophiles Chapbook: B. Franklin, 1706-1790. Franklin's interests in typography and as a printer have caused a number of typefaces to be named after him, such as the famous Franklin Gothic, but also Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin Condensed and Ben Franklin Open (metal types at Keystone Type Foundry. 1919), Franklin's Caslon (2006, P22), Poor Richard RR (named after Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard Almanack"), Poor Richard (1994, Projective Solutions: a free font), and Benjamin Franklin Antique (free font by Dieter Steffmann). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Best of 2013 lists

Besides my own best-of-2013 list in typeface design, one can consult the lists by Christoph Koeberlin (who includes his own FF Mark in his list), and Sean Mitchell's list (editor of Type release). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bethany Heck
[The Font Review Journal]

[More]  ⦿

Bibliograhy on type, fonts and postscript

Rather sloppily compiled by Luc Devroye. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bibliography on typographic fonts

Nelson Beebe's computer science bibliography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bigital.org

A type activity web site of all Spanish-speaking typographers. Not updated since 2001. Located in Buenos Aires. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bill Dawson

Bill Dawson (XK9, Los Angeles) is a graphic designer who has interesting things to say about type--his Typethos series of type quotes is a must-read.

At [T-26], he designed Megahertz (1998, techno family) and Leger (monoline minimalist sans family). Klingspor link. Behance link. XK9 link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Bill Troop and quality of type

Bill Troop on the sad quality of modern type. Text posted on Typographica, February 25, 2003. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bitmap, PostScript, and TrueType Fonts Compared

Comparison at Apple. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bjoern Karnebogen

Author of the (German) thesis Type and Image (2003). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bob Caruthers: Type 1

A one-page introduction to type design. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bob Giampietro

An article about Koch's Neuland from the perspective of black Americans. [Google] [More]  ⦿

bobASSOCIATES Design Consultants

Design studio. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bodoni (Dave Farey)

Dave Farey's great essay on the history and implementations of Bodoni. All Bodoni typefaces published today have genetic material from Giambattista Bodoni's original. Below are various implementations:

• ATF/Monotype Bodoni, originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1907, and used by Monotype in the 1930s. Linotype's version. Adobe's version. Ultra weights sold by URW as Bodoni No 2. Libre Bodoni (2014, a free font family by Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida) is based on Benton's Bodoni.
• Bodoni Modern (R.H. Middleton, 1930s, for the American Ludlow foundry). See his 1936 Bodoni Campanile, sold by Bitstream as Modern 735. URW offers Black and Stencil weights.
• Bauer Bodoni (Heinrich Jost, 1926). Dave Farey argues for its delicacy but still calls it a bastard. Neufville has the original design, with Linotype, Bitstream, Adobe and URW offering derivatives.
• Berthold Bodoni Antiqua (1935), a descendant of ATF Bodoni, resurrected in the 1970s by Günter Gerhard Lange. This was continued by Karl Gerstner in the 1980s and is available as IBM Bodoni from URW. See also the URW version of Bodoni Antiqua.
• Berthold Bodoni Old Face was designed in 1983 by Günter Gerhard Lange
• WTC Our Bodoni designed by Massimo Vignelli in 1989 for the World Typeface Corporation. For display only. Related to the ATF version.
• FF Bodoni Classic (FontShop, 1994). Designed in a two-year period by Gerd Wiescher, this is the first Bodoni version that tried to stick closely to Bodoni's original drawings. Farey complains that the italics are not tilted enough though. Check also Wiescher's FF Bodoni Classic Handdrawn (1997).
• ITC Bodoni is another faithful interpretation developed by Sumner Stone, Holly Goldsmith and Jim Parkinson. These come in 6, 12 and 72 point ranges and form an extensive extremely useful family. Versions sold by URW and Linotype.
• Bodoni Old Fashion by URW.
• Bodoni Classico, designed by Franko Luin at Omnibus.
• FB Bodoni: just two digitizations based on Benton's 1933 Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed, by Richard Lipton in 1992. Clearly, for display only.
• URW Bodoni.
• Linotype Gianotten: Created by Antonio Pace in 2000, this typeface is said to go back directly to the Bodoni Museum in Parma.
• Ambroise, Ambroise Firmin (condensed) and Ambroise François (2001, extra condensed), 30 fonts in all, are splendid fonts named after Ambroise Didot by their creator, Jean-François Porchez. Many say that they are closer to Bodoni than to Didot--just look at the question mark, but Porchez based his work on late style Didot's published around 1830.

View various Bodoni Antiqua / Bodoni Old Face typefaces. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bookman
[Alexander Phemister]

Bookman is due to Alexander Phemister (1860) and Chauncey H. Griffith (1936), and is an ATF face. Mac McGrew: Old Style Antique [No. 560] was the typeface on which Bookman was based. It was cast by a number of founders, of which Keystone continued to cast it into this century. Also see Stratford. Other pre-digital foundries that did Bookman include Ludlow, Linotype and Miller&Richard. ITC Bookman was designed in 1975 by Ed Benguiat. Other digitizations include Book PS (Softmaker), Bookface, Bookman BT (Bitstream), Revival 711 (Bitstream), BM (Itek), Brooklyn (Corel), and Antique Old Style. See also Bookman-like typefaces.

Some images below by Alex Delgado. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bram de Does

Bram de Does was a type designer born in Amsterdam in 1934. He died on December 28, 2015. At Enschedé in Haarlem, which he joined in 1958, and for which he worked most of his life, he designed Trinité (1978-1981) and Lexicon (1990-1991). Enschedé write-up. Author of Kaba Ornament Deel I - Vorm (De Spectatorpers, 2002), De Kaba Ornament in Vignettes Borders and Patterns (2006, De Buitenkant) and Kaba Structuren (De Buitenkant), which present the Kaba ornaments that de Does designed at enschedé in 1987 just before its closure in 1990.

Trinité won him the prestigious H.N. Werkman Prize in 1991. Mathieu Lommen and John A. Lane published Bram de Does Boektypograaf & Letterontwerper Book Typographer & Type Designer (Amsterdam, 2003). Mathieu Lommen published Bram de Does: letterontwerper & typograaf / typographer & type designer in 2003 at De Buitenkant.

In 2003, a 53 minute Dutch documentary was made: Systematisch Slordig: Bram de Does - Letterontwerper&Typograaf (Coraline Korevaar/Otto de Fijter, Woudrichem). That video is also at Vimeo and here. A collection of many of his drawings is at the University of Amsterdam. Part of this collection (e.g., the development of Lexicon) has been scanned in and placed on the web. Details on his fonts:

• Lexicon is discussed in the book by Bram de Does and Mathieu Lommen, Letterproef Lexicon. The Enschedé Font Foundry (1997, Amsterdam). Lexicon was produced by Peter Matthias Noordzij. It was first used for the new edition of the Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal (the Standard Dutch Dictionary, or the Dikke Van Dale as we say in Belgium). For a digital descendant of Lexicon, see Lucas Sharp and Connor Davenport's Eros (2017).
• Trinité according to Wikipedia: Trinité was originally designed for phototypesetting machines. In 1978, the printing office Joh. Enschedé replaced their phototypesetting machines (with Autologic machines), for which they wanted to adapt Jan van Krimpen's typeface Romanée. The company consulted with De Does, who was against it. He feared that Romanée would lose its character in the translation from metal movable type to phototype, specifically because Romanée was not a single font but several versions for each pointsize, which would not be possible to preserve in phototype. 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. [...] Trinité was originally published as an Autologic typeface in 1982. However, at the end of that decade, when De Does had already left the firm, Enschedé once again switched typesetting machines (this time the digital Linotronic system) and only kept the old one because of Trinité. Being an important business asset for the firm, they commissioned De Does and Peter Matthias Noordzij (the designer of PMN Caecilia) to produce digital PostScript fonts of Trinité, using Ikarus M. To distribute the typeface, Noordzij proposed starting a small-scale digital type foundry, The Enschedé Font Foundry (TEFF), on which they released Trinité in 1992.

Brian Hoff
[The Design Cubicle]

[More]  ⦿

Brian Maloney
[The Type Club of Toronto]

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Bruno Maag
[The Helvetica Killer]

[More]  ⦿

Cabrillo: Basic Design Concepts

Looks like course notes on typography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Caecilia and TheSerif

Jan Middendorp explains the similarities between Matthias Noordzij's Caecilia and Lucas DeGroot's TheSerif by tracing them back to Gerrit Noordzij's teaching. No plagiarism here, he says: Caecilia is a text font, and TheSerif is for shorter texts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Call it what it is
[John Downer]

Great article by John Downer on the various categories of historical revivals. He classifies them as follows:

• "Revivals/Recuttings/Reclamations": Closely based on historical models (metal type, hand-cut punches, etc.) for commercial or noncommercial purposes, with the right amount of historic preservation and sensitivity to the virtues of the original being kept in focus-all with a solid grounding in type scholarship behind the effort, too.
• "Anthologies/Surveys/Remixes": Closely based on characters from various fonts all cut by one person, or cut by various hands, all working in one particular style or genre-like a medley or an overview done more for the sake of providing a "sampling" than for the sake of totally replicating any one single cut of type.
• "Knockoffs/Clones/Counterfeit": Closely based on commercial successes (of any medium) to belatedly muscle in on part of an unsaturated market, often by being little more than a cheap imitation of what has already been deemed by experts as a legitimate revival. "Me Too" fonts, or "Copy Cat" fonts, as they are called, tend to focus on opportunism rather than on originality. These don't rate as revivals because they don't revive.
• "Reconsiderations/Reevaluations/ Reinterpretations": Loosely based on artistic successes (of any medium) as a kind of laboratory exercise, often without much concern for their immediate or eventual commercial viability.
• "Homages/Tributes/Paeans": Loosely based on historical styles and/or specific models, usually with admiration and respect for the obvious merits of the antecedents-but with more artistic freedom to deviate from the originals and to add personal touches; taking liberties normally not taken with straight revivals.
• "Encores/Sequels/Reprises": Loosely based on commercial successes (of any medium) as a means of further exploring, or further exploiting, an established genre; milking the Cash Cow one more time.
• "Extensions/Spinoffs/Variations": Loosely based on artistic or commercial successes (of any medium) for only rarely more than minor advancements in a tried, popular, accepted style; akin to previous category.
• "Caricatures/Parodies/Burlesques": Loosely based on prominent features of the model, often with humor or satire as the primary objective, but quite often also with humor or satire as an unexpected effect.

Cameron Moll
[Ampersand]

[More]  ⦿

Captioning

Joe Clark from Toronto on the sad state of online captioning typography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Carl Crossgrove
[OthelloMT]

[More]  ⦿

Carolina de Bartolo
[101 Editions]

[MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Carolyn Brown
[Sofia Open Content Initiative]

[More]  ⦿

Caslon analytics profile

Font link page. Also an intro to typography in general. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Caslon: Mac McGrew's take

Mac McGrew describes the situation of Caslon in the era of metal type. All text below is quoted. Caslon is "the oldest living typeface," having survived in almost exactly its original form since every character was hand-cut by William Caslon more than 250 years ago. Virtually the same design is still available, along with a myriad of imitations, derivatives, and attempts at improvement. Altogether, they form a number of families, for there is little or no compatibility between many typefaces which now bear the name Caslon. In fact, Caslon is perhaps the hardest set of types to group into reasonable categories; therefore some of the following classifications are arbitrary.

• The original Caslon. Prior to 1722 English typefounding was at a low ebb. and most printers in that country used Dutch types. But in that year William Caslon completed the first sizes of his new style, which quickly gained dominance over the Dutch types. This new English style was also extensively exported to other countries, including the American Colonies, where it was popular before the Revolution. In fact, the Declaration of Independence of the new United States was first printed in Caslon's types. Benjamin Franklin met Caslon in London, admired and recommended his types, and used them extensively in his printshop. Caslon's types have gone through several periods of decline and revival. In America they died out by about 1800, and had little or no further use for nearly sixty years. In 1858, Laurence Johnson, a prominent Philadelphia typefounder, visited London and arranged with the successors to William Caslon to duplicate the Caslon types. There are several accounts of how this was done; some say Johnson had fonts specially cast, from which he made electrotype matrices. Another account says he had strikes--unfinished matrices--made from the original punches, while a third account says he obtained the original matrices. The latter account is most unlikely, but the other two possibilities are interestingly credible. Many of the mats still available at ATF, successors to Johnson, are electrotypes-but then, mats wear out anyway, and are commonly replaced by electrotyping existing virgin cast type when patterns or punches are not available. If strikes were finished in this country-the usual process of accurately fitting them for width and position on the type body--this would allow for the fact that some sizes, especially in the 14- to 24-point range, are more loosely fitted here than in England. Otherwise there is virtually no difference between the American and English versions, except for later additions such as dollar mark and various swash letters--the latter are discussed later. Johnson simply called the typeface Old Style, as family names were a later development. When Johnson's foundry merged with MacKellar Smiths&Jordan foundry, the typeface was designated Original Old Style, to distinguish it from other typefaces in the same category. MS&J was part of the great merger that formed ATF in 1892, and the typeface became Old Style No. 71. When ATF's first specimen book was being prepared in 1897, the advertising manager. Henry Lewis Bullen, renamed the series Caslon Old Style. Later "No. 471" was added, the "4" designating typefaces obtained from MS&J. Meanwhile, a prominent New York printer, Walter Gilliss, had promoted the adoption of Caslon for setting Vogue magazine, a fashion and art journal which was started in 1892, and the typeface quickly returned to popularity. A. D. Farmer&Son copied the typeface under the name Knickerbocker Old Style. But this was the time when standard alignment was being heavily pro- moted, necessitating the shortening of descenders. Inland Type Foundry, St. Louis, advertised its own version of Caslon Old Style in 1901, with the claim. "We have obtained the sole right from the originating house to manufacture this series in the United States. Inland is the only type foundry which casts this typeface on standard line. ..." This meant that they had considerably shortened the descending letters; they had also redesigned the italic extensively. ATF countered with CaslonNo. 540, with similarly shortened descenders but essentially the original roman and italic designs otherwise. Several other foundries, including BB&S, Hansen, and Keystone, produced similar Caslons. One of the most noticeable features of Caslon is its lack of uniformity from one size to another. This is due to the fact that all the original characters were cut by hand, before the invention of precise mechanical systems for enlarging and reducing drawings. In Caslon 540, each size is the equivalent of the next larger size of 471, including some obsolete odd sizes. Thus 14-point 540 is equivalent to 18-point 471,18 to 22, 20 to 24, etc. The difference is primarily in the descenders, very unattractively shortened in some sizes of 540; lining figures replace the hanging style, and a few other slight changes have been made. The additional large sizes are an attractive generalized design. To overcome objections to the wide fitting of some sizes of Caslon Oldstyle No. 471, ATF brought out Caslon Oldstyle No. 472 in 1932; the design is identical but it is fitted more closely. It is made only in 18-, 22- and 24-point sizes. In the specimens shown here, notice the small caps shown with Caslon OldstyleNo. 471, for which they are made up to 36-point-one of the very few typefaces to include such letters above 14- or 18-point. Most of these appear to be cut separately, rather than being regular caps of a smaller size. Long-s characters and combinations have also been made for Caslon Oldstyle roman and italic by ATF and Monotype, and for Caslon No. 540 roman by ATF; they are called Quaint Characters.
• Swash versions of the Caslon Oldstyle Italic capitals J, Q, T, and Y, also lowercase h with the final stroke turned inward, were the only forms shown in Caslon's original specimen sheet, although other similar swash letters were made for Dutch types at least a century earlier. Later, plain versions of these letters were added, and both forms are included in some fonts. About 1920, Thomas M. Cleland designed a dozen swash letters to be used with Caslon Oldstyle Italic No. 471, and a dozen more were designed in 1923 for Curtis Publishing Company, perhaps by another designer. These were cast in regular molds, with some letters having long, delicate kerns. By 1927 most of these letters, plus a few others, were being made for Caslon Italic No. 540. These were cast with mortises where necessary, greatly reducing the problem of breakage. Thereafter the larger sizes of Caslon No. 471 Italic were also adapted to mortise molds. Lowercase swash letters e, k, v, w, andz are part of the swash font for both 471 and 540 italics. Vowels are also cast on smaller bodies to fit within the mortises. Compare Scotch Open Shaded Italic. About 1927 an ATF specimen said, "The five largest sizes of CaslonItalic No. 540 are the equivalent of 60-, 72-, 84-, 96-, and 120-point Caslon Oldstyle Italic No. 471. Some of the Swash Capitals are cast on these bodies and long descenders cast on these larger bodies will be ready shortly, which will give the full effect of the popular No.4 71 Italic." No evidence has been found that this was ever completed. In the specimen of Caslon Oldstyle Italic No. 471 Swash shown here, these characters are shown on the first line; these are made in all sizes of the face. Caslon Italic No. 540 includes-only in sizes from 36-point up-many of these letters plus the I and U shown separately; fullface letters in this series are cast on the next larger body and thus are identical to 471. Incidentally. the swash J in these fonts is identical when inverted to the pound sterling mark furnished with English fonts. Ludlow True-Cut Caslon Italic also includes many of the 471 swash letters. Monotype Caslon Old Style Italic No. 3371 includes some of the same, plus the W shown separately. Monotype Caslon Old Style Italic No. 4371, which was copied from Stephenson Blake's Caslon Old Face in the 42- to 72-point sizes, has a different set of swash letters as shown on the latter part of the second line. Linotype Caslon Old Face Italic has a similar set of swash letters, only some of which are shown in the specimen. Linotype Caslon Italic (not Old Face) has no swash letters but the otherwise identical Intertype typeface does, as shown, including the peculiarly reversed T, which was later corrected. Also note the swash letters shown with some following Caslon italics. Caslon Italic Specials are swash letters of a completely different sort, designed by Carl S. Junge in 1924 for BB&S, for use with that foundry's Caslon Italic and various similar typefaces.
• Monotype produced an adaptation of Caslon to its mechanical restrictions as early as 1903, when Sol Hess drew English Caslon Old Style No. 37 at the request of the Gilliss Press in Boston. (Two years later Monotype adopted a new set of matrix and other mechanical improvements which required redesigning nearly all its typefaces.) Display sizes of this typeface were also drawn by Hess, presumably adapted from the original English face, as the italic has several swash letters similar to the English version. Otherwise display sizes of this roman and italic are very similar to Inland Type Foundry's short-descender adaptation of the original Caslon. On Linotype and Intertype. Caslon No.4 is essentially the same. Monotype also has Inland Caslon Old Style No. 137, presumably adapted from the Inland typeface mentioned above, but the italic seems identical to that of No. 37. Linotype has a copy of Caslon No. 137 under that name. About 1915 Monotype cut yet another version of Caslon Old Style-No. 337, designated "MacKellar Caslon" in some early literature because it is closer to the original typeface associated with that foundry. Display sizes are virtually an exact copy of No. 471. Composition sizes are well adapted, though necessarily modified to fit the standard arrangement; they are made with short descenders on standard alignment, but were the first Monotype typeface with alternate long descenders. Oddly, all three Monotype Caslons---37, 137, and 337---are the same set width---letter for letter---in all keyboard sizes made, which means that any given character is precisely the same width from one typeface to another in any composition size. In addition, 12-point No. 337, which with long descenders must be cast on 13- or 14-point body, is essentiallythe same size and width as 14-point of the same face. Sizes of this typeface above 36-point were later copied from Stephenson Blake's Caslon Old Face and called Caslon Old Style No. 437, as previously noted. Linotype and Intertype have Caslon and Italic, similar to Caslon No. 540 and cut about 1903; long descenders are available in place of the regular short descenders, making a fair approximation of Caslon Oldstyle No. 471; this Caslon Italic in 18- to 30-point sizes is more regularized as shown, similar to Caslon Light Italic. Linotype also has Caslon No.2, a copy of Monotype Caslon No. 37, also with alternate long descenders; and the previously mentioned Caslon No. 137, cut in 1936. For greatest authenticity, Linotype went back to the English original in 1923 for its Caslon Old Face; the roman is almost indistinguishable, but the italic is necessarily modified considerably. Most smaller sizes have both long and short alternate descenders avail- able. Intertype offers the same face, roman only, in 18- to 30-point. Ludlow's True-Cut Caslon and Italic, cut in 1922 and 1928 respectively, are close copies of Caslon Oldstyle No. 471 and Italic.
• Several attempts have been made to regularize Caslon and improve its so-called faults, but these have generally lost much of the character of the face. and have seldom achieved widespread use. They include
  • Recut Caslon (Inland 1907).
  • Caslon Lightface (Keystone 1910-12).
  • Clearface Caslon (Robert Wiebking for Western 1913), etc., all with italics and some with condensed versions; Caslon Lightface Italic is non-kerning.
  • New Caslon, introduced in 1905 by Inland, was the most successful of these attempts. In addition to eliminating irregularities, the aim of this typeface was to strengthen the design so that under modern printing conditions it would more closely resemble the effect of the original Caslon when printed heavily on dampened rough paper, as was commonly done in the eighteenth century. The italic followed in 1906. In 1919 ATF (successor to Inland) reversed the descender-shortening trend with the design by Morris Benton of long descenders, oldstyle figures, and italic swash characters as American Caslon; otherwise this typeface and New Caslon are identical. New Caslon was adapted to Linotype and Intertype as Caslon No.3, which some users call Caslon Bold, although it was not intended to be a bold face. However, in 18-point and larger, Caslon No.3 and Italic are copies of Caslon Bold rather than New Caslon.
  • Condensed Caslon is a modification of New Caslon, by Inland in 1907; it was inherited by ATF and copied by Monotype, both of which gave it the same series number (the only such incidence); printers often but incorrectly call it Caslon Bold Condensed.
  • Caslon Extra Condensed is also derived from New Caslon, sometime between 1912 and 1917.
  • Caslon Catalog, with heavied hairlines, was designed by Robert Wiebking for his Advance Type Foundry in 1913 under the name of Caslon Antique (not to be confused with a later use of this name); it was also shown by Laclede, and was renamed when BB&S acquired it.
  • Caslon Medium and Italic, as the name implies, are somewhat heavier versions, offered by BB&S as Modern Caslon and Italic about 1924---the roman at least was shown by Western Type Foundry in the mid-teens. However, the italic appears to be identical to Ludlow's Caslon Light Italic, also credited to Wiebking but advertised as early as 1922; it was the first typeface cut for Ludlow's development of italic matrices which permitted kerning designs without the fragility of the kerns on single types. Strangely, though, Ludlow Caslon Light (roman) matches Caslon Clearface.
  • The newest Caslon was designed in 1965, when ATF commissioned a "beefed up" version of Caslon No. 540, by Frank Bartuska. The result was Caslon No. 641, an arbitrary number. It is a handsome face, reflecting the best of 540, but without the latter's variations from one size to another. It also includes all the ancillary characters of ATF's later creations as shown, including percent and pound marks, a variety of quotation marks, and center dot, hyphen, and dash in two positions to center on caps or lowercase. An italic was started but never completed. This typeface has considerable similarity to Caslon Medium, for which ATF still had mats when the new typeface was commissioned.
• Boldface Caslons have been made by several sources.
  • The most popular Caslon Bold was introduced by Keystone Type Foundry in 1905, followed by Italic in 1906 and Condensed and Extended versions about 1911; this is the version made by ATF and in regular widths by Monotype. Monotype keyboard sizes (including large composition to 18-point) are modified considerably to fit standard arrangements, but the only apparent difference in display sizes is the redrawn T and g shown separately in the specimen alphabet and the addition of ligatures and diphthongs on Linotype and Intertype.
  • Caslon No.3 matches ATF Caslon Bold from 18-point up, although smaller sizes match New Caslon.
  • Hansen's Caslon Fullface and Caslon Fullface Condensed were close copies of Caslon Bold and Caslon Bold Condensed, differing most apparently in the characters shown (A Gas, condensed AG), but Hansen's Caslon Fullface Italic matches New Caslon Italic.
  • A somewhat different Caslon Bold series is made by Ludlow.
  • A Caslon Black series by BB&S, from Western Type Foundry in the mid-teens.
  • Caslon Adbold, originating with Keystone in 1913, is characterized by heavier strokes throughout; Extended and Extra Condensed versions followed in 1915 to 1917; all were patented and presumably designed by R. F. Burfeind.
  • Heavy Caslon was issued by Inland in 1906 or earlier; Ludlow copied it as Caslon Old Face Heavy in 1925 and Intertype in 1937. Ludlow has a companion italic, while Intertype's italic is a sloped roman design. See Caslon Shaded.
• Caslon Openface was originated by BB&S in 1915, where it was first called College Oldstyle. It started out as a reproduction of a delicate 18th-century French typeface known as Le Moreau le Jeune, by the foundry of G. Peignot&Son, but in the American version some strokes are heavier. In a later ad, BB&S said, "Placing it in the Caslon group of types is taking a liberty, but it assuredly 'belongs.' " Actually it has somewhat more affinity for the Cochin types.
• Caslon Shaded was adapted by ATF from Heavy Caslon in 1917, by W. F. Capitaine. Caslon Shadow Title was adapted from Caslon Bold by Monotype about 1928. Compare Cameo, Cochin Open, Gravure, Narciss.
• Caslons in name only.
  • Caslon Antique and Italic were designed by Berne Nadall and brought out by BB&S in 1896-98 as Fifteenth Century (XV Century in one early announcement) and Italic. Although they aren't really representative of types of that time, being a poor copy of a crude early typeface cut about 1475 in Venice, they have become popular for the simulation of supposedly quaint American types of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Disregarding the usual practice of increasing the proportionate width of a typeface as the size decreases, Caslon Antique maintains uniform proportions in all sizes, and thus appears narrow and cramped in small sizes. Caslon Antique is also the original (1913) name of Advance Type Foundry's Caslon Catalog, mentioned earlier, while in the early 1920s Laclede Type Foundry applied that name to "a brand-new, entirely machine-cut typeface of Old Style Antique," a duplicate of the Advance face.
  • Caslon Old Roman is discussed later under its original name, Old Roman.
  • Caslon Text originated with William Caslon in 1734. Inland Type brought out a reproduction of it in 1899 as part of their agreement with the Caslon Type Foundry in England. It later became the property of ATF, and was copied by Linotype. Being handcut originally, it shows the expected varia- tions from one size to another, but some characters show decidedly different forms in some sizes. See Cloister Black and Engravers Old English, which are derived from this face.

Caslon: Wikipedia

Excerpts from the wiki page on Caslon: Caslon refers to a number of serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (1692-1766), and various revivals thereof. Caslon shares the irregularity characteristic of Dutch Baroque types. It is characterized by short ascenders and descenders, bracketed serifs, moderately-high contrast, robust texture, and moderate modulation of stroke. The A has a concave hollow at the apex, the G is without a spur. Caslon's italics have a rhythmic calligraphic stoke. Characters A, V, and W have an acute slant. The lowercase italic p, q, v, w, and z all have a suggestion of a swash. [...] Caslon's earliest design dates to 1722. Caslon is cited as the first original typeface of English origin, but type historians like Stanley Morison and Alfred F. Johnson, a scientist who worked at the British Museum, did point out the close similarity of Caslon's design to the Dutch Fell types cut by Voskens and other type cut by the Dutchman Van Dyck. [...] Nicols writes: "he (Caslon) cut the beautiful fount of English which is used in printing Selden's Works 1726. Nicols describes this character as far superior over comtemporary Dutch founts used in English books at this period. Rowe More does not give any comment on this. Dutch founts were in use by several printers in England at that time. The Oxford University Press used the "Fell-types", character cut by the Dutch typefounder Voskens. The Cambridge University Press had received in January 1698 some 52 series of alphabets from Holland, all cut by Van Dyck. But even before that in 1697 thay used the Text-sized roman and italic of Van Dyck in an edition of Gratulatio Cantabrigiences. Character of Van Dyck and Voskens is found also in: William Harison, Woodstock Park, Tonson, 1706. Although Nicols attributes this character to Caslon, the fount used in Seldens Works is actually cut by Van Dyck. The italic is identical to the Van Dycks Augustijn Cursijf fount in specimen sheets issued in 1681 by the widow Daniel Elzevir. This woman had bought the type foundry of Van Dyck after Van Dyck died. The roman in this book, is a Garamond. This fount is used in the first volume and in the greater part of the second volume, It is found in a specimen sheet of the Amsterdam printer Johannes Kannewet, in accompagny with Van Dyck's Augustijn Cursijf. The only thing known about this Kannewet is that he was a printer, not a typefounder. This specimen-sheet is preserved in the Bagford-collection in the British Museum, and can be dated 1715 or earlier because Bagford died in 1716. There is no reason to suppose anything is added on a later date to this collection. The roman is named: Groote Mediaan Romyn. This fount is also found on a specimen sheet of the widow of Voskens. Therefore it can be assumed to be the work of Voskens. The earliest use of it at Amsterdam is 1684. The earliest use of a roman and italic cut by Caslon can be identified in books printed William Bowyer in 1725, 1726 and 1730. The founts cut by Caslon and his son, were close copies of the Dutch Old typeface cut by Van Dyck. These founts were rather fasionable at that time. The alternative founts they cut for text were a smaller, rather than a condensed letter. The Caslon types were distributed throughout the British Empire, including British North America. Much of the decayed appearance of early American printing is thought to be due to oxidation caused by long exposure to seawater during transport from England to the Americas. Caslon's types were immediately successful and used in many historic documents, including the U.S. Declaration of Independence. After William Caslon I's death, the use of his types diminished, but saw a revival between 1840-1880 as a part of the British Arts and Crafts movement. The Caslon design is still widely used today. For many years a common rule of thumb of printers and typesetters was When in doubt, use Caslon. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Cavalier

A quaint and spindly typeface from VGC, sometimes known as Chevalier or Chivalry. Digital versions, all basically equivalent:

• Cavalier (2012, SoftMaker).
• Stiletto (2006, Ralph M. Unger).
• Adieu (2001, David Bergsland).

Chad Mazzola
[Beautiful Web Type]

[More]  ⦿

Character design standards

Microsoft's page on character design standards. Subpages on Uppercase, Lowercase, Figures, Spaces, Diacritics, Punctuation, Monetary symbols, Math symbols, Symbols. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Charles Bigelow
[Times Roman and Times New Roman]

[More]  ⦿

Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski (b. Andernach, Germany, 1920, d. San Pedro, CA, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. Typefaces styled after Bukowski's work: Bukowski (2014, Ingi Kristján Sigurmarsson), Buk (2017, Jefferson Camargo). Dedicated web site.

Some quotes:

• Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
• For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
• You have to die a few times before you can really live.
• The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
• That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

Cheese or Font

An on-line game of guessing whether given names are cheeses or fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Chris Koelsch

Columbus, OH-based designer of some great animated letters in 2018. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Christian Robertson
[Roboto (or: Google Android Design)]

[More]  ⦿

Christoph Koeberlin
[Typefacts]

[More]  ⦿

Citroën

About the Citroën corporate sans typeface. See also here. Seems like it was designed in 2008 by Serge Cortesi. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Clarendon

The original Clarendon is due to Robert Besley (1845). Robert Bringhurst writes: Clarendon is the name of a whole genus of Victorian typefaces, spawned by a font cut by Benjamin Fox for Robert Besley at the Fann Street Foundry, London, in 1845. These typefaces reflect the hearty, stolid, bland, unstoppable aspects of the British Empire. They lack cultivation, but they also lack menace and guile. They squint and stand their ground, but they do not glare. In other words, they consist of thick strokes melding into thick slab serifs, fat ball terminals, vertical axis, large eye, low contrast and tiny aperture. The original had no italic, as the typeface had nothing of the fluent hand or sculpted nib left in its pedigree.

Mac McGrew adds: Clarendon is a traditional English style of typeface, dating from the 1840s, the name coming from the Clarendon Press at Oxford, or, according to some sources, from Britain's Earl of Clarendon and his interest in that country's Egyptian policies. (Such typefaces were classified as Egyptians, and inspired such later designs as Cairo, Karnak, Memphis, and Stymie.) Early Clarendons were used primarily as titles and display typefaces, for which their strong and sturdy nature was well suited. They have the general structure of romans, but lack the hairlines typical of those typefaces. Being heavier, the traditional Clarendons were often used as boldfaces with romans, before the family idea provided matching boldface designs.

McGrew continues his discussion by pointing out various revivals and typefaces with strong similarities: Similar typefaces were known as Doric or Ionic, before more individualized type names became common; in fact, all three names were sometimes used interchangeably. Most foundries had versions of Clarendon, and sometimes Doric and Ionic, in the nineteenth century, but most of these typefaces were obsolescent by the turn of the century. However, a few were copied by Linotype, Intertype and Monotype, and thus given a renewed lease on life. Clarendon Medium of BB&S was formerly known as Caledonian. ATF had a similar typeface known as Ionic No. 522. Keystone showed Clarendon Condensed in 1890. Clarendon [No. 51 of BB&S was called Winchendon by Hansen, and extended to 48-point. Like many pre-point-system typefaces, some foundries adapted them to point-system standards by casting them on oversize bodies, others on undersize bodies with overhanging descenders. In the later 1950s Stephenson Blake in England revived several of these early Clarendons under the new name of Consort, which became a popular import (and the source of some of our specimens). Consort Bold Condensed is said to be the first Clarendon, of 1845. (Some added members of the Consort family are noted under Popular Imports in the Appendix.) In 1953 a new version of Clarendon was developed by Hermann Eidenbenz for the Haas Type foundry in Switzerland and later acquired by Stempel in Germany. The Haas Clarendon was copied by Linotype in 1966, in light and bold weights, and about the same time Ludlow brought out three weights of essentially the same face. This was created primarily to set the newspaper ads of a large department store, but it was a good addition to the resources of Ludlow. ATF commissioned a modernized rendition of Clarendon from Freeman Craw, and this was brought out in 1955 as Craw Clarendon (q.v.). About 1961 Monotype brought out Clarendon Bold Extended, similar to Craw Clarendon but heavier. Also see Ionic, News with Clarendon, Manila.

Poster by Elizabeth West. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Collegium Graficum
[Alexander Overdiep]

Dutch text about good typography. A nice intro. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Common Windows typefaces
[Nick Shanks]

Nick Shanks shows and compares the main Windows fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Company scorecard

Scorecard (dated February 2004, signed by Luc, to be taken with a grain of salt) for some of the main type companies, Linotype, Agfa/Monotype, Adobe, Fontshop/FontFont, URW, Bitstream, FontBureau. Criteria: (1) respect for designers (defending their rights, mentioning their names prominently in the font and in advertising), (2) honesty in advertising, (3) contributions to the art of typography, (4) web sites.

Cont Ed Typography
[Stan Schwartz]

Educational pages on typography and type design. Some links. Run by Stan Schwartz. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Convention typographique

Jef Tombeur's site on orthotypography (in French). One can buy at this site the comprehensive book by Jean Meron entitled Orthotypographie : recherches bibliographiques (2002), which has a preface by Fernand Baudin. [Google] [More]  ⦿

CoolType

Commercial site specializing in Photoshop tips and links for web page design and fancy font enhancements. Go here to view fancy tricks with fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Copperplate Script Fonts

A page with some copperplate script fonts, as defined by Encyclopaedia Britannica: "formally English round hand, in calligraphy, dominant style among 18th-century writing masters, whose copybooks were splendidly printed from models engraved on copper. The alphabet was fundamentally uncomplicated, but the basic strokes were often concealed in luxuriant flourishing". [Google] [More]  ⦿

Coron's Sources of Fonts

Dead link. Stephan Baitz's informative page about Ancient Scripts and Fonts, including fantasy fonts, alien and sci-fi fonts, Blackletter fonts, uncials, runes, symbolic fonts, Indic simulation fonts, Arabic simulation fonts (such as Caliph) and exotic fonts. Lots of links are provided as well. Fonts are displayed an can be downloaded from an archive. His page looks great too. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Corporate Identity

This useful site lists information about company logos, colors and typefaces. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Coulton Thomas
[Recognizing a Bembo]

[More]  ⦿

Counterspace

Site about typography. Despite the slow loading, worthwhile information on type, including a glossary and a type history timeline. Incredible-flashy design, yet the authors forgot to mention their own names. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Critique of the alphabet

Entertaining, downright funny, critique of the alphabet by Marian Bantjes. [Google] [More]  ⦿

CSA Archive

Clip-art. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Curtis Post

A newspaper typeface published in 1902 by American Type Founders (ATF). Mac McGrew: Curtis Post was produced by ATF in 1902 for the Saturday Evening Post magazine of Curtis Publishing Company, but soon released to printers in general. It is based on Post Oldstyle Roman No.2, a style which previously had been handlettered for headings in the magazine. Like many fonts of the day, it contained several alternate characters and logotypes. Some specimens hyphenate the name as Curtis-Post. Curtis Shaded Italic was cut in 1910; it is uncertain whether this is the same as Post Shaded Italic. Compare the various Post typefaces.

Nick Curtis's Saturday Morning Toast NF (2001) is based on the logotype font of the Saturday Evening Post from the 20s. He writes: Saturday Morning Toast is warm, cuddly and endearing in its quirky charm. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Cyrus Highsmith
[Four parts of a typeface]

[More]  ⦿

Czech Design and Typography (studio experimentalniho design)
[Alois Studnicka]

Filip Blazek writes about typography. His own fonts include Pozorius, Studnicka Antikva and Duboryt. Alois Studnicka (Prague) seems to have designed PozoriusCESample. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Daniel Will-Harris
[Will-Harris House]

[MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Darkmode

Darkmode refers to white type on black background. It is generally understood that for white type on dark printed matter should be bolder (than its black on white counterpart), while white text on a black screen should be thinner as the screen spews white in the reader's direction. Dalton Maag, in its presentation of its Darkmode typeface family writes: There are well-known optical and psychological effects in design which result in text presented white-on-black being perceived as larger and bolder than the same text presented black-on-white. This presents a challenge for consistent visual hierarchy on different backgrounds, especially when designing for emissive displays.

Dalton Maag's Darkmode (2020-2021) is an adaptation of an earlier font by them, Stroudley, which was created for physical signage and wayfinding: Our [Dalton Maag's] aim for Darkmode was to translate Stroudley's fundamental characteristics of accessibility, readability, and legibility to on-screen reading, digital navigation, and electronic signage. Darkmode's open counters, tall x-height, humanist proportions, and clear and distinguishable characters all contribute to a comfortable reading experience, even at low resolutions or small sizes. The Darkmode family consists of eight static weights, ranging from Thin to Black, plus a variable font (VF) file, with both weight and darkmode [on/off] axes.

Additional references include

• A discussion of Darkmode by Nikolay Petroussenko, type designer at Fontfabric.
• A discussion of white-on-black typography at Typedrawers (2021). Some typophiles find the darkmode issue overrated (including Jasper de Waard and Scott-Martin Kosofsky), while others point to tools that may be readily available to automatically embolden or lighten weights (such as the Offset Curve filter in Glyphs (for designers), and CSS code snippets (for users and web site designers)). Peter Constable observes however that the weight axis does not do the exact same thing as Dalton Maag's "Darkmode" axis: weight affects advance widths; "Darkmode" does not. "Darkmode" is like what is often referred to as "grade": small adjustments in stroke weights to compensate for medium or context conditions that affect apparent weight without affecting advance widths.

Dash

About ng you always wanted to know about the en dash and the em dash. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dave Crossland
[Font Bakery]

[More]  ⦿

Dave Tribby
[American Amateur Press Association (AAPA)]

[More]  ⦿

David Kindersley

English stonecutter (b. Codicote, 1915; d. Cambridge, 1995). An ex-apprentice of Eric Gill, he set up his own shop in Cambridge in 1939. His carved plaques and inscriptions in stone and slate can be seen on many churches and public buildings in the United Kingdom. He and his third wife Lida Lopes Cardozo, also a stonecutter, designed the main gates of the British Library.

In 1952 Kindersley submitted MoT Serif to the British Ministry of Transport, which required new lettering to use on United Kingdom road signs. The Road Research Laboratory found Kindersley's design more legible than Transport, a design by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, but nevertheless chose Transport. Many of the street signs in England, especially in Cambridge use Kindersley's fonts.

The book typeface Octavian was designed by Will Carter and David Kindersley for the Monotype Corporation in 1961. He also created Itek Bookface.

Kindersley was known for his letterspacing system. Author of Optical Letter Spacing for New Printing Systems (Wynkyn de Worde Society/Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 1976) and Computer-Aided Letter Design (with Neil E. Wiseman).

The Cardozo Kindersley workshop, which Kindersley founded and was later continued by Cardozo, publishes a number of typefaces based on Kindersley's work. They include Kindersley Street (2005, aka Kindersley Grand Arcade) which is based on Kindersley Mot Serif (1952). It was designed for the Grand Arcade, Cambridge.

London street signs that were designed by David Kindersley served as the basis of a complete lapidary typeface by Boris Kochan and Robert Strauch of Lazydogs Type Foundry, called Streets of London (2013).

Image: Stone cut alphabet from 1979 displayed in the University of Amsterdam' Special collections.

Linotype link. FontShop link. MyFonts link. Wikipedia. Klingspor link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

De Letter Pagina

Type site in the Netherlands. In Dutch. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dean Allen

Dean Cameron Allen died in 2018 at the age of 51. Obituary in The Globe and Mail: It is with unspeakable sorrow that we announce the sudden passing of Dean Cameron Allen, on January 13, 2018 at the age of 51. He leaves behind his parents, James and Holly; his brother, Craig; an adoring family; longtime partner, Gail; and a legion of loving friends and admirers around the world. Renaissance man, trailblazer and autodidact extraordinaire, Dean was a person of dazzling wit, charm and erudition. Graphic designer, typographer, teacher, web pilgrim, critic, author, Weimaraner tamer, song and dance man, chef... he brought titanic intelligence, insight and humour to everything he did. And whatever room he was in, he was the weather. He was instrumental in bringing clean, elegant design and typographical rigour to the early internet. And in raising online writing to a fresh and thrilling new art form. A source of inspiration to many, he was generous with his guidance and praise. Equally at home with the bawdy as the sublime, he could wield his humour like a cudgel or dashing sleight of hand. And salvage even the most dire situation with laughter. He moved from his native Vancouver to France in his thirties, and had perfected the bise and Gallic shrug by day two. He was a loving stepfather, and gave full, raucous meaning to the term 'bon vivant'. O, combien tu nous manques. His absence is unfathomable. We miss him with every breath.

Dean used to run a site called Textism, that had Essays and opinions on typography, ca. 2000-2003, but the site disappeared some time later. It included a critical comparison of twenty great text typefaces: Jenson, Bembo, Granjon, Elzevir, Caslon, Fleischmann, Baskerville, Fournier, Bell, Bulmer, Miller, Centaur, Janson, Electra, Fairfield, Dante, Aldus, Sabon, Albertina. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dean Allen's type tutorial

[More]  ⦿

Deborah Mitchell

Born in Caracas, Deborah is currently studying fine arts at California State University. She made a great type poster that explains typographic terminology. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Debra Adams

Author of "abcdefg" [a better constraint driven environment for font generation] (1989 Raster Imaging and Digital Typography conference, pp. 54-70), as employee of Xerox PARC. She describes an experimental system that automates the generation of letters in a font from four master characters (o, h, p and v). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Deep Font Challenge

Font identification game by Deep Creative. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Delve Fonts (was: Delve Media Arts)
[Delve Withrington]

Delve Withrington (Alameda, CA; b. 1970, Asheville, NC) studied at Savannah College of Art and Design, designed signage, print projects and web pages in addition to designing custom typefaces, worked for Fontshop, and in 2004, joined the type team at Agfa Monotype, which morphed into Monotype Imaging, Redwood City, CA. From Asheville, NC, he moved around and ended up in San Francisco. In 1996, he founded Delve Fonts in Berkeley, CA (in fact, Delve Media Arts, and later renamed Delve Fonts). He has collected a virtually complete list of books on typography. Author index. MyFonts link. Designer of these typefaces:

• Beleren (2015). A custom typeface for the trading card game Magic: The Gathering (Hasbro).
• Blasphemy Initials: a free (and also commercial...) spooky font.
• Blot Test (1999): a dingbat font inspired by the work of noted German psychologist Hermann Rorschach [1885-1922].
• Cody (1999): an informal comic book face.
• Continuo (1996): an all caps bilined outline face.
• Cortina (2011). A futuristic family by Joachim Müller-Lancé.
• Delve Hand (1996-2003).
• Eucalyptus Regular.
• Eulipia (1997-2003): organic.
• Helfa (2011). Delve writes: Readability is baked in with a generous x-height, fine proportions that have a medium height to width ratio, and reasonable contrast in stroke weight variation.
• Filmotype Washington (for Font Diner). Designer unidentified.
• Muskeg. A combination of German expressionism and brush styles.
• Oktal Mono (2012, a rounded octagonal modular typeface by Joachim Müller-Lancé and Erik Adigard of MAD studio in Sausalito).
• Peso (1999): an octagonal family inspired by a parking sign discovered in Guanajuato, Mexico.
• Quara (2009): a techno sans.
• Smith & Nephew (2003) and Smith & Nephew Cyrillic (2015), rounded sans typefaces in the style of VAG Rounded.
• Tilden Sans (2004-2009): low contrast, large x-height.
• Tome Sans (2020). A 10-weight sans superfamily, with a variable font option.
• Uppercut Angle (2011). A signage typeface by Joachim Müller-Lancé. It was originally developed for the Krav Maga training center of San Francisco.
• Ysobel (2009; winner of an award at TDC2 2010). Delve co-designed the newspaper type family Ysobel (Monotype) with type designers Robin Nicholas, head of type design at Monotype, and Alice Savoie (Frenchtype, Monotype). The sales pitch: According to Nicholas, the idea for the Ysobel typefaces started when he was asked to create a custom, updated version of the classic Century Schoolbook typeface, which was designed to be an extremely readable typeface - one that made its appearance in school textbooks beginning in the early 1900s. See also Ysobel eText Pro (2013).

Adobe link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Delve Withrington
[Delve Fonts (was: Delve Media Arts)]

[MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Deote
[Adrian Täckman]

New Danish type site from Copenhagen. None of the subpages show on my browser. Adrian Täckman is one of the cofounders of e-types in Copenhagen in 1997. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Design & typo
[Peter Gabor]

Peter Gabor's type blog and type education site in Paris, started in 2005. In French and English. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Design Eva Wilsson
[Eva Wilsson]

Now Eva Wilsson and formerly Eva Grinder. Swedish designer of Mido (2007), a free medium-bold Egyptian typeface that became commercial in 2016. On her site, she offers a research paper on Egyptian type, and describes the development of Mido.

Alternate URL. Another URL. Typedia link. Another URL. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Design is History

Great pages about the milestones in design history, which often coincided with the key moments in typographic history. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Design--Etch

By Richard Smith: "A list of fonts to help you choose a type style for your custom etched glassware." [Google] [More]  ⦿

Designing with Type
[James Craig]

Craig was the Design Director for Watson-Guptill Publications and is a member of the New York Art Directors Club, Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), Type Directors Club (TDC), Typophiles, and a past member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). He teaches typography and design at The Cooper Union and lectures widely. Designing with Type is a growing resource for typography students and educators maintained by James Craig, author of Designing with Type: A Basic Course in Typography (1999, Watson Guptill). That book was updated to Designing with Type, 5th Edition: The Essential Guide to Typography (2006, by James Craig and Irene Korol Scala, published by Watson Guptill). Links to commercial foundries. Also check the student design subpage. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Design:Technology:Society

The UIUC School of Art's annotated graphic design bibliography. Dead link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Deutsche Rechtschreibung

German writing rules, by Roman Schneider and Dr. Klaus Heller. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Diacritics

Microsoft's page on diacritics--their alignment and width rules, and definitions in Unicode. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Die (deutschen) Mikrotypographie-Regeln

German typographical rules explained by Marion Neubauer. Continued here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Digital Sans

An early techno family from 1974 sold by Elsner&Flake. Clones include Space Gothic. The design of Digital Sans is identical to that of Sol (1973, Marty Goldstein and C.B. Smith at VGC). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Digital Typography (Don Knuth)

Don Knuth's 700-page book (1999) on typography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Digitalogue

Commercial Japanese font outfit, involved in various font activities. Their fonts are featured at and sold by P22 in the Font Pavilion CD series. Each set features several Roman and Katakana fonts in TrueType for Windows and PostScript for Macintosh. Of particular interest is the DPI72 series, all screen pixel fonts in type 1 format:

• Eriko Tomita: 10GIRLS series (1999), JISBIT11 series (1999).
• Takafumi Miyadima: 4030STARCH (1999).
• Kato Masashi of FLOP Design: AMI-alp and AMI-kat (1999).
• Masahito Hanzawa of Power Graphix: ASTROCREEP-7pt (1999), Eightball-8pt (1999).
• Takuya Sato: BrokeBack series (1999), Pastel (1999).
• Yuji Adachi: CODE14X (1999), DryBones7 (1999), Tempo9 (1999).
• Taku Anekawa of Param: Dannybitman-7pt, DingBit-FreeSoul, DoshinFont.
• Yosiro: Echo8 (1999), Riddim7 (1999), Vibes10 (1999).
• Hideaki Ohtani of fontgraphic.com: F2-BoldScriptALP, F2-BoldScriptKT, F2-ScriptALP, F2-ScriptKT.
• Hyperion Graphics: GIGANTIC-9 (1999), HELLFIRE series (roman, katakana, 1999), Inferno series (roman and kata, 1999), Starlight9 (1999).
• Sasuri\245Vivs: Kyosen-TsukaenaiMappo (1999).
• Atsushi Aoki: PointN (1999).
• Masayuki Sato of Maniackers Design: Zerozero series (2000).

DigitalThread Fonthaus

Font links and discussions. Book discussions. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Distinctive glyphs

Recommendations on glyphs along which typefaces can easily be distinguished. We get

• 4 votes: agQ
• 3 votes: R
• 2 votes: sCGMS
• 1 vote: eilnotAEIJ

Distractions: Name-that-Font

Article in The PracTeX Journal, 2006, vol. 1. It has font quizzes and name-that-font tests concocted by Yves Peters, Tamye Riggs, Charles Bigelow, and Michael Spivak. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dmitriy Horoshkin's Library

Dmitriy Horoshkin's library of Rusian books on type and typography include these downloadable texts:

• Album of written and printed fonts, M.A. Netyksa, 1906
• Font album of Zemsky typography, Simferopol, 1904-1910
• Bibliography of Russian typographic fonts, V.Ya. Adaryukov, 1924
• Bibliography of Russian typographic fonts, V.Ya. Adaryukov, 1924 (electronic book) Rab-book
• The Art of the Book, A.A. Sidorov, 1922
• The history of Russian ornament. Museum of the Stroganov School, 1868
• Font file according to GOST-1947, VNITO Polygraphy and Publishing.
• Book Proof, N.N. Filippov, 1929
• Book font, M.V. Bolshakov, 1964
• Brief information on printing business, P. Kolomnin, 1899
• Typeface, T.I. Kutsyn, 1950
• New Russian font V.Mashin, 1906
• Model fonts of the Military Printing House, 1821
• Samples of the writings of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1862
• Samples of Slavic-Russian printing from 1491, 1891
• Samples of the foundry of I. Shcherbakov in St. Petersburg, 1881
• Samples of text machine fonts of the linotype, Leningrad, 1938
• Samples of artistic fonts and frames, A.A. Kotlyarov, 1929
• Piusa Bauer in Warsaw, 1888
• Font samples (Printing and Bookbinding) Yu.A. Mansfeld, 1904
• Font samples of the 4th printing house named after E. Sokolova, 1956
• Font samples, General Staff of the Red Army, 1937
• Font Samples, Graphic Workshops at Academic Publishing House, 1923
• Samples of fonts and frames for drawings and plans, A.D. Demkin, 1924
• Types of fonts and decorations of the printing house of I. Wilborg, B.G.
• Samples of IAN fonts - "Our Father" and other texts in 325 languages and dialects, 1870
• Font samples of the St. Petersburg Synodal Printing House, 1902
• Types of typographic lithography fonts of the Siberian T-v Printing, bg
• Samples of fonts of A.Transhel's printing house, 1876
• Samples of fonts of the printing house of the Astrakhan provincial government, 1886
• Samples of fonts of the printing house of the Moscow Union of Mozhaisk PEC, 1926
• Samples of fonts of the Printing house of the Central Union, bg
• Book Design - A Guide to the Preparation of a Manuscript for Printing, L.I. Hessen, 1935
• Design of the Soviet book, G.G. Guillo, D.V. Konstantinov, 1939
• Printing ornament B.1, Glagol, 1991
• Printing ornament B.2, Verb, 1991
• Font construction, Ya.G. Chernikhov N.A. Sobolev, 2005
• Guide to the study of ribbon (Rondo) font, A.I. Pechinsky, 1917
• Russian typographic font. Issues of history and application practice, A.G. Shitsgal, 1974
• Tutorial of calligraphy and cursive writing, S. Volchenka, 1902
• Collection of old Russian and Slavic letters, K.D. Dalmatov, 1895
• Slovolitni O. I. Leman in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Font Catalog, 1915 (?) G. Moscow.
• Slovolitnya O.O. Gerbek. Fonts and ornaments, 19 ?? g.
• Collection of fonts. Compiled and published by Mikhail Maimistov, 1912
• Modern Font, W. Toots, 1966
• Art fonts, A.M. Jerusalem, 1930
• Font, B.V. Voronetsky E.D. Kuznetsov, 1967
• Font in visual agitation, S. I. Smirnov, Third Edition, 1990
• Fonts and Alphabets, O.V. Snarsky, 1979
• Fonts for inscriptions on drawings, M.D. Mikeladze, 1961
• Fonts for projects, plans and maps, A.S. Shuleykin, 1987
• Fonts and their construction, D.A. Pisarevsky, 1927
• Fonts and type works, V.V. Grachev, B.G.
• Typographic fonts, ONSH, ed. A.N. Strelkova, 1974
• Fonts Development and use, G.M.Baryshnikov, 1997
• Fonts The educational-methodical manual for cadets of LVTKU, N.A. Shashurin, 1981
• Aesthetics of the art of font, A. Kapr, 1979

Local download (with Horoshkin's permission). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dmitry Kirsanov

Type designer Dmitry Kirsanov (b. Orenburg, Russia, 1965) graduated from the Orenburg Art School in 1987. He worked freelance for Yuzhnyi Ural publishing company in Orenburg. After attending the Moscow State University of Printing (1996), he joined its Department of Print Design in 1997 as an instructor of typographic design and computer graphics. From 1996 on he worked at ParaGraph International, designing typefaces. Since April 1998 Kirsanov works for ParaType. His page has essays on the history of serif and sans serif, and on font matching. Would be great for an introductory course. He designed a Cyrillic version of ITC Bodoni 72 (2000, called PT ITC Bodoni, Paratype) and ITC Bodoni 72 Swash (2001). PT Mas d'Azil (Paratype, 2002) and PT Mas d'Azil Symbols are prehistoric lettering and pictorial fonrs based on images discovered in a prehistoric cave of Mas-d'Azil, France. He created Magistral (1997, based on a clean look sans display typeface of Andrey Kryukov), Venetian 301 (2003, Paratype; a Cyrillic version of Bitstream's Venetian 301, which in turn was based on Bruce Rogers' Centaur, which in turn goes back to the 1470s alphabets of Nicolas Jenson), News Gothic (2005, a Cyrillic family based on the perennial News Gothic sans family), and Mag Mixer (2005, an industrial-look mechanical typeface based on Magistral).

In 2018, Albert Kapitonov and Dmitry Kirsanov revived the early 20th-century typeface Lehmann Egyptian from the Berthold and Lehmann type foundries in St. Petersburg, and published it at Paratype.

His talk at ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg is on the first didones in Russia.

Paratype page. FontShop link. Klingspor link.

View Dmitry Kirsanov's typefaces. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Dmitry Kirsanov: The World of Fonts

Web designer in Halifax who writes about fontography and type history. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dmitry's Design Lab

Dmitry Kirsanov's page on typography. Lots of didactic material and great explanations. A must. Also a great example for web page design. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Don Barnett
[Urban Insect Evening (was: Nekton Design)]

[More]  ⦿

Donald Knuth: interview

Donald Knuth about TeX, Metafont, and Truetype. One quote: " I saw that the whole business of typesetting was being held back by proprietary interests." Elsewhere, he was surprised to learn from the interviewer that In-Design is using TeX's whole-paragraph optimization. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dorsey

Mac McGrew writes: Dorsey was designed by Inland Type Foundry in 1904, and named for a printer in Dallas, Texas. It is an oldstyle antique series, much like Bookman but with slightly more contrast. Light Dorsey, introduced in 1910, is somewhat similar to Cushing Monotone, but with smaller x-height and longer ascenders. There were also condensed and extra condensed versions.

For a digital revival of Light Dorsey, see LD Display (2022, Otis Verhoeve). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Drew

Mac McGrew: Drew is a delicate, compact roman type with a pen-lettered effect. It has long ascenders and comparatively small x-height. The long serifs are mostly unbracketed, but the general feeling is informal and closer to oldstyle in details. It originated with Inland Type Foundry and was shown in 1910. Compare Adcraft, Avil; also Bernhard Modern, Cochin. The image below is from the 1923 ATF catalog. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dutch ligatures

Zip file with German and Dutch ligatures such as fb, fk, ffb, ffk, fj, ffj, and so forth. Expert page by Gert-Jan C. Lokhorst. For the Computer Modern family. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dynamic optical scaling

Article by Jacques André and Irène Vatton: "Dynamic Optical Scaling and Variable-Sized Characters"> (Electronic Publishing, vol. 7(4), pp. 231-250, 1994). Alternate URL. [Google] [More]  ⦿

dynTypo
[Vítor Quelhas]

Vítor Quelhas was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1979. He received an MA in Multimedia Arts at Fine Arts School of the University of Porto (FBAUP), Portugal, with a thesis on Dynamic Typography. He studied Communication Design/Graphic Arts at FBAUP, where he graduated in 2002. In 2001/02 he studied abroad as an ERASMUS student in Communication Design at Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is an invited Assistant Professor of Computation and Fine Arts, Communication Design, at the Department of Visual Arts, Bragança Polytechnic Institute, since 2002. As a designer, he has been responsible for different projects, including DynTypo, his research website concerning dynamic typography. From the latter site: dynTypo is a collection of work and research by various designers, programmers and artists interested in the possibilities of dynamic and interactive typography in the multimedia arts scene. There are many links, many of which go to John Maeda's lab at MIT. Speaker at ATypI 2006 in Lisbon on Dynamic typography. Alternate URL. Another URL. And another one. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Eamon Dyas
[Times New Roman]

[More]  ⦿

e-a-t

E-a-t (experiment and typography) is a joint Czech and Slovak enterprise that through publications and exhibitions tries to increase the visibility of Czechoslovak type design. Exhibitions in 2004 include Brno and Prague. In 2005, one is planned in Bratislava. Review by Dan Reynolds.

Old dead link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Edouard Hoffmann

Swiss typefounder who made the Haas Type foundry as the center of the Swiss movement in the design of typefaces in the 1950s. He directed Max Miedinger in the development of Helvetica, and Hermann Eidenbenz in Clarendon> (1953).

FontShop link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Ein Reiseführer für Typografen

Richard Felsner (Mainz, Germany) has some info on the history of type. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Elian Script

C. C. Elian oproposed an entirely new script in which letters and sounds are stacked. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the MFA program in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She also is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City.

Author of Thinking with Type (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). Visit also the interesting Thinking with type web page, which features a fun section on "crimes against typography", notes on type classification, a course outline, and tons of other educational material. See also here and here. Author of Laws of the Letter (with J. Abbott Miller).

Ellen Lupton was the keynote speaker at AypI2006 in Lisbon. In that talk, summarized here, Ellen Lupton discusses the benefits of truly free fonts (Perhaps the free font movement will continue to grow slowly, along the lines in which it is already taking shape: in the service of creating typefaces that sustain and encourage both the diversity and connectedness of humankind.) and provides key examples: Gaultney's Gentium, Poll's Linux Libertine, Peterlin's Freefont, Bitstream's Titus Cyberbit, and Jim Lyles' Vera family. She is the editor of D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006).

In 2007, she received the AIGA Gold Medal. Her introduction to the major typefaces. Speaker at ATypI 2010 in Dublin. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Elzevir family

Elzevir is an oldstyle typeface style related to garaldes. Elzevir was also the name of a renowned family of printers in the 16th and early 17th century in Leiden, The Hague, Utrecht, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. The first one, Louis (1540-1617), was the son of a Belgian printer in Leuven and established a print shop in Leiden in 1580. Other members include Isaac Elzevir, Bonaventrura Elzevir, and Abraham I Elzevir. They were operational until 1712.

The Elzevir style was promoted by Louis Perrin in Lyon, France, in 1846. In the United States, this style is known as DeVinne. Britannica link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

emdash

emdash is a new type and design outfit founded by Ken Botnick. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Emday Fonts
[Miriam van der Have]

From Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Miriam van der Have's Dutch site offers a general introduction to fonts and font terminology. An impressive glossary. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Emil Olsson
[TypeNeu]

[More]  ⦿

Emily King

London-based designer who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on typeface design of the late 1980s and early 1990s (at Kingston University, 199): "New Faces: type design in the first decade of device-independent digital typesetting (1987-1997)". Her thesis is on-line. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Emodigi

Fantastic site with descriptions of many of the funkiest foundries. Type links. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Emotional Digital

Great typography and design book by Alexander Branczyk, Jutta Nachtwey, Heike Nehl, Sibylle Schlaich, and Jürgen Siebert, Thames&Hudson, 1999. Now also on-line. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Empire Gothic

Empire Gothic was offered by Keystone Type Foundry in 1912. Although the name does not identify it as an italic, it is somewhat similar to Medium Gothic Italic, according to Mac McGrew. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Enlaces--Links

Typography, font and web design links. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Enrique Longinotti
[Hyperfuente]

[More]  ⦿

Eric Gill and Jonathan Barnbrook: Designers as Authors at the Poles of the Twentieth Century
[Steven McCarthy]

Discussion of the work of Eric Gill and Jonathan Barnbrook, offered by Steven McCarthy (University of Minnesota). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Erik Spiekermann
[What makes a good typeface?]

[More]  ⦿

Erik's Typo Tips

Erik Spiekermann's tips for good typography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Esperfonto

Typographical tips. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Esszet

Type historian James Mosley explains that Abraham Lichtenthaler, a seventeenth century printer from the Bavarian town of Sulzbach is credited with introducing the character to roman printing type. Follow-up article by Jonathan Hoefler. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ethan Cote

Chi Huynh (Ethan Cote) from Montreal interviews type designers. [Google] [More]  ⦿

EthanCote

Interiews with typographers. [Google] [More]  ⦿

European Diacritics

Overview of diacritics by John Hudson. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Eurostile

Nebiolo's Eurostile set a precedent that led to tens of typefaces and descendants. View a few of the commercially available ones. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Eva Wilsson
[Design Eva Wilsson]

[MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Evolution of Alphabets

At the University of Maryland, Professor Robert Fradkin's page on the origins of the alphabet. Great applets. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Evolution of the Alphabet
[Matt Baker]

A great chart by Matt Baker that shows the evolution of the Latin alphabet from 1750 BC until today. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Experluette
[Olivier Randier]

Olivier Randier's pages devoted to typography. Has sub-pages on hyper Casse, his project on the listing and study of all 65000 signs/symbols from all languages. There is also l'Outil, a gallery of nice typographical examples.

Olivier Randier, Lionel Buchet and others helped with the development of a set of school fonts for SG Création (a company owned by Gérard and Marc Seintignan). These fonts were commercialized since about 2008 under the name SG Education. Link for Olivier Randier. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Familiar Faces

Allan Haley's guide to typefaces of the Compugraphic Corporation (note: Compugraphic was acquired by Agfa/Monotype). Written in the late 1970s. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fat Cat

The hyper-heavy typeface Fat Cat probably appeared first as an uncredited typeface within the pages of Alphabete: Ein Schriftatlas von A bis Z. It inspired these digital fonts:

• Frenchy RR (2000, Steve Jackaman).
• Katzenfatzen NF (2010, Nick Curtis).
• Mogzilla NF (2007, Nick Curtis).
• Frenzy (2019, SoftMaker). Earlier, SoftMaker marketed this as F820 Deco.

Fat Faces: origins
[Sebastien Morlighem]

On February 22, 2021, Sebastien Morlighem gave a great Zoom talk in a seminar series hosted by The Cooper Union in New York. In it, he described the beginnings of fat types from around 1780 until their zenith of fatness and development around 1825, all in London. Here is a summary of the exposition for those who have no access to the video at The Cooper Union.

Sebastien started with quotes from famous type experts and type historians:

• Paul Barnes, upon publishing Isambard in 2019: The fat face is the joyful expression of an idea---to make something as bold as can be---executed with real vigour and the utmost conviction. (Not really a definition)
• Talbot Baines Reed, in "Old and new fashions in typography", Journal of the Society of Arts, 1890, p. 534: The new Roman was barely established as the prevailing fashion, when a vulgar taste for fatter faces asserted itself. The demand was promptly responded to by the founders of the day, Robert Thorne leading the way. Others outstripped him in the race; and about 1820, or rather before, a face like that before you was both fashionable and popular for certain works. (A condescending view)
• Joseph Moxon, in "Mechanick Exercises Volume 2", 1683: A fat face is a broad stemmed letter.

Without a good definition, but eager to tell us the story, Sebastien showed examples of gradual thickening of the stems and increase of contrast from bold to fat, starting in Thomas Cottrell's foundry, where Robert Thorne (1754-1820) was employed. After Cottrell's death, Robert Thorne bought his foundry in 1794 and replaced the types by his own. Already in 1774, Thomas Cottrell had shown big fat letters in his A Specimen of Printing Types, very much related in shape to the Caslon types, as Cottrell had previously worked for the Caslon foundry. Similar large letters were also shown in broadsides by William Caslon in 1785. This was the time that a need arose for advertizing via posting bills and large lettering on buildings and coaches. Not to be outdone, Edmund Fry showed a very bold Ten Lines Pica in 1787 and S&C Stephenson had a sixteen lines pica in 1796. Thorne in his 1794 book, A Specimen of Printing Types, shows for the first time lower case versions of the letters. Still, serious mechanical challenges remained, as the early types of posting bills were often sand cast. Sometimes printers would use wood types, and in rare instances, even fill in the fat letters by hand.

The period from 1805 until 1810 saw the rise of the fat face; Sebastien showed us examples, in particular, of great use by the Liverpool-based printer G.F. Harris. Type historian Daniel Berkeley Updike (Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use, Harvard University Press, 1922, vol. 2, p. 196) wrote: Thorne [...] is responsible for the vilest form of type invented up to that time. Thorne's specimen book of "Improved (!) Types" of 1803 should be looked at as a warning of what fashion can make men do. Stanley Morison, for whom Sebastien showed little respect, even wrote Thorne's "fat grotesque" [sic] was the first original English design to make an impression abroad. [...] With Thorne was produced a letter during 1800-1803 which was a novelty, distinct and dreadful. [Memorandum on Revision of the Typography of "The Times" [1930], Selected Essays on the History of Letter-forms in Manuscript and Print. Edited by David McKitterick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, vol. 2, p. 305]

Great progress was made in the genre by Caslon & Catherwood ca. 1810, who slowly evolved fatter types from bold typefaces. In 1812, William Caslon Juior (William Caslon IV) introduced a new production method, which he called the sanspareil matrices. They would allow for more accurate and crisper letters, and more efficient production of very large lettertypes. And so, the race was on, to make bigger and fatter typefaces. Other, newer foundries also started showing the popular fat types, including Vincent Figgins in 1815, caslon & catherwood in 1820, and Thorowgood in 1821, a year after he bought Thorne's foundry after Thorne's death in 1820. Nicolete Grey in XIXth Century Ornamented types and Title Pages [1938, London: Faber and Faber Limited] had this to add to a fat face by Fry and Steele from 1808: In this letter of Fry [...] the process seems to have reached a norm. It is a superb, wide, generous letter, magnificently roman, but with a good deal less of order and more of pomp than Trajan's classic. [...] It is a letter which falls into no category. In the process of fattening, Cottrell's ordinary eighteenth-century capital has changed, the modelling has been exaggerated and the shading become uniformly vertical and the forms of the letters have grown softer and rounder, yet it is not a modern face, for the shading is quite gradual and the bracketing very full, nor are the thick strokes thick enough, nor are the thin strokes thin enough, for it to be a fat face.

Sebastien wrote tthis all up in a booklet, Robert Thorne and the origin of the fat face (2021). The video of his talk is at Type@Cooper in the Lubalin series. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FDBP

Font Development Best Practice documentation. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Felipe Cáceres
[La Unión de los Tipógrafos]

[More]  ⦿

Female typedesigners

A list maintained by Tiffany Wardle and Indra Kupferschmid. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FF DIN
[Albert-Jan Pool]

The story of Albert-Jan Pool's information design type family FF DIN, told by FontShop: i, ii, iii, iv. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Figures

Microsoft page on figures, with information on proportional versus tabular numerals (tabular numerals are of the same width); old style numerals (three groups: 0, 1 and 2 align from baseline to x-height; 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 descend to the nearly the lowercase descender; 6 and 8 ascend to the figure overshoot height); vulgar fractions, shilling fractions, nut fractions; fractions reserved in unicode tables. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Filip Blazek
[Typo.z (was: Designiq)]

[More]  ⦿

Florian Jennett

Student at HfG in Offenbach who is working on a project involving the use of code to create typefaces. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Folio breitfett

Folio breitfett or Folio-Grotesk breitfett was an extended sans titling typeface at the Bauersche Giesserei, 1963, designed by K.F. Bauer and W. Baum. In the phototype era, it became known as Folio Bold Extended, and was used extensively by Universal Studios back in the late 60s to the mid-70s for various TV shows such as The Rockford Files, Banacek, McMillan & wife, McCloud, and Columbo. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Folios: Typographers

Online portfolios from typographers. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Bakery
[Dave Crossland]

Font Bakery is a command-line tool written in Python 3 for checking the quality of font projects. It is a tool similar to tools used for checking the quality of fonts on Google Fonts.

Links:

• List of checks currently offered--they include thes subcategories: opentype, universal, adobefonts, googlefonts, fontval, shared_conditions, ufo_sources.
• A full introduction
• https://gitter.im/fontbakery/Lobby is a chat channel. Font Bakery has an active community of contributors from foundries around the world, including Adobe Fonts, Dalton Maag, Type Network, and Google Fonts.
• Full developer documentation (a hosted and compiled copy of contents in the docs directory.)
• The project was initiated by Dave Crossland in 2013 to accelerate the onboarding process for Google Fonts. In 2017 Lasse Fister and Felipe Sanches rewrote it into a modern, modular architecture suitable for both individuals and large distributors. Felipe has maintained the check contents since 2016. Lasse also began a sister project, Font Bakery Dashboard: A UI and a cloud system that scales up for checking thousands of font files super fast and in parallel, by using thousands of "container" virtual machines. Font Bakery is not an official Google project, and Google provides no support for it. Throughout 2018, 2019 and 2020 the core project maintainers Felipe Correa da Silva Sanches and Lasse Fister are commissioned by the Google Fonts team to maintain it.
• TypoLabs 2018 talk on YouTube and its presentation deck.
• Video by Felipe Sanchez.
• Most of the checks are for OpenType binary files, and project metadata files. If you are developing a font project publicly with Github (or a similar host) you can set up a Continuous Integration service (like Travis) to run Font Bakery on each commit, so that with each update all checks will be run on your files.
• Github link.

Font design strategies

Advice from John Hudson (Tiro Typeworks) on the initial stages of font design. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Falsehoods

Falsehoods programmers believe about fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font FAQ

At Rijks Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font FAQ (alternate site)

[More]  ⦿

Font Fundamentals

Thomas Detrie explains the evolutionary development of letterforms and how technology affected changes in typefaces. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font identification (Spanish)

Font identification jump page, in Spanish. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Juice

A typographical inititiative by Bruhn, Uhlenbrock and Schmidt. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Pharos Text

Weekly column by ozzie Peter McDonnell. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font prefixes, suffixes

Standard font prefixes (for foundries) and suffixes. Maintained by SourceNet. Dead link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Primer

The font formats (bitmaps, scalable, ...) explained. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font School
[T. Kengo]

Dead link. T. Kengo's explanations, in Japanese, of the major font classifications. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Source Paradise

Font links and font information by "desktoppublishing". [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font Talk

Artboy (Glenn Zucman) collects interesting font links and has a cute anecdote about Helvetica and Franklin Gothic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FontBook online

Searching for a designer or a font? Look no further than the FontBook. It has over 25,000 fonts listed. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fontburglar
[Mirko Velimirovic]

An informal weekly Zoom meeting for type designers to chat and show their work, hosted on Friday afternoons by Mirko Velimirovic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fontfuse

A font pairing design resource, which seems to be run by Extensis, a Portland, OR-based software company. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fontjoy: Font pairing via machine learning

The proposal is to map each font as a vector of features such as thickness, x-height, descender height, obliqueness, and so forth. Pairing would happen by selecting a font that is close in one or two features, but very different in others. This is not quite machine learning, but the principle is nice, and perhaps easy to automate given a good program. If the features are all centered at zero, then it is proposed to maximize the absolute value of P and N, where P is the inner product restricted to positive terms and N to negative terms. Github link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FontNet

From the UK, Neville Brody's site. [Google] [More]  ⦿

fontophile

Font information. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Font-o-Rama
[Nina Hons]

Düsseldorf-based German foundry of designer Nina Hons (b. 1974, Germany), formrly Nina David. Nina studied communication design at Art Center College of Design. In 1998 Nina Hons was rewarded a certificate of typographic excellence from the Type Directors Club in New York for her typeface UniF (1997, a unicase typeface published at Fountain). In 2002, she set up Font-O-Rama, her own commercial type foundry.

Her fonts include Geomee (2003, a noteworthy rounded squarish family), Mein Schatz (2004, a sans family), Casi (2000), DSC (2000, pixel face), Eiei (2001, eggs font for Easter), KomodoreDestroy (2000), KomodoreNormal (2000, horizontally-striped typeface), Pagra (2001), UniF (1997), UniFIce (2001), UniFRama (2002), UniFXmas (2000), Liebling (2005, a serif to go with Mein Schatz), Mein Schatz (2003, sans), Longing (2005, liquid typeface with ornaments added), Herzchen (2006), and Sweet Home (2005, stitching face).

Fountain link. Home page. Alternate URL. Dafont link. FontShop link. View Nina Hons's typefaces. Klingspor link. Fountain Type link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Fontribute

A series of one hour Youtube videos by Thomas Jockin and Erin McLaughlin on designing type. They mainly compare new typefaces with existing ones to aid the designers. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fontroduction
[Ian Obermuller]

Ian Obermuller's introduction to typefaces, with a visual glossary, and wonderfully instructive pages on type classification and type recognition. Ian is a 2010 graduate of the Seattle Central Creative Academy. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts and FreeBSD: A Tutorial

Dave Bodenstab's tutorial of the various font files that may be used with FreeBSD and the syscons driver, X11, Ghostscript and Groff. Cookbook examples are provided for switching the syscons display to 80x60 mode, and for using type 1 fonts with the above application programs. Dead link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts Anon

A club for fontaholics, that has grown into a world of its own. It has a a great annotated list of download warehouse links, a funny confessional [read Sara's story!], original fonts, utilities such as FontDreams and FontSaver, a messageboard, one of the most useful lists of links anywhere, and many pages with tips and font support. Beautifully packaged, it provides hours of comfort and stress release for all font lovers. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts are not software

Great article by David Earls in which he explains his views on what fonts are. He argues that, like a music CD, fonts are data, not software. Some quotes:

• Typefaces (and, you guessed, music) are a specific form of data, they are ideas, they are the result of solving creative problems, they are inspiration and beauty, and as such are an expression of life, of humanity. Does that sound like software to you?
• I think it devalues high quality typography to label it as software, even if the designers themselves who label it so may be only doing so in order to obtain financial or reputation protection under antiquated and ill-fitting intellectual property law.

Fonts are software

Typophile discussion as a reaction to David Earl's article which claimed that fonts are data, not software. Here are some viewpoints:

• Simon Daniels (Microsoft): TrueType hinting code and OpenType Layout tables are clearly software, even if outlines and metrics might be considered data by some.
• David Hamuel: The software is only an aid, legal one. Nothing more.
• Mark Simonson:As a font designer, I sympathize with the idea that the design of a font should have legal protection in the U.S. as it does elsewhere. Apparently, fonts are put in the same category legally as flatwareforks, spoons, knives, etc.designs of which are also not protected as creative works.
• Hrant Papazian: You know whats really denigrated though? Bitmap fonts. [...] Legal protection? Zilch.

Fonts Culture

Discussion (in Russian) about the various font categories. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts Nomina Nominata

Carefully crafted page by Stefan Unterstein who lists and discusses high quality free fonts. His list:

• Adobe Utopia
• Charter
• Bitstream Vera Sans/Mono/Serif [Gnome Desk+Webfont]
• IBM Courier
• URW Antiqua/Grotesk
• URW Ghostscript/PS Core-Fonts
• Microsoft WebFonts (Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet)
• Monotype Arial & Andale Mono
• Linotype Digi-Antiqua/Grotesk (2)
• Gentium RU Serif Roman/Italic Unicode (by Victor Gaultney)
• Linux Libertine Serif Roman/Italic Unicode (by Philipp H. Poll).

Fonts OLPC

A wiki on fonts for all languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts versus typefaces

Allan Haley eloquently explains the difference between a typeface (a conceptual design) and a font (an implementation, from 8pt metal to a truetype file). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fontself
[Pierre Terrier]

Lausanne and/or Paris-based type site related to a project conceived and designed by two graphic designers, Franz Hoffman and Pierre Terrier from studio koilinen, and a software developer, Marc Escher. A quote: It provides the ability to create fonts that preserves the gestures of a given handwriting and the original look of the drawing appliance (ball-point pen, pencil, ink, paper, etc.)

Fontself allows one to make fonts directly in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. It appears that one can create, with their commercial software an Opentype font by simple dragging and dropping an image with the individual letters. It works on both Mac and Windows. This, in turn can be used to simulate handwriting. Fonts (format unclear, not downloadable) include grunge typefaces (Agrotesk, Linexspray), handwriting (Psycho, Mascara, Meriem, Bic, Ehcadnarac, Manu, Signo, Manuscript), and scanned text typefaces (Baskerville, Garabig, Franklin Multi, Sabon, Gothique, Dido). Fontself also provides an editor for creating color fonts. Creative Market link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FontShop International (or: FSI)

Established in 1989 in Berlin by Erik Spiekermann, Joan Spiekermann and Neville Brody. Also offices in San Francisco, Australia, Austria and Norway. It has a formidable collection of fonts, better known as the FontFont collection. It is a major source of new type, and organizes a Conference in Berlin each year, called TYPO Berlin. In 2015, FontShop was sold to Monotype.

Fontshop team. Designers. Subpages: FontFeed (font news), FontStruct (free modular fontre), FontBook, Font education.

Catalog of FontFont's typefaces [large web page warning]. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

FontSite
[Sean Cavanaugh]

Online font site run by Sean Cavanaugh (b. Cape May, NJ, 1962) out of Camano Island, WA. This used to be called Title Wave Studios. Since 1996, Sean Cavanaugh is the head of FontSite. In the archives, one can/could find essays on writing style, rules of typography, and a comparison by Thomas Phinney (program manager of Latin Fonts at Adobe) of T1 and TTF. The Fontsite 500 CD (30 USD) offers 500 classical fonts with the original names, plus a few names I have not seen before, such as Bergamo (=Bembo by Francesco Griffo), Chantilly (=Gill Sans), Gareth (=Galliard), Noveo sans (=Neuzeit Grotesk), Palladio (=Palatino), Savoy (=Sabon), URWLatino, Unitus, Toxica, Publicity, Plakette, Pericles, Opus (=Optima), Melville, Function, Flanders, Cori Sans, Binner. Uli Stiehl provides proof that many of the fonts at FontSite are rip-offs (identical to) of fonts in Martin Kotulla's (SoftMaker) collection. This is perhaps best explained that Sean Cavanaugh's last real job was director of typography for SoftMaker, Inc., where he oversaw the development and release of SoftMaker's definiType typeface library and associated products [blurb taken from Digital Type Design Guide: The Page Designer's Guide to Working With Type, published in 1995 by Hayden Books].

Free fonts: Bergamo, CartoGothic (1996-2009), CombiNumerals. At MyFonts, the CombiNumerals Pro and CombiSymbols dingbat families are available since 2010. The site has a number of fonts with the acronym FS in the name, so I guess these are relatively original (but I won't swear on it): Allegro FS, Beton FS, Bodoni Display FS (+ Bold, Demibold), Bodoni No 2 FS (+ Ultra, Bodoni Recut FS (+Bold, Demibold), and so forth. His 500 Font CD has these fonts:

• Garalde, Venetian: Bergamo, Bergamo Expert, Bergamo SC&OsF, Caslon, Caslon Expert, Gareth, Garamond, Garamond Expert, Garamond SC&OsF, Garamond Condensed, Garamond Modern, URW Palladio, URW Palladio Expert, Savoy, Savoy Expert, Savoy Small Caps&OsF, Vendôme.
• Slab Serif: Clarendon, Glytus, Typewriter, Typewriter Condensed.
• Script: Commercial Script, Deanna Script, Deanna Swash Caps, Hudson, Legend, Mistral, Park Avenue, Phyllis, Phyllis Swash Caps, Vivaldi.
• Uncial: American Uncial, Rosslaire.
• Blackletter: Fette Fraktur, Fette Gotisch, Olde English.
• Borders and symbols: Celtic Borders, Deanna Borders, Deanna Flowers, Picto, Sean's Symbols.
• Transitional: URW Antiqua, Baskerville, Baskerville Expert, New Baskerville.
• Didone, modern: Bodoni, Bodoni Expert, Bodoni Small Caps&OsF, Modern 216, Walbaum.
• Sans serif: Chantilly, Franklin Gothic, Franklin Gothic Condensed, Franklin Gothic Cnd. SC&OsF, Function, Function Small Caps&OsF, Function Condensed, Goudy Sans, Opus, Opus Small Caps&OsF, Syntax, Letter Gothic.
• Decorative: Ad Lib, Algerian, Arnold Boecklin, Binner, Caslon Antique, Chromatic, Copperplate Gothic, Davida, Delphian Open Titling, Function Display, Glaser Stencil, Goudy Handtooled, Handel Gothic, Hobo, Honeymoon, Horndon, Mercedes, Mona Lisa, OCR-A&OCR-B, Plakette, Reflex, Salut, Stop, Toxica, VAG Rounded.

Fontweb.de

German language group interested in starting a web presence with a mailing list, linked web pages, font pages, and so on. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fontzilla
[Nancy Foster]

Fontzilla is Nancy Foster's type site. Useful links and information. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Forrest L. Norvell

Type commentator and analyzer in San Francisco who has written on Hrant Papazian's bouma theory, Futura, web typography, chirography and readability. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Four parts of a typeface
[Cyrus Highsmith]

Dead link. Cyrus Highsmith explained the four parts of a typeface: Things, Ends of Things, Intersections of Things and Not Things. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Frank Adebiaye
[The Tragicomedy of Digital Fonts]

[More]  ⦿

Frank Griesshammer
[Git for type designers]

[More]  ⦿

Frank Hinman Pierpont
[Rockwell]

[More]  ⦿

Frankenfont

This is an interesting book project by fathom Information Design: This project started because of a fascination with the way that PDF files contain incomplete versions of fonts. The shape data is high enough quality to reproduce the original document, however only the necessary characters are included in the PDF. This prevents others from extracting the fonts to be used for practical purposes, but creates an opportunity for a curious Victor Frankenstein who wants to use these incomplete pieces to create something entirely different. So the authors grabbed letters from tens of thousands PDF files and printed a book in them. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Franklin Gothic
[Morris Fuller Benton]

Franklin Gothic was designed from 1904 until 1913 by Morris Fuller Benton for ATF. It was one of the most successful advertising sans typefaces ever made. What the Americans called gothic in those days corresponds to the German Grotesk and the British grotesque. Designs close to Franklin Gothic of that era in Germany include Basic Commercial and Reform from D. Stempel AG. Later serif typefaces by Benton include Alternate Gothic, Lightline Gothic and News Gothic.

Franklin Gothic is seen in many high-profile situations, from books to billboards. It was featured on the cover of Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster. It is the official typeface of the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, and was even the typeface in the PBS series The Electric Company. Franklin Gothic Condensed was used for subtitles in the Star Wars films.

In 1979, under license with ATF, Vic Caruso began work on more weights of Franklin Gothic for ITC. His version adheres closely to the subtle variations in stroke thickness of the original design. As was usual with all ITC designs of that period, it had an enlarged x-height and condensed proportions, and, as a result, it became a standard choice for use in newspapers and advertising. In 1991, David Berlow completed the family for ITC (MyFonts shows 96 styles) by creating compressed and condensed weights. He writes: ITC Franklin Gothic Compressed is designed especially to solve impossibly tight copyfitting problems, while maintaining high legibility standards. ITC Franklin Condensed provides medium weights of narrow proportions.

Digital remakes and variations and versions include Franklin Gothic (URW++), Gothic 744 (Bitstream, later simply renamed Franklin Gothic), Franklin Gothic SG (2016, Elsner & Flake), Franklin Gothic Pro Black Condensed (2011, Red Rooster), and Frankfurt Gothic (Corel).

In 2019, ATF Type published ATF Franklin Gothic (Mark van Bronkhorst, Igino Marini, and Ben Kiel), a broad and multi-weight interpretation of Franklin Gothic, which only had bolder weights. For the lighter styles, the designers were inspired by Benton's Monotone Gothic.

MyFonts hit list for Franklin Gothic and its descendants. Subpage with the 96 styles of ITC Franklin Gothic by David Berlow, 1991-2008. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fred Showker

Dirty dozen typefitting tricks for designers. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Freddie Witherden
[A Treatise on Font Rasterisation]

[More]  ⦿

Frederic William Goudy
[National Old Style and Nabisco]

[More]  ⦿

Free ATypI

A personal opinion on the membership and conference fees for ATypI. After a Typophile discussion, ATypI's president, Mark Batty, lowered ATypI's membership fee for citizens of developing countries on February 18, 2003. A positive move! [Google] [More]  ⦿

Free font development discussion

Raph Levien muses about a website to foster the development of fonts to be released under licenses compatible with free software distribution. The typophiles discuss. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Free fonts on the web

Paul Neubauer's links to free fonts and typography in general. Gives info on which fonts to use in web pages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

French Face Extended

A modern typeface with short ascenders and descenders published by Monotype in the early part of the 20th century. In spite of its name the design follows English models. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Frenchwood Ronde

A metal typeface by Lanston Monotype. Its italic is almost a script, but does not seem to be related, as its name suggests, to the French hand know as ronde. [Google] [More]  ⦿

From metal to digital

Interesting discussion on Typophile on the transition from metal to digital type. Items dealt with include ink traps and thorns, optical scaling, soft contours, and randomized letters. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Frutiger

Wiki entry on Frutiger, the sans serif typeface created by Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger in 1968 for the newly built Charles De Gaulle International Airport at Roissy, France. This typeface design was initially prepared by Adrian Frutiger for his friend Alfred deVolz at Sofratype. The working drawings were made by Andre Guertler. The typeface was called Concorde (or Concorde Sofratype) and was released in 1968. When Linotype purchased Sofratype, the typeface was withdrawn, and the rights were returned to Frutiger. The design re-appeared in 1970-1971 on the signage for the Charles de Gaulle airport at Roissy outside of Paris. Linotype purchased the design from Frutiger and it was re-released as the typeface Frutiger in 1976. The new typeface, originally called Roissy, was completed in 1975 and installed at the airport the same year. A very legible family, it was released to the public by Stempel in 1976. Corporations worldwide use it for their identity: Raytheon, the National Health Service in Britain, the British Royal Navy, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Finnish Defence Forces. Road signs in Switzerland are in Frutiger, and the public transport system in Oslo uses it as well. Extensions of it include

• Frutiger Next (1997) made for signage of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Linotype released it in 2000.
• Frutiger Symbols (1998) and Frutiger Stones (1998).
• ASTRA Frutiger: a variant of Frutiger used by Swiss authorities as the new font for traffic signs, replacing VSS since 2003. It was based on Frutiger 57 Condensed, but with widening up- and down-strokes, which are intended to give the eye a better hold than was the case with the earlier version. A family of 2 fonts were made, called ASTRA-Frutiger-Standard/standard, and ASTRA-Frutiger-Autobahn/autoroute.
• Frutiger Capitalis (2005), containing only ornamental glyphs of religions, hand signs, astrological signs.
• Frutiger Arabic (2007) designed by Lebanese designer Nadine Chahine as a companion to the Latin typeface Frutiger and with the consulting of Adrian Frutiger. It is based on the Kufi style but incorporates aspects of Ruqaa and Naskh in the letter form designs.

FTF Billboard

Graphic designers get-together and manifesto for 2000. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fuck yeah kerning
[Kilian Valkhof]

A web site that posts examples of poor kerning. Run by Kilian Valkhof, a Front-end developer&user experience designer from The Netherlands. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Futura Display

A typeface designed by Paul Renner in 1932 (Bauer, Neufville, Berthold).

Derived typefaces include Futura Display by URW, Futura Display SB (2004, Scangraphic), Futura Display SH (2004, Scangraphic), Futura Display EF (Elsner & Flake), Deko Display Serial (2010, Softmaker), Function Display (Infinitype), S842 Deco (Softmaker), Steile Futura, Topic, Bauer Topic. Turista Gorda NF (2009, Nick Curtis) is based on Baltimore Type Foundry's Airport Tourist which in turn used ideas from Renner's 1932 typeface Futura Display.

Airport Gothic is a related metal face. Mc McGrew on Airport Gothic: Most of this series is the first American copy of Futura, which originated in Germany in 1927, designed by Paul Renner for Bauer. One source says it was cut from original Futura drawings, smuggled out of that country, but it seems more likely that matrices were made by electrotyping the imported type. An extrabold weight, Airport Black, was cut by Baltimore about 1943; information on this cutting is scarce and contradictory---one account says it was designed by Bill Stremic or Bill Blakefield, another that it was designed by Carl Hupie (or Hooper), and cut by Herman Schnoor. There is also Airport Black Condensed Title and Airport Broad. The latter is a modification of Airport Black, cut 50 percent wider on the pantagraph by Herman Schnoor. Baltimore later cast some of its Airport series from Monotype Twentieth Century matrices, and in a few cases listed both series. Airport Relief, Baltimore 299, is English Monotype Gill Sans Cameo Ruled, while Airport Tourist, Baltimore 602, is Futura Display, cast from electrotype mats of the German foundry type.

Hess Neobold was designed by Sol Hess for Monotype in 1934. Mac McGrew: It is a narrow, bold, and very squarish gothic with small serifs, designed for attention-getting display in a style of the day, but never made in more than one size. Compare Airport Tourist (Futura Display), Othello. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Futura: Text by Mac McGrew
[Paul Renner]

Futura is a geometric, serifless type designed by Paul Renner for Bauer Type foundry in Germany in 1927, and features reproportioning which at first seemed radical in relation to the traditional gothics. It first gained popularity in America as imported foundry type. The first copies in this country were made by Baltimore Type under the name Airport (q.v.). One source says it was cut from original Futura drawings, but most likely it was electrotyped from imported fonts. Three extrabold versions were added by Baltimore Type, apparently being introduced before their counterparts from other sources.

Airport Black and Airport Black Condensed Title were cut about 1943. Airport Broad is essentially a modification by pantagraph of Airport Black, being cut 50 percent wider. These typefaces are heavier than most of their counterparts, none of which copy them exactly, although Spartan Extra Black is about the same weight.

Intertype copied a number of Futura typefaces under the original names in 1939, with additional weights designed by Edwin W. Shaar and Tommy Thompson up to 1956.

Monotype copied the series under the name Twentieth Century, with additional versions by Sol Hess.

Spartan is claimed to have been redrawn from various European sources, but is almost indistinguishable from Futura. It was cut cooperatively by American Type and Linotype, with smaller sizes matching from both sources. Linotype introduced its Sanserif 52, later renamed Spartan Black, in 1939, while other weights appeared as late as 1955. Some of the additional weights were drawn for ATF by Bud Renshaw and Gerry Powell.

On Ludlow, Tempo Alternate is a near copy of Futura, but not quite as close as the other typefaces listed; in addition, this typeface has several alternate letters and figures which change the character of the design when substituted. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fyrisfonts
[Stefan Lundhem]

Stefan Lundhem started Fyrisfonts. He is the designer of Garajannon (Garamond family), Spartacus (a Roman, CODEX-like lettering font), Beckhem Gothic, Fournament, Primus, Fyris Fraction, Fyris Fraktur, Krabat, Heltime (mix of Times and Helvetica), Terminator, Bessie (2001, multiline art deco typeface modeled after Marcia Loeb's 1972 alphabet, Rainbow), Billie (2001, art deco titling, modeled after Marcia Loeb's 1972 alphabet, Zig Zag), Jämför abc, Miami Blues and Miami Vice (beautiful, now called Bessie and Billie, respectively). The pages in Swedish contain an in-depth study of Jenson and Adobe Jenson MM, Caslon, Cloister Old Style, Fraktur, Garamond, Minion MM, MultipleMaster fonts, Myriad MM, OpenType, Poynter, RailwayType, Newspaper type, Web fonts, Web typography, and screen typography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FY(T)I Scripts: From Formal to Casual

Ilene Strizver on script fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

g

A fun type discussion by experts on the letter "g". [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gaby Mrörch

Typographical links by Thierry Bouche and Gaby Mrörch. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gadget

A heavy sans display typeface sold by Apple, and designed by Font Bureau from 1995 until 1998. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gamb Design
[Manfred Baierl]

Manfred Baierl created the screen fonts Mini-5 and Mini-7 for 5pt and 7pt screen text in 2001. He also created the old typewriter font AltAdler, and the dot font Punkt. Free downloads. He sells Fishsoup, a type 1 font consisting of a smorgasbord of type styles. His pages have lots of useful discussions and links, not least of which is Bembo's Zoo. Check also on-line converter for typographic measurements, Top 10 typefaces, Information on the Euro. Download Ansicode (ANSI numbers replace characters). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gary Hustwit
[Helvetica]

[More]  ⦿

Gary McGraw
[Letter Spirit]

[More]  ⦿

genoTyp

Michael Schmitz's on-line program (2004) to create generations of letters by applying the principles of genetics. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Georg Kraus
[Preußisches Bleisatz-Magazin]

[More]  ⦿

George Williams: interview

An interview with my hero, George Williams, the developer of FontForge. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Georgia and Verdana

Essay by Daniel Will-Harris: Georgia and Verdana: Typefaces designed for the screen. [Google] [More]  ⦿

German numberplates font

FE Mittelschrift is the German car plate font designed between 1978 and 1980 by Karlgeorg Hoefer (1914-2000) together with the University of Giessen (Dept. of Physiology and Cybernetic Psychology). FE is the abbreviation of the German word fälschungserschwerend (difficult to forge). Characters were designed individually so that a C could not be made into an O and so forth. The typeface was first used on cars in 1994. Article by Susanne Schaller, with comments by a number of people. Martin Core claims his Sauerkrauto (2000) font was based on images of the license plates. Spiekermann dislikes the typeface because the letters have no relationship to each other: he calls it a complete forgery. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gerrit van Aaken
[Praegnanz.de]

[More]  ⦿

Getting Started With Type Design: A Personal Journey
[Mathieu Triay]

An excellent type design tutorial by Mathieu Triay for Creative Review, 2017. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GIFFYtype

Daniel Will-Harris provides an educational discussion of using GIF-coded letters in web pages. He also tells you how to go about getting them ready. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gill Sans: Critique by Ben Archer
[Ben Archer]

Ben Archer argues why Gill failed in his attempt to improve on Johnston's Underground typeface in his design of Gill Sans. He laments the lack of consistency and rhythm, the poor choices for some tails, ascenders and descenders. He concludes by saying: The old metal version of Granby has a faithfulness to Johnston's proportions and characteristics that Eric Gill missed in such a way as to suggest he did it deliberately. Nearly a century later, Edward Johnston's pioneering work is still the big noise in contemporary sans serif typeface design. So much for fool-proof! [Google] [More]  ⦿

Git for type designers
[Frank Griesshammer]

A page on Git for type designers brought to you by Frank Griesshammer. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GLaD construction

Read about the relationship between the GLaD construction (subdivide any segment into any number of equal parts with ruler and compass) and Tschichold's page layout proposals. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Global Type
[Lars Kähler]

German/English web site by Lübeck, Germany-based printing engineer Lars Kähler (b. 1962) about all typographic matters, but still under construction. For example, it will have biographies, complete lists of fonts from the major foundries, technological surveys, and articles on the history of type. Lars has been typesetter from 1987 until 1994. He spoke at ATypI 2006 in Lisbon on Global Type, his project. PDF of Lars' presentation. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Globe and Mail
[Nick Shinn]

Canada's main newspaper, The Globe and Mail, was redesigned on April 23, 2007. It features a new font family, consisting of Globe and Mail Sans, Globe and Mail News, and Globe and Mail Text subfamilies, all designed by Nick Shinn. Thanks to the new type, the width of the paper was decreased to 12 inches, matching the Wall Street Journal. The redesign is good, with strong sectioning by well-designed separators. Sample. See also the piece by News Designer. The Globe and Mail News font replaces the old serif headline font, and introduces a semi-serif with the ascenders of the b, d and l slightly bent near the top. Its "l" has a tail for readability I suppose. Personally, I would have stuck with a solid serif headline face---classy and timeless.

Chapter two, October 1, 2010--another redesign, this time catastrophic by any standard. Text content is reduced, pictures are bigger and flashier (and all in color), sports scores, sudoku puzzles, and just about any piece of information is smaller (to the point that sudokus, for example, are almost impossible to do with no scratch space left), and large one-page ads without information are taking over. Nick Shinn's Globe Sans is not bad, but the Globe promises a reduction in its use of serif typefaces for text, and that is another major blunder. This is very sad, indeed, because just about all other newspapers in the country, some French ones excepted, are in the hands of a right-wing group and provide predictable biased content. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Globe Gothic: Benton versus Goudy?

Globe Gothic is a typeface that came to ATF via Central Type Foundry's Quentell. Its career path is described by Mac McGrew: Globe Gothic is a refinement of Taylor Gothic, designed about 1897 by ATF at the suggestion of Charles H. Taylor of the Boston Globe, and used extensively by that paper. But Taylor Gothic has mostly the same lowercase as Quentell, though with hairlines heavied a bit. ATF's Central Type Foundry branch in St. Louis claims to have originated Quentell (q.v.) in 1895 or earlier. The conversion to Taylor Gothic was designed by Joseph W. Phinney, while the redesign as Globe Gothic in about 1900 is credited to Morris Benton. It is a serifless, thick-and-thin face, distinguished by the high crossbar on E, F, and H. The angular end on the stems of V, W, and most lowercase letters.

But there is a slight controversy as to whom designed Globe Gothic Bold, Benton, or Goudy, or others, McGrew: Globe Gothic Condensed, Extra Condensed, and Extended were designed by Benton about 1900. Globe Gothic Bold and its italic are also credited to Benton, in 1907 and 1908 respectively. But Frederic W. Goudy, in the book on his typefaces, says, "This type (Globe Gothic Bold), drawn at the suggestion of Joseph Phinney, followed in the main certain points which he wished brought out. It never had much vogue and is the least satisfactory (to me) of all my types." This is puzzling, as the bold departs somewhat from the style of the lighter weights, but is not at all characteristic of Goudy's work-nor of Benton's, for that matter. Studley of Inland Type Foundry was similar. Compare Ryerson Condensed, Radiant, Matthews, Pontiac, World Gothic.

In the digital era, we find Globe Gothic MN by Mecanorma and a more extensive family at Lanston Monotype called LTC Globe Gothic (2005). Colin M. Ford also created a digital typeface called Globe Gothic. Eli Hernandez's Magnolia (2019) was inspired by Globe Gothic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Glyphic or incise typefaces

Glyphic typefaces have flared strokes or tapered waistlines. They emulate letters carved into stone or bronze. Most of them are not serifed, but they can hardly be called sans typefaces either. Classical examples include Optima (Hermann Zapf), Albertus (Berthold Wolpe) and Pascal (José Mendoza). More recent glyphic or incise typefaces include Ideal Sans (Jonathan Hoefler), Carter Sans (Matthew Carter and Dan Reynolds, 2010, ITC) and Winco (Ramiro Espinoza). [Google] [More]  ⦿

GoldenWeb

This 11,000 font archive has taken typefaces from all major foundries and removed the trademark and copyright notices. The names are unchanged. It contains for example Basic Commercial (Linotype, 2004). If Linotype sues Goldenweb, then we have an interesting situation, because Linotype did exactly the same thing when it derived Basic Commercial from Berthold's Akzidenz Grotesk (namely, it removed and replaced the trademark and copyright notices, but did not touch the electronic font data). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gothic: Mac McGrew

Mac McGrew's discussion on Gothic starts with an important remark: Gothic, the purists say, is Blackletter or what we more often call Old English. But the name is so firmly established in American usage as meaning a plain block letter without serifs or hairlines, that we must accept that meaning. Also, it is part of many type names. But we prefer to go further, and reserve the term gothic for the traditional forms, and sans serif for the modified forms originating in Germany with the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s. Our preferred general term is serifless. In this book, gothics having distinctive family names are listed alphabetically throughout---see Alternate Gothic, Franklin Gothic, Modern Gothic, News Gothic, etc. Those with merely descriptive names are included in this section under the following headings: Numbered Gothics, Condensed Gothics, Inclined or Italic Gothics, and Miscellaneous Gothics. The term "Lining," added to many names when they were realigned to new standards around the turn of the century, has generally been ignored in this book, as it was later dropped in nearly all cases. Nineteenth-century gothics are not included except for a few representative ones or those that have been substantially used subsequently. "Title" gothics---all-cap versions usually occupying almost the entire body---are shown as secondary listings to the cap-and-lowercase versions where both exist. Offset Gothics were cut in reverse for a process of transferring proofs of type to lithographic stones, or more recently to electronic parts. Also see Record Gothic Offset. He the discusses gothic typefaces in detail.

• Numbered Gothics. Most such typefaces, except as cross-referenced below, are nineteenth-century designs; a few are shown because they were copied by Monotype or Linotype or otherwise survived for extensive use in this century. For ATF typefaces numbered in the 500s, the initial 5 generally indicates that the typeface has been adjusted to standard alignment from an older typeface with the same number otherwise; that is, Gothic No. 544 was formerly Gothic No. 44 to old standards.
  • Gothic No.6, an 1895 Inland face, is important only because Monotype adapted it as a practical and widely used utility typeface before the advent of sans serifs.
  • Gothic No. 13 is included under Condensed Gothics.
  • Gothic No.1 and 3: see Franklin Gothic (also see below).
  • Gothic No. 14. See Chamfer Gothic.
  • Gothic No. 16. See Franklin Gothic.
  • Gothic Nos. 17 to 20. See Trade Gothic.
  • Gothic No. 25, 38, and 520 to 526. See Gothic No. 545.
  • Gothic Nos. 29 to 35. See Copperplate Gothic.
  • Gothic, Mono 481, 496, 508. See Helvetica.
  • Gothic Nos. 39 to 45. See Metrolite.
  • Gothic Nos. 544 and 545 are typical plain nineteenth-century gothics, both shown by MacKellar in 1889 or earlier, but both have been copied extensively by other sources, and shown by ATF as late as 1979. Hansen's New York Gothic was equivalent to Gothic No. 545. There was also a comparable but lighter Gothic No. 543, which was not as long lasting. Combination Gothic and Interchangeable Gothic were similar to Gothic No. 545, but as title versions, with several sizes of caps on each of several bodies. Also see Octic Gothic.
  • Gothic No. 578 was shown as Gothic No.8 by Inland in 1898 as "the latest candidate for the printer's favor; a popular old typeface entirely recut." It was shown until 1941. It is a bold weight, and is quite similar to Standard Bold which as an import from Germany was very popular in this country in the 1950s. It is also similar to Comstock, but without the added outline. Keystone called it Standard Gothic, although it is not identical to the German face. As a nineteenth-century gothic, the cap G had no crossbar. Paragon Gothic is the same design, without lowercase, cast as a title face.
  • The small Laclede Type Foundry in St. Louis originated a pair of attractive gothics which apparently were scrapped when the foundry was taken over by BB&S. Gothic No.1 was similar to Franklin Gothic, and Gothic No.3 was similar to Square Gothic, but both had many small differences, the most noticeable being round dots on i, j, and punctuation marks. Another Gothic No.3 is made by Monotype, Linotype, and Intertype, probably from a nineteenth-century foundry source. It is similar to Gothic No. 544.
  • Some other numbered gothics appear under Numbered Faces.
• Condensed Gothics.
  • Inland Type Foundry introduced its Gothic Condensed No. 10 in 1904 as "an entirely new face, from which has been eliminated all of the inconsistencies and objectionable features so noticeable in similar series." Its companion Gothic Condensed Title No. 11, introduced in 1905, was shown by ATF as late as 1969; Monotype's New Gothic Condensed and Gothic Condensed Title are very similar; all are still handsome typefaces.
  • Another Inland typeface of about the same age, Extra Condensed Gothic No.1, survived almost as long in its all-cap version of Extra Condensed Title Gothic No. 12. BB&S had a very similar face, Gothic Extra Condensed No.6 and Title No.6.
  • Gothic No. 13 is a traditional heavy condensed gothic in small sizes; from 24-point up it is basically the same as Modern Gothic Condensed,. Unique Caps were added in 1937.
  • Gothic Condensed No. 523 was Keystone's Universal Gothic, introduced about 1906. Gothic No. 47 of BB&S is somewhat similar. Gothic Condensed No. 529 is a nineteenth-century design, and is similar to the later and more refined Alternate Gothic, but it remained in the ATF specimen books at least to 1979; most sources had comparable typefaces. Also see Vertical Gothic.
  • Monotype has several utility gothics, including Gothic Caps Condensed. No. 48, designed to occupy roman small cap positions in the standard arrangement; and Gothic Condensed, No. 49, a medium weight conventional sort of gothic. A Monotype specimen sheet, issued in 1917, says of Condensed Gothic, No. 515, "This was formerly our 18-point No. 51. We found that it did not match the balance of the series, so we have given it a new number." See Gothic Condensed No. 529.
  • Gothic No.1 Condensed. See Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed.
  • Gothic Condensed No. 2. See Gothic Condensed No. 529, also Alternate Gothic No. 3.
  • Gothic Condensed No.3. See Headline Gothic, Ludlow.
  • Gothic Condensed No. 521. Also see Vertical Gothic.
  • Gothic Condensed Outline. See Contour No.6.
  • Condensed Gothic Outline. See under Alternate Gothic.
  • Gothic Bold Condensed Title. See Railroad Gothic. Medium Gothic No.7. See Mid-Gothic, also Boston Gothic.
  • Medium Condensed Gothic, Ludlow, is a refinement of typical nineteenth-century, straight-sided gothics. It has been popular in newspaper work. Deluxe Variants are an additional feature of about 1939, when similar characters were designed for a number of gothics. Compare Mid-Gothic; Modern Gothic Condensed.
  • Ludlow also has two typefaces named Gothic Extra Condensed, 6-EC. The newer one, in 24to 84-point sizes, is very similar to Aurora Condensed from Germany, also known as Inserat Grotesk or Enge Wotan, with extremely short ascenders and descenders and lengthened white areas in the angular letters. The older Ludlow face, made only in 144-point, is similar to Extra Condensed Title Gothic No. 12, and has no lowercase. In this size, letters are cast individually on Ludlow, the long way of the slug, and used primarily for newspaper headlines.
• Inclined or Italic Gothics.
  • Gothic Italic No. 512, ATF, was advertised by Marder, Luse in 1893 or earlier as Gothic Italic No.3. BB&S had matching GothicItalic, formerly Degree Gothic No. 1.
  • The BB&S Gothic Italic Light was formerly Degree Gothic No.2. Several foundries had comparable typefaces; Inland called its comparable Gothic Italic "original."
  • Gothic Inclined, BB&S, was shown at least as early as 1889 as Inclined Lining Gothic, later known as Inclined Gothic No. 120. Inland advertised the same typeface as Title Slope Gothic, "improved." ATF and Monotype had a similar Inclined Gothic, and other founders had comparable typefaces.
  • Gothic Inclined Light of BB&S was formerly Slope Gothic No. 50 from 1879.
  • Bold Inclined Gothic. See Modern Gothic Italic.
  • Also see Doric Italic, Draftsman Gothic, Boston Gothic.
• Miscellaneous Gothics.
  • Monotype has several typefaces designated simply "Lining Gothic." Those not cross-referenced were undoubtedly copied or adapted from undetermined foundry typefaces. Lining Gothic No. 106 is very light, similar to Lightline Gothic but less refined; it has caps and lowercase. No. 112 is a little heavier, with caps and small caps only in each size. No. 176---see Mid-Gothic. No. 66 and 349---see Gothic No. 545. No. 350 is similar to No. 112 but has four sizes of caps in each of 6and 12-point, in the manner of Copperplate Gothic.
  • Gothic Modern. See Modern Gothic series.
  • BB&S's Gothic Novelty Title was formerly Tasso, 1890 or earlier. Other founders had the same design as Gothic, ATF; Gotham, Farmer Little; Gothic No. 205, Bruce; Ancient Gothic. Dickinson.
  • Gothic Novelty, the same typeface with lowercase, was formerly Tasso No.2.
  • Gothic Novelty Condensed was formerly Archer, about the same age but unlike the other typefaces in this group.
  • Hansen's Extended Lining Gothic was a copy of Philadelphia Lining Gothic.
  • Gothic Shade became Jim Crow.
  • Gothic Double Shade became Marble Heart (q.v.).
  • Gothic Outline Title No. 61, formerly Outline Gothic No. 61, dates to 1890 or earlier, but was still shown by ATF in 1979. Compare Contour Nos. 1 and 6, Franklin Gothic Condensed Outline, Whedons Gothic Outline.

Goudy Center links

Links on typography in general. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Goudy versus Inland

P22 reports this story about the foundry's theft of a design by Goudy: In 1900 Frederick Goudy was commissioned by W.W. Denslow to letter his edition of Mother Goose stories for the McClure, Phillips Co. of New York. (Denslow was the Illustrator of the original Wizard of Oz and also an occasional Roycroft illustrator.) The lettering that Goudy designed featured short ascenders and descenders, as well as a tall x-height. Shortly thereafter the Inland type foundry of St. Louis released a typeface that was a direct copy of Goudy's lettering. Goudy seemed to be more offended that the font was named "Hearst" after the notorious newspaper mogul, than by the fact that they copied his designs. As Goudy had put it: "To my surprise, a little later on, the Inland Type foundry of St. Louis, without consultation with me, brought out a new type copied--not inspired--from my Denslow lettering, and added insult to injury by naming it "Hearst." Goudy's reaction was to create his own type typeface for release. The result of Goudy's attempt to outdo a copy of his design evolved into the Pabst type face. Created for the Pabst Brewing Company, this type design has some similarities to Hearst, but is clearly its own unique face. The ascenders are much taller than Hearst and the x-height is reduced. The distressed edging of the letters and the caps bear a similarity, but clearly these are two distinct typefaces. Five years later in 1907, Goudy's "Powell" typeface was created for the Mandel Brother department store in Chicago. This "Powell" typeface bears a closer similarity to "Hearst."

The Hearst Roman typeface was later digitized by Dan Solo (Solotype) and by Nick Curtis in 2006 as Ragged Write NF. Alan Jay Prescott made New Hearst Roman and Italic in 1995. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Graffiti and typography

Great discussion at Typophile. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GRAFICA

Italian site with the history of type, stone cutting and calligraphy. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Graham Hicks
[Itchy Robot]

[More]  ⦿

Graphê

French association for the promotion of the typographic arts. Fighting for the survival of the treasures at the Imprimerie Nationale in France. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Graphiland
[Olivier Marcks]

Entitled "Cynthia et Luc, ou la Rome et la Mecque des liens", Olivier Marcks discusses, in French, a calligraphy and a font site. Merci, Olivier! [Google] [More]  ⦿

Graphos

Typography joint run by Bill Troop, a phenomenal wordsmith. Just read this quote: Typeface Design is obtuse, incomprehensible, unsuitable, unremunerable, and irresistable. With the aid of the computer, it has never been easier to design a typeface, and never easier to manufacture one. Because of PostScript, TrueType, and font creation programs like Fontographer, Font Studio, and Font Lab, there have never been more typeface designs available, nor have there ever been so many typeface designers active. Yet, just as at all times and places there is very little good of anything to be had, so there are remarkably few fine typefaces available today. Printers now have merely a fraction of the first rate types they had in 1930. " [Google] [More]  ⦿

Guia de tipos

Miguel Sousa's PDF files with type catalogs. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gunnlaugur Briem
[Notes on type design]

[More]  ⦿

Guru's Lair: Acrobat library shelf directory

Arizona-based Don Lancaster's huge list of links for PDF and Acrobat. Includes PostScript code websitan.ps, reflog1.ps and weblogu2.ps (website analysis in PostScript), urlindoc.ps (embed url links directly into your pre-Acrobat source documents), tutorial on PostScript "alpha" transparency, a JPEG to PDF file conversion tutorial, catools1.ps (a et of PostScript utilities that let you read Acrobat catalog internals), and a PFB2PFA.PS program. He has, among many other things, some articles on text justification in postscript, called Picojustification and Postjustification. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GUTenberg

Association of the French users of TeX. Has a newsletter, and publishes topical books. Run by Jacques André, University of Rennes. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Günter Schuler

Günter Schuler is a German author interested in good typography. Among the things he seels are the Cleverprinting DTP-Typomter (a handy sheet for measuring type sizes, both absolute and relative), TypeSelect Schriftenfächer (a wall paint-style foldout with typefaces), and Grundkurs Typografie und Layout (an introductory book on typography). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Haas Unica: The story

This story is taken from the Lineto web site in 2015, just after the digital revival Unica 77 (Christian Mengelt) was published by them. All italic text are verbatim quotes. The underlying thread is a huge fight between Haas and Linotype, with on the Haas side, the Swiss outfits Team 77 and Lineto, and on the Linotype side, the corporate heavyweight. Lineto / Team 77 writes: We are proud and honoured to release Unica77, created by Christian Mengelt of Team 77, the original authors of Haas Unica. Some see Unica as the pinnacle of modernist type design, arguably the most modern and the most Swiss typeface: the idea of a «pure medium», a «neutral carrier». Unica was the typeface that finally delivered what Helvetica had only promised, at a moment when, in a bizarre twist of fate, no-one was looking. And released for a fading technology at a time of transition, it was soon relegated to undeserved obscurity. The tragic story of Haas Unica is one of technological progress, economic pressure, corporate powerplay, bad timing, and unfortunate coincidences. It's the dark side of Helvetica's bright success story.

Helvetica had been secretly developed at the Haas Foundry in the mid-1950s, against the will of Stempel, their majority stakeholder. First presented as Neue Haas Grotesk, in 1957, it was a sensational success. Haas, a relatively small enterprise depending on cooperation and licensing deals, licensed it to Linotype for worldwide exploitation, who adapted it and turned it into the fabled Helvetica. However, Linotype prevented Haas from producing Helvetica for the now prevalent phototypesetting technology, and as a consequence, Haas was denied any major share of its global success.

In 1973, Alfred Hoffmann of the Haas type foundry had enough. He invited the prolific type designers André Gürtler, Christian Mengelt, and Erich Gschwind to investigate improving Helvetica for phototypesetting, and to propose a new typeface optimised for the dominant technology of the day. Their thorough analysis of four formally related typefaces (Akzidenz Grotesk, Univers, Neue Haas Grotesk and Helvetica), later published in the document «From Helvetica to Haas Unica», served as foundation for the synthesis of the brilliant new typeface, its name an amalgam of Univers and Helvetica.

But by the time Bobst/Autologic (for their Eurocat system) and Linotype (for their Linotronic range) came out with Haas Unica, the days for phototypesetting were numbered. The personal computer was on its way to radically alter the design and printing professions, and in 1984 the Apple Macintosh promised a new dawn for type design. Haas Unica fell into the gap of this transitional period. It had taken six years from commissioning to foundry release, and when it came out, the world was ready to move on.

The shift from analogue to digital turned the industry upside down. In rapid succession, companies went bankrupt, were taken over, stripped of their assets, and sold down the river. Four years after launching Haas Unica, Haas’ business partner Stempel was sold to Linotype. Haas, one of the world's oldest foundries with a back catalogue of sheer excellence, was taken over and terminated in 1989. Haas Unica disappeared, and its designers' appeals to Linotype for a digital reissue bore no fruit---it remained buried for close to 30 years.

But it was not forgotten. As avid users of type, we often wondered why Haas Unica wasn't available on the market. In 2004, Berlin-based designer and Lineto partner Stephan Müller came across a digital version in a Scangraphic specimen book. As it wasn't available to buy, he sourced a black market copy, made minimal changes to it and discreetly used it for an artist book. This made waves and before long, Unica became a revered tool of choice for keen designers, among them Norm, Cornel Windlin, Laurent Benner, Jon Hares, and Gregor Huber & Ivan Sterzinger, to name but a few.

The years passed, and in 2012, there still was no legitimate version of Haas Unica around. What was the problem? It seemed mysterious. When we got in touch with Team 77 to express our gratitude and respect, Christian Mengelt told us the whole Unica saga. Talking to him, we also realised that the version of Unica we had grown to appreciate as a quietly obedient servant was an unauthorised version, resolutely rejected by its original designers. According to Mengelt, its more monolinear drawing and its spacing and kerning bore little resemblance to the more subtle and refined original.

At the same time, Mengelt confirmed that Linotype had absolutely no interest in re-issuing Haas Unica and had even given up the trademark years ago; it was obviously just dead weight to them. We were awestruck and decided right there and then to collaborate, in a mission to preserve Unica in its true form and original state. Christian Mengelt dug out the original drawings and went to work, carefully redrawing each of the 8 original cuts. Maurice Göldner closely collaborated with Mengelt to adapt character sets to full Latin Extended encodings, build features and extend the family with new weights (Thin, Medium, Extra Black coming soon). The rest is history, as they say.

The bad luck for Haas Unica contnues, however, in 2014-2015, as Toshi Omagari finished his splendid rendering Neue Haas Unica and Neue Haas Unica Pan European for Linotype. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hamish Macpherson
[The typography of code]

[More]  ⦿

Handwriting: An Elegy
[Ann Wroe]

A wonderful article by Ann Wroe in the November 2011 issue of Intelligent Life. She celebrates the dying art of writing. The first two paragraphs set the tone: Take a sheet of paper. Better still, take a whole sheaf; writing prospers with comfort and cushioning. The paper may be deliciously thick, with ragged edges and a surface capillaried with tiny fibres of the rags that made it. It may be thin, blank, industrial A4, one of a thousand in a cut-price pack from Staples. It may be wove paper, vellum-smooth and shiny, or a bit of scrap, torn not quite straight, with a palimpsest of typed meeting-minutes showing through. But write. The instrument matters but, for the moment, seize anything. The old fountain pen, so familiar that it nestles like a warm fifth finger in the crook of the thumb, its clip slightly shaky with over-use; the pencil, its lead half-blunt and not quite steady in that smooth cone of wood; the ultra-fine felt tip from the office cupboard, with its no-nonsense simplicity, or the ancient mapping pen, nibbed like a bird's claw, which surely writes only in copperplate, scratching fiercely as it goes. Seize even a ball-point, though its line is mean and thin, and though teachers will tell you that nothing ruins writing faster. Dip, fill or shake vigorously; and write. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hans Reichardt
[Type Designer and Punchcutter]

[More]  ⦿

Hausschriften

A list (in German) of typefaces used by companies (often specially designed). Translated and partially reprodused here. We also took info from this subpage.

Company	Type	Alternate type	Yet another type	Still another type
ARD	The Sans	The Serif
AirBerlin	Meta
Airbus	Helvetica Neue	Times New Roman	Arial
Akzo Nobel	Symbol
Aral	Aral V2 Medium	Baskerville BQ
Audi	Audi Antiqua	Audi Sans
BMW	BMW Helvetica
Bonnfinanz	Frutiger	Adobe Garamond	Bodoni Book
Bosch	Bosch Sans/Serif
Bundesregierung	Demos
CDU	FF Kievit
Credit Suisse	Credit Suisse Type
DHL	Frutiger	Minion
DRK	Gill Sans	Rockwell
DSK	The Sans5
DaimlerChrysler	Corporate ASE
Deutsche Bahn	Helvetica
Deutsche Bank	DeuBa Univers
Deutsche Post	Frutiger	Helvetica
E.ON	Polo
Ford	Ford Light/Bold
Heineken	Heineken Sans/Serif
Henkel	Helvetica Neue	Swift EF	Arial	Times New Roman
IKEA	Ikea
Langenscheidt	Trade Gothic
Linde AG	Linde Dax
Lufthansa	Helvetica
Mephisto	Futura Book
Mercedes	Corporate A/E/S
Mitsubishi	Alpha Headline
Nissan	NissanAG
Nivea	Nivea Sans
Nokia	Nokia Sans/Serif
Opel	Opel Sans
Pioneer	Meta
Porsche	Franklin Gothic
Roche	Minion	Imago
School	Chevin
Shell	Futura LT Bold
Siemens	Siemens Sans/Serif/Slab Serif
Sparkass	Sparkasse Lt/Rg
TUI	Tui
Tengelmann	Syntax
UBS	UBS Headline	Frutiger 45
UPS	Dax
VW	VW Headline	Utopia
Velux	Futura
Volvo	Volvo Broard
WDR	Meta	Minion
Zeche Zollverein	Chevin

Company	Typeface	Foundry	Designer	Basis	Application
Škoda	Skoda Sans	Dalton Magg
3Sat	Gill Sans	Monotype	Eric Gill
ADAC	Franklin Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
AEG	Rotis	Agfa	Otl Aicher
AMD	Gill Sans	Monotype	Eric Gill
ARD	The Sans	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
ARD	The Serif	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
AVM	Info	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann, Ole Schäfer
AVM	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann
AWD	AWD			Interstate
AXA	Eras	ITC
Adidas	AdiHaus			DIN
Adobe	Myriad	Monotype
Adobe	Minion	Agfa	Robert Slimbach
AirBerlin	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann
Airbus	Times New Roman	Monotype
Airbus	Arial	Monotype	Patricia Saunders, Robin Nichols
Airbus	Neue Helvetica	Linotype
Akzo Nobel	Symbol
Aldi	Futura	Elsner+Flake	Paul Renner
Allianz	Formata Condensed				Headlines
Apple	Apple Myriad
Aral	Baskerville BQ
Aral	Aral V2 Medium
Arcor	Memphis	Linotype	Chauncey H. Griffith
Arvato	Bliss
Audi	Audi Antiqua
Audi	Audi Sans			Univers
B.Braun Melsungen AG	Rotis	Agfa	Otl Aicher
BMW	BMW Type			Helvetica
Beck's	Syntax	Linotype	Hans Eduard Meier
Berliner Zeitung	Walbaum	Linotype	J. E. Walbaum		Headlines
Berliner Zeitung	Utopia	Monotype			Text
Bertelsmann	Utopia	Monotype
Bertelsmann	Univers	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Bonnfinanz	Bodoni Book	Bitstream	Giambattista Bodoni
Bonnfinanz	Adobe Garamond	Agfa	Claude Garamond, Robert Slimbach
Bonnfinanz	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Bosch	Bosch Serif
Bosch	Bosch Sans
Bulthaup	Rotis	Agfa	Otl Aicher
Bundesagentur für Arbeit	Corporate S	URW++	Kurt Weidemann
Bundesregierung	Neue Demos
Bundesregierung	Neue Praxis
C&A	CA Info Type
C&A	CA Corporate Type
CDU	CDU Kievit			Kievit
Canon	DendaNew
Commerzbank AG	Commerzbank Headline			Stymie Black
CosmosDirekt	Geometric Slabserif 703	Bitstream			Logo
CosmosDirekt	Univers Condensed	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Credit Suisse	Credit Suisse Type
DA direkt	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger		Fliesstext
DA direkt	Linotype Ergo	Linotype			Logo
DAB Bank	DAB Bank Officina			Officina
DHL	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
DHL	Minion	Agfa	Robert Slimbach
DRK	Helvetica	Linotype	Max Miedinger
DRK	Arial	Monotype	Patricia Saunders, Robin Nichols
DSK	The Sans	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Delta Airlines	Delta	Dalton Magg
Der Spiegel	Spiegel Sans (a 32 style American gothic family)	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot	Franklin Gothic
Der Spiegel	Spiegel Serif	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot	Linotype Rotation
Detax	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Deutsche Bahn AG	DB Sans Condensed	URW++
Deutsche Bahn AG	DB Sans	URW++
Deutsche Bahn AG	DB Head	URW++
Deutsche Bahn AG	DB News	URW++
Deutsche Bahn AG	DB Serif	URW++
Deutsche Bank	Deutsche Bank Univers			Univers
Deutsche Post AG	Frutiger Condensed	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger		Headlines
Deutsche Post AG	Minion	Agfa	Robert Slimbach		Fliesstext
Deutsche Telekom	TeleAntiqua	URW++
Deutsche Telekom	TeleGrotesk	URW++
Deutsche Telekom	TeleLogo	URW++
Deutsche Welle	Bembo	Agfa	Francesco Griffo, A. Tagliente		Fliesstext
Deutsche Welle	DW Interstate			Interstate
Die Grünen	Corpus Gothic	Fountain	Peter Bruhn
Die Linke/PDS	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann		Fliesstext
Die Welt	Franklin Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
Die Welt	Excelsior	Linotype	Chauncery H. Griffith		Text
Die Welt	TimesBQ				Headlines
Direct Line	Gill Sans	Monotype	Eric Gill
Dr. Oetker	Dr. Oetker Tiffany			Tiffany
Dänisches Bettenlager	Futura	Elsner+Flake	Paul Renner
E-Plus	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
E-Plus	OCR Plus	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger	OCR F
EnBW AG	DIN	FontFont
Erco	Univers	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Erco	Rotis	Agfa	Otl Aicher
Eurex (Deutsche Börse AG)	Syntax	Linotype	Hans Eduard Meier
Ev. Johanneswerk	Arial	Monotype	Patricia Saunders, Robin Nichols
Ev. Johanneswerk	Helvetica	Linotype	Max Miedinger
FC Bayern München AG	FCB Interstate			Interstate
FSB	News Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
FSB	Univers	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Festo AG	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann
Financial Times	Utopia	Monotype
Financial Times	Walbaum	Linotype	J. E. Walbaum
Ford	Ford Extended			Helvetica
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung	Eighteen
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung	Times Ten
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung	FAZ Fraktur	URW++		Fette Gotisch
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Fujitsu Siemens Computer	Rotis	Agfa	Otl Aicher
GE (General Electric Company)	GE Inspira
Germanwings	Bliss
Gothaer (Versicherung)	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann
Heidelberg Gruppe	Heidelberg Gothic			News Gothic
Heidelberg Gruppe	Heidelberg Antiqua			Swift
Heineken	Heineken Sans
Heineken	Heineken Serif
Henkel	Swift
Henkel	Neue Helvetica	Linotype
Henkel	Arial	Monotype	Patricia Saunders, Robin Nichols
Henkel	Times New Roman	Monotype
IGEPA	IGEPA Raldo	URW++
ING DiBa	Stone Sans
Ikea	Ikea Sans			Futura
Ikea	Ikea Serif			New Century Schoolbook
Industrie- und Handelskammer	Rotis Sans	Agfa	Otl Aicher
Industrie- und Handelskammer	Rotis Serif	Agfa	Otl Aicher
J.M. Voith AG	Voith Helvetica			Helvetica
Jaguar	DIN	FontFont
Jet (Tankstelle)	JetSans
Kabel Deutschland	Kabel Unit			FF Unit
LBS	LBS The Sans			The Sans
Langenscheidt	Trade Gothic	Linotype	Jackson Burke
Lekkerland	LL Sari			FF Sari
Linde AG	Linde Dax			FF Dax
Linotype Library GmbH	Univers	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Lufthansa	Helvetica	Linotype	Max Miedinger
MINI	MINITypeRegular	Dalton Maag			Fliesstext
MINI	MINITypeHeadline	Dalton Magg			Headlines
Mazda	BaseTwelve Sans				Headlines
Mazda	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger		Text
McDonald's	Akzidenz Grotesk
Mecklenburg Vorpommern	Myriad Pro
Mecklenburg Vorpommern	Lithograph
MediaMarkt	Franklin Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
Mephisto	Futura Book	Elsner+Flake	Paul Renner
Mercedes	Corporate E	URW++	Kurt Weidemann
Mercedes	Corporate A	URW++	Kurt Weidemann
Mercedes	Corporate S	URW++	Kurt Weidemann
Mitsubishi	Alpha Headline
Mobilcom	Neue Helvetica Extended	Linotype
Müller (Drogerie)	MuellerSchrift			Gill Sans
Münchner Rück	Univers	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
N-TV	Info Office	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann, Ole Schäfer		Laufbänder
NDR	NDR Sans
Nissan	NissanAG
Nissan	Nissan Standard	URW++
Nivea	Nivea Sans
Nokia	Nokia Sans		Erik Spiekermann
Nokia	Nokia Serif		Erik Spiekermann
OBI	Obi Sans	Elsner+Flake
Opel	Opel Sans			Futura
PAGE (Magazin)	GST Polo	TypeManufactur	Georg Salden
Paul Hartmann AG	Frutiger Next	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Peugeot	Gill Sans	Monotype	Eric Gill
Pioneer	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann
Plus (Supermarkt)	The Sans	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Porsche	News Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
Porsche	Franklin Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
Postbank AG	Frutiger	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
Premiere World	Premiere Gothic			Franklin Gothic
Puma	Puma Pace	Dalton Magg
Quelle (Versandhaus)	Quelle Interstate			Interstate (1993, Tobias Frere-Jones)
RBB	Interstate (1993, Tobias Frere-Jones)	Font Bureau	Tobias Frere-Jones
RTL aktuell	Bank Gothic	Bitstream	Morris Fuller Benton
RWE	RWE Corporate
Rama	Rama Typo
Ravensburger	The Sans	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Roche	Minion	Agfa	Robert Slimbach
Roche	Imago
Roche	Minion	Agfa	Robert Slimbach
Roche	Imago
SPD	The Sans	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Saab	Gill Sans	Monotype	Eric Gill
Sat.1	SAT1DigitalSans			Digital Sans
School	Chevin
Schwäbisch Hall AG	Charlotte Sans			The Sans
Shell	Futura LT Bold	Elsner+Flake	Paul Renner
Siemens	Siemens Serif	URW++
Siemens	Siemens Sans	URW++
Siemens	Siemens Slab	URW++
Smart	Smart Courier			Courier
Sparda Bank	Clarendon	Linotype	H. Eidenbenz		Headlines
Sparda Bank	ITC Officina Sans	Agfa	Erik Spiekermann		Fliesstext
Sparkasse	Sparkasse Light	Dalton Magg
Sparkasse	Sparkasse Regular	Dalton Magg
Stuttgarter Zeitung	DTL Argo
Stuttgarter Zeitung	Gulliver
Süddeutsche Zeitung	Excelsior	Linotype	Chauncery H. Griffith		Text
Süddeutsche Zeitung	Helvetica	Linotype	Max Miedinger		Headlines
TU Dresden	DIN Bold	FontFont
TU Dresden	Univers 45	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
TUI	Tui	Dalton Magg
Tagesspiegel (Berlin)	Franklin Gothic	Linotype	Morris Fuller Benton
Tagesspiegel (Berlin)	Poynter	Font Bureau			Fliesstext
Tagesspiegel (Berlin)	Californian	Font Bureau	Frederic W. Goudy, David Berlow		Headlines
Talkline	Neue Helvetica	Linotype			Text
Talkline	Rockwell	Monotype	F. H. Pierpoint		Headlines
Taz (Berlin)	Taz III	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Taz (Berlin)	LF Taz	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Taz (Berlin)	The AntiquaE	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Taz (Berlin)	TazText	LucasFonts	Lucas de Groot
Tchibo	Interstate (1993, Tobias Frere-Jones)	Font Bureau	Tobias Frere-Jones
Tengelmann	Syntax	Linotype	Hans Eduard Meier
UBS	Frutiger 45	Linotype	Adrian Frutiger
UBS	UBS Headline
UPS	UPS Sans
VW	Utopia	Monotype
VW	VW Headline
Vattenfall	Interstate	Font Bureau	Tobias Frere-Jones
Velux	Futura	Elsner+Flake	Paul Renner
Vobis	Interstate (1993, Tobias Frere-Jones)	Font Bureau	Tobias Frere-Jones
Vodafone	Vodafone Font Family	Dalton Magg		InterFace
Volvo	Volvo Broard
WDR	Minion	Agfa	Robert Slimbach
WDR	Meta	FontFont	Erik Spiekermann
Wilo AG	Wilo Plus			FF Plus
Xbox 360	Convection
Xerox	Walbaum	Linotype	J. E. Walbaum
Yello Strom	Yello DIN			FF DIN
ZDF	Handel Gothic	URW++			Logo
ZDF	Swiss 721			Helvetica
ZF Friedrichshafen	ZF Serif	URW++
ZF Friedrichshafen	ZF Sans	URW++
Zeche Zollverein	Chevin
comdirect	Dax	FontFont	Hans Reichel
dm Drogeriemarkt	DM Cochin			Cochin
dm Drogeriemarkt	DM The Sans			The Sans
e·on	GST Polo	TypeManufactur	Georg Salden
kabel eins	DIN 1451	FontFont
mdr (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk)	can you (read me?)
tegut...	tegut-Sans			Officina Sans

Credit for some images below: Danielle West. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hausschrift-Liste Unternehmen-zu-Schrift

Ralf Hermann's list of house fonts used by German companies. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Heike Häser
[typemotion]

[More]  ⦿

Helmar Fischer
[Typoecke]

[More]  ⦿

Helvetica
[Gary Hustwit]

A documentary film about Helvetica and the influence of type in our lives, by Gary Hustwit, released in 2007. From the web site: Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day. The film was shot in high-definition on location in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium. [...] Interviewees in Helvetica include some of the most illustrious and innovative names in the design world, including Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Michael C. Place, Norm, APFEL, Pierre Miedinger, Bruno Steinert, Otmar Hoefer, Rick Poynor, Lars Müller, and many more. Screened in Montreal on May 5, 2007, at Concordia University, the reaction was unanimously positive. The editing, pace, music and visual content are just perfect. The humour of Hustwit shines through when he pits the rationalists (pro-Helvetica people) against the emotionalists (the grunge crowd). The interviews with Massimo Vignelli (very funny), Wim Crouwel, Erik Spiekermann (about Helvetica: "bad taste is everywhewre"), Paula Scher (she said that Helvetica was used by the war corporations in Vietnam and is the cause of the Iraq war) and Michael Bierut are very entertaining. Maybe on purpose, maybe not, Hustwit used the Germans as a comical counterweight. FontShop link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Helvetica quotes

Taken from the flyer for Helvetica---Homage to a Typeface, edited by Lars Müller:

• Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay. (Adrian Frutiger)
• In a way, The Beatles are the Helvetica of pop; just like Helvetica is The Beatles of typefaces. (Experimental Jetset)
• If you have no intuitive sense of design, then call yourself an "information architect" and only use Helvetica. (David Carson)
• Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces. (Wolfgang Weingart)
• I discovered that I never really used Helvetica but I like to look at it. I like the VW beetle, too, although I've never driven one. (Stefan Sagmeister)
• I have never designed a logotype without first trying it in Helvetica. It is still the most versatile, classic and readable of all typefaces. (Steff Geissbuhler)
• Any good typeface can be completely destroyed when misused or extensively overused. Helvetica seemed to sustain a beating like no other. Still fresh, still popular Helvetica is king. (Alexander Gelman)
• There was once a typeface that had the reputation of being more legible and functional than all the others. It was used everywhere and for everything, from signs to logos. Then one day readers couldn't stand seeing it anymore and decided to stop reading it - despite its superior legibilty. Bit by bit designers forgot about it and it was only used by lay people. Then it was rediscovered for a while and in fashion again. Even books were published about it. (Ruedi Baur)
• Helvetica is the typeface for a deserted island. (Friedrich Friedl)
• We hate to like Helvetica. (Hamish Muir)
• I remember a time at Yale when my work was being critiqued by Paul Rand. Mr. Rand told me only to use Helvetica as a display typeface never in text, then he squinted, leaned in, and whispered in my ear, "because Helvetica looks like dogshit in text". (Kyle Cooper)

Credit: Poster by Charlotte Bagnara. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Helvetica: The name

About the genesis of the name Helvetica, Max Miedinger's famous typeface from 1957. According to Bruno Steinert, Stempel's marketing director had the idea to change the name, because Neue Haas Grotesk didn't sound like very good for a typeface that was intended to be sold in the United States. Alfred Hoffmann, the son of Eduard Hoffmann who influenced and advised Miedinger, explained: Stempel suggested the name of Helvetia, this is very important. Helvetia is the Latin name of Switzerland. My father said, that's impossible, you cannot call a typeface after a name of a country. So, he said, why don't we call it Helve-ti-ca. So, in other words, this would be "the Swiss typeface". And they agreed. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Helvetica, the Voice of Opposition
[Steven McCarthy]

Discussion and critique on Helvetica offered by Steven McCarthy (University of Minnesota). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Herb Lubalin
[Lubalin Graph]

[More]  ⦿

Herron School of Art

Unbelievably nice web pages for a typography course atught by John Chastain at the Herron School of Art. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hewlett-Packard

Info on Panose, Infinifont, FontSmart, and the Book of Characters. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Historical alternatives to the Latin alphabet

Essay by Nicholas Fabian. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hobo sign language

Symbols used by hobos for communication. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hollow Truetype Fonts

Jacques Paris lists and discusses hollow truetype fonts. Some downloads: AgencyGothic, CaesarOpen, Bio-disc, FanatikaOne, FanatikaTwo, GoudyOldStyleBT-Roman, CAITLYN, Nonstop, PointedOut, Ruffian-Outline, RainyDays, SqueezeMeBaby, ArialicHollow, BurnOut, Callistroke, Flashbackversion3, Flyman, ImpressedMetal, JediHollowNormal, JediSolidNormal, lemans, YoldAnglican, AlfredoHeavyHollow, Babylon5-Hollow, Bullpen3D, Bullpen, Bullpen-Italic, Gubbrra.AgencyGothic, Bio-disc, FanatikaOne, FanatikaTwo, GoudyOldStyleBT-Roman, CAITLYN, Nonstop, PointedOut, Ruffian-Outline, RainyDays, SqueezeMeBaby, Stitch-&Bitch, ArialicHollow, BurnOut, Callistroke, Flashbackversion3, ImpressedMetal, JediHollowNormal, JediSolidNormal, lemans, YoldAnglican, AlfredoHeavyHollow, Babylon5-Hollow, Bullpen3D, Bullpen, Bullpen-Italic, Gubbrra. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Homage Script and Homage Condensed

In 2016, Garagefonts published a pair of nostalgic 1980s-theme typefaces without identifying the designer, other than International TypeFounders and Phil's Fonts. Homage Script (2016) is inspired by James Hellmuth's 1980 cover lettering for Phil's Photo Homage to the Alphabet, and Homage Condensed (2016) is a digital revival of LSC Condensed by Tom Carnese and Herb Lubalin. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hot Metal Homepage

List of typecasters (in the United States). [Google] [More]  ⦿

HotFont Directory

French typography links. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Hyperfuente
[Enrique Longinotti]

Argentinian site managed by Longinotti's group at FADU, University of Buenos Aires, est. 2009. This project is dedicated to extreme fonts---many creations are truly spectacular. It is thus a huge source of font ideas. The list below has the names and creators of the 208 fonts made by FADU-UBA graduates between 2008 and 2010, in three consecutive classes, with direct links to their university pages, where one can find images. Because of the overload, I will only comment on a few of the typefaces elsewhere on my Argentinian page. In alphabetical order of typeface name: ⦿ 1810 Golpista: by Lucas Morsellino ⦿ 72 Degrees: by Alvaro Vaquero ⦿ Alfonsina: by Rocio Cueto ⦿ Aliro: by Carla S. Bozzola ⦿ Anette's Font: by Paula Bustos ⦿ Angélica: by Facundo Quiroga ⦿ Antigona: by Analía Aspauzo Baez ⦿ Aracno: by Denise Furman ⦿ Arnol: by Verónica Bertazzo ⦿ Babel: by Florencia Pereira Da Luz ⦿ Backigham Palace: by Luciana Paiva ⦿ Bakery: by Agustina Re ⦿ Balawi: by Ma. José Galanda ⦿ Balu: by Bratin Esteban ⦿ Bariloche: by Yanina Walter ⦿ Bella Donna: by Ma. Laura Verazzi ⦿ Belta: by Aixa Aztarbe ⦿ Bemola: by Ma. Angeles Scarimbolo ⦿ Bendland: by Debora Palti ⦿ Benicius: by Diego Martinez Bela ⦿ Bernini Gian: by Martín Dalesandro ⦿ Bikini: by Marcela Casabona ⦿ Black Queen: by Matías J. Fernández G. ⦿ Blackheart Inertia: by Sebastián Barraud ⦿ Blackwidow: by Cinthia Alonso ⦿ Blindado: by Ma. Cecilia Montaño ⦿ Blue Velvet: by Jésica Sanson ⦿ Bogus: by Emiliano Suárez ⦿ Boldalic: by Gutierrez ⦿ Bolticad: by Hernán Rodríguez ⦿ Botero: by Sebastián Garbrecht ⦿ Brott: by Andrea Broitman ⦿ Buffóntica: by Lucía Ladreche ⦿ Calvina: by Laura Dattoli ⦿ Caroline Type: by Luciana Manazzoni ⦿ Carta: by Carolina Monacci ⦿ Caspianfont: by Ana Zimmermann ⦿ Celeni: by Lucía Ramallo Sarlo ⦿ Cenefa: by Natalia Vetta ⦿ Ceñida: by Agustín Morano ⦿ Clonum: by Alejandra Arregger ⦿ Cloverflieds: by Mariana Mac Loughlin ⦿ Colofón: by Maximiliano Sproviero ⦿ Column Roman: by Ayelén Starzak ⦿ Cupcake: by Andrea Landoni ⦿ Dam: by Luz Aicardi ⦿ Damajuana: by Rocio Ruiz ⦿ Dammar: by Yony Fernando Huaman ⦿ Decorte: by Juan Manuel Riva ⦿ Dei Verbum: by María Teresa Beccar ⦿ Delhi: by Francine De Tullio ⦿ Denan: by Hernán Silles Roth ⦿ Dergollum: by Carol Pinto ⦿ Desencadenada: by Francisco Valdez ⦿ DHNN Wilson: by Lucas Davison ⦿ Dighot: by Diana Sanchez ⦿ Dilatatie: by María Brex ⦿ Diplodocus: by Martiniano Garcia Cornejo ⦿ Dixie Light: by Eugenia Mello ⦿ Don Felix: by Natalie Galindo ⦿ Donatello: by Fernando García Laucona ⦿ Drop Seriff: by Alberto Federico ⦿ Efilona: by Leonardo Píccolo ⦿ Eightys's font: by Ana Valeria Canelo ⦿ Ema Zunz: by Lucía Szych ⦿ Epistemologia: by Jacques Franz Toriglia ⦿ Erahood: by Pamela Aurora ⦿ Etile: by Santiago Adur ⦿ Expressive: by Julieta Valiente ⦿ Faegon: by Pablo Menéndez ⦿ Famkul Italic: by Florencia Diaz ⦿ Fatty: by Justina Leston ⦿ FedDartype: by Sebastián Fucks ⦿ Fegs: by Celeste Peney ⦿ Figaro: by Carolina Wasiljew ⦿ Fiji: by Andrés Rosenberg ⦿ Filografía: by Cecilia Billoch ⦿ Filoseidología Ponzettiana: by Alejandro San Pedro ⦿ Finola: by Ivana Pazos Boullón ⦿ Fits Neo Gotik: by Ludmila Lara ⦿ Foster: by Augusto Menestrina ⦿ Fractus: by Federico Zrycki ⦿ Frakfurt: by Emanuel Gerber ⦿ Fran: by Iris Santana ⦿ Frappé: by Magdalena Sifredi ⦿ Furh Modern: by Carolina Pernet ⦿ Giambattista Illuminame: by Verónica Grandjean ⦿ Girak: by Sebastian Sanchez ⦿ Gloomy: by Alicia Lee ⦿ Gluttony: by Jimena Zazas ⦿ Good Folks: by Ruth Miller ⦿ Goodfortune: by Giuliana Grippo ⦿ Guilvant Font: by Florencia Mendez ⦿ Gurkaf: by Wozniak ⦿ Haarp: by Micaela Diaz ⦿ Headache Gothic: by Daniela Rascovsky ⦿ Heavyink: by Esteban Estomba ⦿ Holga: by Paola Mathieu ⦿ Homesick: by Georgina Di Francesco ⦿ Humekoy: by Brenda Diaz ⦿ Ignea: by Ma. Lucia Tissino ⦿ Incriptus: by Joaquín Lavori ⦿ Iota Font: by Ana Paula Santander ⦿ Irontail Gothic: by Brian Aldave ⦿ Isolda: by Stefania Orsini ⦿ Italgraph: by Johanna Sosa ⦿ Jocelyn: by Fabián Mariño ⦿ Jockimo: by Astrid Bauckhage ⦿ Joker: by Sofía Arhancet ⦿ Juana: by María Juana Sibolich ⦿ Junior: by Milagros Barros Tomé ⦿ Kilo: by Leandro Di Pascuale ⦿ Kilogramica: by Ma. Soledad Garcia Rodriguez ⦿ Kimborni: by Mauricio Dias ⦿ Kowgui: by Laura Di Candia ⦿ Kramer: by Mercedes Moltedo ⦿ Kraut: by Marcelo Granero ⦿ Kyss: by Carolina Norzagaray ⦿ Lady Elizabeth Grant: by Sabrina Lopez ⦿ Lang Font: by Fernanda Cinzano ⦿ Lashing Candy: by Sabrina De Mestre ⦿ Last Nk: by Anabela Willie ⦿ Latter Serif: by Marcia Garibaldi ⦿ Leguin: by Marcela Fernandez ⦿ Look Font: by Clara Severo ⦿ Lucha Unicase: by Lucia Guisado ⦿ Lucky Type: by Paula V. Hernandez ⦿ Madox: by Nadia De la Cruz ⦿ Manuale: by Juan Eduardo Nápoli ⦿ Marea: by Andrea López ⦿ Marinera: by Facundo Rodríguez ⦿ Marteaux: by Martín Canal ⦿ Mavera: by Fernando Escobares ⦿ May Gothic: by Aylen Marzo ⦿ Mecánica: by Ángeles Gonzalez ⦿ Melba: by Daniela Scarone ⦿ Mifont: by Bianca Trezza ⦿ Milk Shake: by Camilo González Lowy ⦿ Minoris: by Gabriela Calvo ⦿ Monia: by Lucas Di Prisco ⦿ Nai: by Ignacio Sottano ⦿ Nemesya: by Danila Gallardo ⦿ Neo Scriptum: by Renata Caballin ⦿ Newpress: by Julieta Pisani ⦿ Norton Gothic: by Juan Rodríguez Cuberes ⦿ Noville: by Cecilia Álvaro ⦿ Nü¼ Font: by Nadia Menotti ⦿ O Merinda: by Ana Cordani ⦿ Oblong: by Gabriela Palmieri ⦿ Odysea: by Lisandro Mansilla ⦿ Old Glyph: by Gerardo Sanchez ⦿ Old Magazine: by Ulises Faggiani ⦿ Olden Zebra: by Noelia Romero Mendoza ⦿ Olivia: by Diana Mora ⦿ Onirik: by Agustina Borsani ⦿ Oriental Condensed: by Leonardo Barilari ⦿ Orondas: by María Carolina Espinosa ⦿ Patova: by Anabella Mazzuca ⦿ Peperina: by Cristina Alvarez ⦿ Picolina: by Lucia López ⦿ Pochoclo: by Daniela Shinzato ⦿ Poster Bondi: by Juan LLorens ⦿ Qhanqa: by Juan Martinez ⦿ Queen: by Claudio Guzmán ⦿ Read Praz Std: by Emiliano Agnetti ⦿ Recrearte Italic: by Fabbro ⦿ Requiem: by Daniel Fernandez ⦿ Robertha: by Dominique Raed ⦿ Rypher: by Flavio Martínez ⦿ Sabayon: by Cecilia Kimsa ⦿ Saint Firulet: by Florencia Baldini ⦿ Salmuera: by Fernanda Moench ⦿ Schrag Pech: by Carolina Melul ⦿ Schynus Regular: by Ma. Belén Toledo ⦿ Serenity: by Carla Llinas ⦿ Sergo: by Ma. Florencia Garcia ⦿ Siesta: by Luciana Sanchez Guerrero ⦿ SirFont: by Florencia Marascio ⦿ Sixfingers: by Matias Seisdedos ⦿ Sleepy: by Marcelo Di Carlo ⦿ Slender: by Silvana Lopéz Devito ⦿ Sofia: by Esteban Simone ⦿ Staralfur: by Natalia Lee ⦿ Tagua: by Lucía Estévez ⦿ Taipu: by Alejandro Alarcón ⦿ Tangerine: by Carolina Grosso ⦿ Techi: by Ricardo Kim ⦿ Templetype: by Guillermina Astorga ⦿ Tomato Soup: by Ma. Florencia Iglesias ⦿ Tomp Regular: by Tomas Rafael Palazzo ⦿ Tormes: by Adrián Cattalini ⦿ Trovattore: by Paula Do Souto ⦿ Unique: by Hernán Fraga ⦿ Urbano: by Florencia Cambera ⦿ Vade Retro: by Evelyn Von Eckenbrecher ⦿ Vennezia: by Karina Haasz ⦿ Verjilius Augusteus: by Andrés Apud ⦿ Vesper: by Alejandra Montalbetti ⦿ Vicario: by Carolina Carballo ⦿ Vikinga: by Martín Kazaniets ⦿ Vittandaj: by Elizabet Correa ⦿ Wayne Bruce: by Juan Francisco Adriani ⦿ Wedding: by Marisol Lucero ⦿ Wide Drops: by Laura Espeso ⦿ Wynox: by Herrera Broner Lucila ⦿ Xixo Xixo: by Adolfo Gregorio Acosta ⦿ Zephora: by Florencia Basile ⦿ Zerdai: by Rodrigo Oturakdjian. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ian Obermuller
[Fontroduction]

[More]  ⦿

Ikea: The flap

In 2009, Ikea, which had been using Ikea Sans and Ikea Serif, switched to Verdana for its signs. Freely distributed by Microsoft, the typeface allows Ikea to use the same font in all countries and with many alphabets. An Ikea spokesperson adds: It's more efficient and cost-effective. Plus, it's a simple, modern-looking typeface. But the verdict by typographers is unanimous---this is a bad choice. One person even started a wiki page called Verdanagate. Excerpts from their reactions:

• Carolyn Fraser (a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia): Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web - it's dumbed down and overused. It's a bit like using Lego to build a skyscraper, when steel is clearly a superior choice.
• Simon l'Anson (creative director at Made by Many, London): It has open, wide letterforms with lots of space between characters to aid legibility at small sizes on screen. It doesn't exhibit any elegance or visual rhythm when set at large sizes. It's like taking the family sedan off-road. It will sort of work, but ultimately gets bogged down.
• Lise Abend (Time Magazine): The main complaint that online protesters have, though, is that the newly adopted font is plain ugly. Especially when it's enlarged to, say, the size of a catalogue headline. Or worse yet, a billboard.