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Helvetica
Max Miedinger
1957
“First learn a proper trade.” These were the words with which Max Miedinger’s father put an end to the debate on the future career of his 16-year-old son, who longed to become a painter. Instead, in the autumn of 1926, Miedinger junior began an apprenticeship as a type setter with the Zurich printing company Jacques Bollmann. Four years later, he knew for certain: “I want to be a designer, not spend the rest of my life fiddling with columns of type in galleys”. Evening classes with Johann Kohlmann at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts confirmed his interest. Finally, in 1936, Max Miedinger was able to put his talent to professional use – as a typographer in the advertising studio of the Globus department store chain. There, over the ten years that followed, he created posters, newspaper advertisements, the corporate lettering and printing for in-house use.
After the Second World War, Miedinger left the bustle of Zurich and applied to work as a salesman at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, near Basel. The director Eduard Hoffmann was impressed by Miedinger’s versatility and, after seeing his notebook of sketches for new type, let him in on his “secret project”, which he was hoping would bring the Haas foundry new commercial success. For its competitor H. Berthold was dangerously close to wooing away the Swiss company’s customers with its successful Akzidenz Grotesk. Swiss Typography was in its heyday, and yet even Switzerland’s own designers were using the bestselling Berlin typeface. Hoffmann hoped to put an end to this development with a new sans-serif, which Miedinger was to design. As a blueprint he used a linear sans-serif published by the Leipzig foundry Schelter & Giesecke in 1880, Schelter Grotesk.
A few months later, the first proofs of Neue Haas Grotesk were on Hoffmann’s desk. He was delighted. Neue Haas Grotesk made its premiere in the summer of 1957. Two years on, Swiss Typography was spilling over into Germany. In Frankfurt’s Hedderichstraße, D. Stempel AG, which had been the majority shareholder in the Haas Type Foundry since 1954, was giving great thought to how it could jump on this bandwagon. In June 1959, sales whiz Heinz Eul proposed incorporating Neue Haas Grotesk into the Stempel range, specifically for the “advertising designers” as a weapon against Futura and Akzidenz Grotesk. But he was not completely happy with the name. It needed a new one – and one that would make the purpose and geographical origin of the typeface immediately comprehensible. One morning, after a long and restless night, Eul put a letter suggesting the name “Helvetia” in the mailbox of his boss Erich Schultz-Anker. He, in turn, after a brief consultation with Eul, changed this to “Helvetica”, and launched the typeface in early 1961 – “unbearably late”, in Eul’s opinion, but it proved to be right in time.
In the 1960s, the distinctively named typeface became an unparalleled international success. The ubiquity of Helvetica itself, and of a vast number of imitations, made it into something of a “typographical menace” in the eyes of some critics. Innumerable corporate designs – including those of Lufthansa, Bayer, Hoechst, Deutsche Bahn, BASF and BMW – use Helvetica for their identity. This is not because of a lack of inspiration on the part of the designers, but because Helvetica’s popularity meant that it was always available – an important factor in the age of mechanical typesetting.
In 1983, D. Stempel designed Neue Helvetica for the typesetting equipment manufacturer Linotype. In the course of this process, the various Helvetica fonts, which had evolved over time and did not always match one another, were harmonised. Only two years later, Linotype took over Stempel AG and decided to dissolve the company. In the years that followed, Neue Helvetica grew to include 51 fonts, and continued the success story begun by its predecessor.
When Linotype was defining the technical basis for Desktop Publishing+++ (DTP) with Apple and Adobe in 1985, the original Helvetica returned to play a key role. Four fonts from the Helvetica family were among the first eleven fonts built into the Apple laser printer, establishing a “typographical starter kit” for computer-based design work.
Despite their criticisms, typography experts agree that Helvetica embodies the ideal of objectivity that was propagated by Swiss graphic design at that time. This feature has made the “featureless typeface” into an icon of modern design.
Source: Fontshop
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Garamond
Claude Garamond
1530
Paris, Christmas Eve, 1534. As countless families delighted in the happy faces of their children, at the Place Maubert, 35-year-old Claude Garamond was experiencing the most terrible moment of his life. He was watching with tears in his eyes as his teacher, the printer Antoine Augereau was burnt at the stake, along with his books.
These were turbulent times, early in the French Renaissance, full of faith in intellectual thinking, in writing, in books and in humanism. The Bible was being printed in the vernacular for the first time, bills protesting against the Mass heralded the Reformation, Luther’s theses were circulating, and religious power struggles were on the horizon.
Augereau was accused of writing pamphlets which criticised the Catholic Church. But in fact he was a scapegoat, sacrificed in place of his client Margaret of Navarre, a sister of the king and enthusiastic supporter of Luther. The powerful theologians of the Sorbonne were simply too cowardly to take any action against the aristocratic publicist herself. The Paris street Grand-Rue Saint-Jacques was a gathering place for open-minded printers and publishers. One of these was Antoine Augereau, who held the opinion that new ideas needed new typefaces. His apprentice Claude, who had already proved his aptitude as a punch cutter on many occasions, accepted this challenge just a few years into his career. In 1530, under Augereau’s supervision, he cut his own Cicero (12-point) typeface for the famous printer Robert Estienne. His work received great admiration. Almost one hundred years later, around 1620, it was reproduced by the Swiss printer Jean Jannon under the name Garamond, and quickly achieved world-renown.
After the death of Augereau, Claude Garamond opened his own workshop in the Rue des Carmes, where he perfected his Roman type. At the suggestion of the rector of the Sorbonne, Jean de Gagny, he designed an italic typeface for his Cicero of 1530, the future Garamond. To this day, this italic font is considered by many type designers to be the epitome of aesthetic perfection. After Garamond’s death in 1561, part of his type repertoire passed into the possession of the Imprimerie Royale Most of the matrices and punches, however, were bought by Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, while seven Roman series were bought by the Frankfurt type founder Jacques Sabon (later Egenolff-Berner).
After almost 200 years of oblivion, these were revitalised in 1928 on the basis of the old samples from the Egenolff-Berner foundry, and are referred to as the “Garamond punches”. Many punch cutters, type founders and type designers have since taken Garamond as a template for their own fonts. Two examples of this are Tony Stan’s ITC Garamond and Jan Tschichold’s Roman typeface Sabon.
Among the digital Garamonds available, Adobe’s is considered to be one of the best. Robert Slimbach initially took an Egenolff-Berner type sample from 1592 as his template. But after researching at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, he decided to rework his first draft in order to give the characters greater vitality and authenticity. The Adobe Garamond’s decorative letters, ornaments, historical ligatures and titling letters are a result of the same research visit.
Source: Fontshop
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Frutiger
Adrian Frutiger
1977
In the early 1960s, Paris’s Orly airport was bursting at the seams. On 13 January 1964, the French Council of Ministers made the decision to build a major new airport on the sparsely populated land near the village of Roissy-en-France.
The young architect Paul Andreu was entrusted with the task of designing the “Aéroport Paris Nord” (working title). He organised a series of workshops with architects, designers, psychologists and artists, for Roissy was to be the site of something new and groundbreaking. Among the experts was the young Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger, who, with his successful typeface Univers, released in 1957, was to develop the signage.
But he found Univers too geometric and compact to be read quickly on signs, and reverted to a seven-year-old sans-serif draft called Concorde, which he had drawn with André Gürtler for the typesetting company Sofratype.
The colour psychologists had settled on a yellow background for the signage, with the French text printed in white and the English in black. For the workshop presentation, Frutiger used coloured Letraset sheets. He cut out the word “Départs” in a stronger Concorde, and stuck ‘‘Departures” on in black underneath. The improved legibility in comparison to Univers (# 10) was apparent to everyone immediately. And Paul Andreu was delighted with the idea of giving the airport its own typeface.
When the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle was inaugurated in March 1974, even the signage set new standards. Typographers from around the world were eager to use the typeface in their own printing. D. Stempel AG and Linotype released Frutiger on the market in 1977. It quickly became a bestseller and was expanded several times, most recently in 1999 by Frutiger himself.
He spent two years on Frutiger Next. All the characters were redigitised, though the basic forms remained almost unchanged. Only the ß symbol and ampersand were redeveloped, and s and t given a discreet facelift. The range of weights now included six instead of five stroke widths, and the addition of a true italic font completed Frutiger Next.
Source: Fontshop
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Bodoni
Giambattista Bodoni
1790
It was June 1766, and all his preparations were made. The 26-year-old engraver Giambattista Bodoni, son of an Italian printer, was setting off from Rome on the two-week journey to the Cambridge University Press. In his luggage he had with him his current favourite book: the New Testament, printed by the “perfecter of neoclassical Roman type” John Baskerville, director of the press. Bodoni was hoping to complete his apprenticeship as a type cutter under his supervision. But before he had even reached the Austrian border, an attack of fever brought the expedition to an abrupt end: Bodoni had malaria. In a North Italian sanatorium he recovered more quickly than the doctors expected, but made no new plans, spending his time cutting type instead. After a visit to Parma, he took on the position of director of the Stamperia Reale there in 1768, commissioned by several art-loving dukes to make it into one of Italy’s great printing houses.
In 1771, with the aim of keeping him at his court, Duke Ferdinand of Bourbon-Parma gave Bodoni permission to establish a private printing office at the palace. There, he soon began producing folios and special editions of classics, which attracted great attention across Europe, because Bodoni set almost every edition in a new typeface. The perfection of his work – from the cut of the type to the choice of paper – brought him the title of “Printer to the Kings and King of Printers”.
Bodoni ran the Stamperia Reale for more than 40 years until his death in 1813. Over the five years that followed, his widow Margherita gradually organised the great wealth of type that he had created. The printing house worked almost exclusively on the preservation of her husband’s legacy. Finally, in 1817, she published the two-volume “Manuale Typografico” (Manual of Typography), in a print run of only 250 copies. With 142 alphabets and the corresponding italics, script fonts and ornaments, it continues to engage interpreters of Bodoni to this day.
When using the “royal type” it is important to note that its harmonious forms and clear contrast between black and white require careful handling. Bodoni is not the font of paper-shuffling bureaucrats. Nor is it particularly practical. But when it comes to presenting an important text to its best advantage, one does well to learn from Bodoni himself and use plenty of white space, generous line leading and a font size of at least 10 points.
Source: Fontshop
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Futura
Paul Renner
1927
The torch-lit procession started moving at 10 p.m. precisely, in the pouring rain. To the sound of a German SA brass band, students, professors and SA and SS units marched through the Brandenburg Gate, escorted by mounted police. They were heading towards the Opernplatz (now called Bebelplatz), where earlier that day a great bonfire had been prepared. A few minutes later, the “corrosive” books of Heinrich Heine, Erich Kästner, Karl Marx, Kurt Tucholsky and many others would be “consigned to the fire”.
The polemic paper entitled “Cultural Bolshevism?” did not appear on the “brown list” of 10 May 1933. This passionate defence of modernity in architecture and the visual arts, written by Paul Renner, had been published six months earlier by Eugen Rentsch in Zurich. Even in 1932, the author had no longer been able to find a publisher in his native country. The book’s release provoked agitation against the artist in the Völkischer Beobachter, as was to be expected, and in April 1933, Renner was arrested and dismissed from his position as director of the Master School for Printers in Munich. He fled to Switzerland one month later.
Fortunately, Paul Renner had released his successful Futura font family in 1927. The copyright royalties from this provided him with a reliable income during the Nazi era.
Futura, the first drafts of which date back to 1924, was greatly inspired by the Bauhaus. Renner regarded the typeface as an overcoming of the “irreconcilability of Roman capitals and the Latin lower case characters which originate in handwritten Carolingian minuscule”. His Futura was the prototype of a geometric sans-serif Linear-Antiqua.
Although Renner retained unusual (anti-cursive) forms for a, g, n, m and r in the first publication of the font, Futura achieved its great success without these characters. On the first sample sheet by the Bauer foundry in 1927 they were promoted as special characters, but the second in 1928 no longer even included them. Elsner + Flake’s recently released OpenType version of Futura includes Renner’s original range of characters.
Source: Fontshop
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Times
Stanley Morison
1931
The manager of the London daily newspaper The Times, William Lints-Smith, had heard that the respected typographer Stanley Morison (40) was unimpressed by the print quality of his newspaper. On 1 August 1929, they could be found sitting opposite each other at the publishing offices, discussing a redesign of the paper.
Morison, who had been artistic advisor to the typesetting equipment manufacturer Monotype for the previous six years, impressed the newspaperman with his arguments, and on the spur of the moment Lints-Smith offered him a job as an advisor. The first conflict of wills arose when Morison announced that the period after “Times” in the newspaper’s nameplate would not survive his redesign. Lints-Smith consulted with the publishers and, a week later, gave his consent.
Towards the end of 1930, after fruitless experiments with the printing machines, Morison decided that the newspaper needed a new typeface of its own. In January 1931 he presented two drafts: a reworked Perpetua and a modernised Plantin. A group of experts decided on the latter, which soon became famous across the world as “Times New Roman” and replaced its predecessor “Times Old Roman”.
The Times draughtsman Victor Lardent created a first version of the new font on the basis of Morison’s specifications. Specialists at Monotype then revised the draft for engraving and casting. The Times edition of 3 October 1932 was the first to be published in the new font, initially for one year’s exclusive use. Monotype then licensed its Times for Linotype and Intertype line-casting machines. The first book set in Times was published in 1934, and in the USA the magazines Time, Life and Fortune switched to the successful new typeface.
New printing machines and better varieties of paper led in the early 1950s to Times’ London name-giver abandoning the font. But it enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s thanks to the invention of the laser printer, which incorporated it in a digitised form on a memory chip. Together with web browsers and word processing programs, the operating systems Windows and Mac-OS – which include Times New Roman – sustained the font’s profile over many years. And the U.S. State Department recently secured its continued survival by deciding in early 2004 that all diplomatic documents in future must be set in 14-point Times rather than 12-point Courier.
Source: Fontshop
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Akzidenz Grotesk
Günter Gerhard Lange
1966
The great German corporate designer Anton Stankowski (1906–1998) announced in an advertisement in 1989: “I only accept functional typefaces. The one you are reading right now is the one I preferred for 60 years now. It is Akzidenz-Grotesk.” What makes a font so desirable that a confident designer would restrict himself to it for his entire career?
Akzidenz-Grotesk has no known date of birth. In fact, several people can claim to be the father of “AG”, as insiders like to call it. As early as 1880, the German typographer and hieroglyphics expert Ferdinand Theinhardt (1820–1906) designed four sans-serif fonts which he called “Royal Grotesk” for the publications of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. In 1908, Hermann Berthold took over the Theinhardt Type Foundry and integrated “Royal”, which by then had gained considerable popularity, into his Akzidenz-Grotesk family, giving it the name “AG Mager”.
Günter Gerhard Lange, a later patron of Akzidenz-Grotesk, refers to sources which suggest that its regular font originated at Bauer & Co. in Stuttgart in 1899, a short time after which Bauer was bought by H. Berthold AG. Berthold itself had presented an Accidenz-Grotesk typeface in an advertisement not long before.
It was a great achievement of GG Lange that, during his time as artistic director at H. Berthold AG between 1966 and 1972, he managed to bring the differing branches of Akzidenz-Grotesk together into one harmonious family for use in phototypesetting. This brought AG enthusiastic new devotees. And for many it remains their one true typographical love, against which no other typeface stands a chance.
Source: Fontshop
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Officina
Erik Spiekermann
1990
“Two things motivated me to propose a new typeface to the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1988. One was that I had had enough of the sleek, ‘pretty’ fonts that all the manufacturers were releasing, and the other was that there was a need for a modern correspondence font for laser printers. ‘Great’, said ITC, ‘go ahead.’
My idea was to take the typewriter fonts Letter Gothic and Courier as models and to create something new from them. Letter Gothic would form the basis for the narrow sans-serif version, and Courier the wide Roman. I concentrated on the sans-serif, and my friend Gerard Unger offered to do the groundwork for a serif font.
In my first sketches for ITC Correspondence (working title), I had one eye on Letter Gothic and the other on my post-office typeface (later FF Meta; ed.). Gerard Unger provided the serif test word ‘Hamburgefonts’, but then an important project came up for him. I also had to put the new font to one side. And all of a sudden it was the spring of 1989.
Just van Rossum came to my rescue when he started an internship at MetaDesign that May. He took my sans-serif, cleaned up the Ikarus data and created a really smart font family. Gerard was still busy with other things, so Just and I tried to create a slab-serif from it. It looked great. Towards the end of 1989, the font data went to URW, who added the rounded corners automatically.
When the proofs arrived from ITC in New York in the summer of 1990, I was annoyed to start with because my discrete text figures had been replaced by lining figures drawn by URW. And I can’t quite shake off the suspicion that somebody made our heavy dots lighter.”
Source: Fontshop
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Gill Sans
Eric Gill
1930
In November 2015 Monotype released the Eric Gill Series including Gill Sans Nova (a long-awaited update by George Ryan) with an exhibition in London’s Brick Lane at the Truman Brewery.
This new release now addresses several of the criticisms made in the original article (2007), including a recognisable numeral 1 and a semi-bold weight – useful when using Gill Sans Light for text setting. This ‘new’ Gill Sans also includes Greek, Cyrillic and many accented characters in the Opentype format, as well as extra sorts and roman numerals, (though no alternative ‘a’ or ‘crotched’ versions of b, d, p or q).
When Futura became a bestseller in Germany in the late 1920s, Stanley Morison (see “6: Times”) began looking for a British equivalent for his employer Monotype. Sometime towards the end of 1928, he thought of the sculptor and graphic artist Eric Gill, and the impressive sans-serif for the London Underground on which Gill had worked with Edward Johnston seven years earlier. Something like that might make a good “Futura killer”.
Morison set off that same day to the tiny Welsh hamlet of Capel-y-ffin, where the 42-year-old Gill had moved in 1924 to complete his Perpetua typeface. It did not take Morison long to convince the artist that he was the right man for the job, especially as Gill had no end of unused ideas for typefaces lying around.
In London, two weeks later, they examined Gill’s old and new type sketches together. Morison was astonished to see that, with only a few changes, many of the Johnston characters made a wonderfully readable text font, despite their small x-height. The explanation for this was that the characters of Gill’s new typeface were based in the first instance on Roman forms and proportions, with their forms made geometrical by the designer in a subsequent second step.
Between 1929 and 1932, more than 36 series of Gill Sans were created for use in mechanical typesetting. What distinguishes this sans-serif – as compared to Futura – is not only the pronounced contrast in weights, but indeed that all its fonts have a distinct character of their own because they were not derived mechanically from the same design.
The light font has a heavily hooded f and a tall t, and is open and elegant in appearance. The regular is compact and muscular, with a flat-bottomed b, flat-topped p and q, and triangular-topped t. The bold Gill Sans reflects the open style of the light, while the extra bold and ultra bold have a flamboyant character of their own. Thus, the Gill Sans family reflects its creator’s understanding of craftsmanship.
Eric Gill’s sculptural and typographical oeuvre has an indisputable place in British cultural history. Nevertheless, Fiona MacCarthy’s 1989 biography of Gill has cast a shadow over the artist’s work. His strict Catholicism did not deter him from an incestuous relationship with his sister, or from sexually abusing his children. In his diaries, Gill gives a detailed description of his sexual experiments with the family dog.
The typography expert Ben Archer (Auckland, New Zealand) published a noteworthy re-evaluation of Gill Sans at typotheque.com (first published in Designer Magazine, Singapore, January 2007). He concludes: “I contend that the majority of character shapes in Gill Sans are actually worse than in Johnston’s design of 15 years previous. Gill Sans achieved its pre-eminence because of the mighty marketing clout of the Monotype Corporation and the self-serving iconoclasm of its author. Thus, rather than Johnston’s lettering, it was Gill Sans that became the English national style of the mid-century.”
Source: Fontshop
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Univers
Adrian Frutiger
1954
The typeface that made Adrian Frutiger famous around the world has its origins in exercises that he worked on way back in 1949, as a 21-year-old at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. What was new about Univers was that it treated a font family as a complete, cohesive system for the first time.
Its starting point is the regular font (Univers 55), from which all others are derived. The contrast is balanced in such a way that the font is suitable even for long texts. Frutiger placed great importance on the range of differences in weight between capitals and minuscules, and the x-height is unusually large for a font of that period.
It took 15 years for Univers to become widely known and available on the various types of mechanical and phototypesetting equipment. The cool, systematically designed font family appealed to the rationalistic style which dominated typography in the late 1970s, and corresponded with the aim of “Total Design” (as Wim Crouwel and Ben Bos had named their design agency in 1964). In Holland, Univers became something of an unofficial national font, while designers in the USA and Germany tended to favour Helvetica.
In 2004, Univers was comprehensively revised by Adrian Frutiger and Linotype, expanded to include 59 fonts, and given three-figure numbering.
Source: Fontshop
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Optima
Hermann Zapf
1954
At the Franciscan Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence on 3 October 1950, one visitor was looking at the 276 gravestones through quite different eyes than the other tourists. The great names of Michelangelo, Rossini, Galilei and Machiavelli held less fascination for him than the great variety of lettering carved in the stone. Because he had left his notebook behind at the hotel, Hermann Zapf sketched a few characters on a 1000 lire note.
Back home in Frankfurt, the sketches became the breakthrough in a type project with which Zapf had been commissioned by the Stempel foundry: the design of a functional typeface somewhere between a sans-serif and a Renaissance Roman font. After thorough readability tests, the final drawings were completed in 1952 and August Rosenberger cut the type, which was released two years later under the name Optima.
Its appearance – both delicate and clear – was a novelty, and made it a favourite in advertising design, particularly in connection with perfumes and luxury goods. 50 years after its premiere, the font was comprehensively reworked under the name of Optima Nova. Without technical limitations or compromises, Hermann Zapf and Akira Kobayashi created an extended font family which finally included a true italic font, small capitals, text figures and a titling font with elaborate ligatures.
Source: Fontshop
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Franklin Gothic
Morris Fuller Benton
1903
Having spent the first eleven years of his life as an only child, the printer and inventor Linn Boyd Benton had hoped when he married his wife Jessie that they would have a large family. But the birth of their son Morris Fuller on 30 November 1872 nearly cost Jessie her life, and so the two of them decided not to have any more children.
Morris Fuller Benton’s exceptional talent as a draughtsman predestined him to study mechanical engineering and, in 1896, secured him a job as an assistant to his father at the New York headquarters of the American Type Founders Company (ATF). ATF had come into being four years previously as a merger of 23 American type foundries. Benton was appointed as chief type designer at ATF in 1900. In the years that followed he designed a multitude of typefaces, including Parisian, Broadway, Cheltenham, Poster Bodoni, Balloon Light, News Gothic and, in 1903, Franklin Gothic. The latter later enjoyed a similar status in the USA to that of Helvetica or Univers in Europe.
ATF was hit hard by the Great Depression of the interwar years. Morris Fuller Benton left the company in 1937 because of ill health, and died of a pulmonary embolism in 1948.
Source: Fontshop
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Bembo
Francesco Griffo
1496
After his apprenticeship as a type cutter and founder in Bologna, Francesco Griffo found employment with the respected Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. Manutius was 40 years old and about to embark on the most exciting project of his professional career.
In the Biblioteca Marciana, Manutius had access to a most extensive collection of Greek manuscripts, loot from the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. With a group of gifted typographers, he set about publishing the valuable texts. The necessary Greek type was cut for him by Francesco Griffo.
In February 1496, Griffo designed a typeface for the essay “De Aetna” by the Italian scholar Pietro Bembo, which achieved great popularity under the name Bembo. In 1929, the British Monotype Corporation released a family of Bembo fonts. A 1524 pattern book by the Italian calligrapher Giovanni Tagliente provided a template for the italics.
Source: Fontshop
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Interstate
Tobias Frere-Jones
1993
What could be better proof of readability? Thanks to Interstate, millions of car drivers find their way along the highways of the USA every day – even at a speed of 55 miles per hour.
The typeface was designed in the 1970s by the United States Federal Highway Administration. Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones digitised his interpretation for the first time in 1993, and expanded the font family in the years that followed for use in print design.
Most recently, Frere-Jones and Cyrus Highsmith enlarged the family to include 40 fonts, among which are italic, condensed und compressed versions. Interstate is among the most popular fonts in Germany, not least as a result of its use in TV and many magazines, and as Quelle-Karstadt’s corporate font. Many designers view it as a livelier alternative to the somewhat stiff DIN.
Source: Fontshop
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Thesis
Lucas de Groot
1994
What Lucas Adrianus Wilhelmus de Groot really wanted was to become a painter. But his work had always been very graphical. It started when he was still at school in Noordwijkerhout. Annoyed by the bad typography of the school magazine, he immediately posted his suggestions for improvement under the editor’s door. By the next day he was on the editorial team.
From 1982 to 1987, de Groot studied under Gerrit Noordzij at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, a hotbed for new type. He specialised in typography, photography and illustration. His final piece of work was produced entirely in typefaces which he had designed himself, among them an early version of what later became his successful Thesis typeface, at that time still called “Paranthesis”.
Between 1989 and 1993, de Groot, who goes by the name of Luc, worked for the respected design agency BRS Premsela Vonk on large corporate design projects. It was here that he laid the foundations for TheMix, Thesis’ semi-serif version, which became the corporate font of the Dutch Ministry of Transport and Water Management.
When he came to Germany in 1993 and joined MetaDesign in Berlin, he finally had time to finish his “typographical tribe” with its three families, TheSans, TheSerif and TheMix: “I couldn’t speak the language yet and I hardly knew anybody … so I took the time to complete Thesis”.
By about 1994, Thesis had become a bestselling member of the FontFont Library. Despite the popularity of Adobe’s multiple-master fonts, which made it possible for ordinary users to generate custom fonts very easily, many type enthusiasts favoured the FF Thesis with its 144 fonts. One reason for this was undoubtedly the eight carefully harmonised font weights, which Lucas de Groot had developed with typographic sensitivity on the basis of his own interpolation theory. In addition to this, Thesis’ range of characters was unrivaled at that time.
Source: Fontshop
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Rockwell
Frank Hinman Pierpont
1934
The Peace of Amiens between France and England in March 1802 cost Napoleon his hold on Egypt. It was not long before the first pieces of Egyptian loot appeared in London, sparking a wave of enthusiasm for the Land of the Pyramids. And the type foundries were not immune to the fever. Their catalogues presented so-called “Egyptians”, Roman typefaces with linear serifs and very little contrast.
In around 1913, Monotype released an Egyptian with the serial number 173. By now, this classification of type, which had become known as “slab serif”, was an essential feature in the repertoire of every typesetting company. In 1932, the Monotype works manager Frank Hinman Pierpont commissioned his studio to design a new version of Egyptian 173, which was soon released as Rockwell – the name having been “borrowed” from the company’s American joint venture, Lanston Monotype. Its weight is reminiscent of Stempel’s Memphis. Rockwell was soon available in several different font versions, becoming the most successful Egyptian typeface of the 20th century.
Source: Fontshop
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Walbaum
Justus Walbaum
1800
Justus Erich Walbaum (1768–1837) was the son of a clergyman, and a self-taught typographer. After completing an apprenticeship with a spice merchant and confectioner in Braunschweig, he first worked manufacturing baking tins. Later, he became an engraver – of musical scores, among other things – and learned to cut punches. In 1796, he opened his own type foundry in Goslar, moving it to the artistically-minded town of Weimar in 1803.
In 1828, he handed the business over to his son Theodor, who tragically predeceased him eight years later. To safeguard his life’s work, Walbaum sold the foundry to F.A. Brockhaus in Leipzig. Decades later, in around 1917, the original Walbaum matrices were purchased by H. Berthold in Berlin. A highlight among them was the valuable Walbaum Roman type cut around 1900.
It is considered to be the most important specifically German example of neo-classicist type. It is somewhat narrower than Bodoni, with less contrast and stronger main and hairline strokes. Günter Gerhard Lange at Berthold helped to re-popularise the font in the late 1970s. Two famous Walbaum users are Wired and the Berliner Zeitung.
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Meta
Erik Spiekermann
1991
“Goodbye Helvetica” was the conclusion to which Sedley Place Design came in late 1984, after looking through hundreds of items of German Federal Post Office printing that had been produced using genuine and imitation Helveticas. The Berlin designers were in the process of developing a new corporate design for Europe’s largest employer (with a staff of 500,000). A functional typeface was needed which would be resilient, economical and distinctive. But finding one was proving difficult.
Erik Spiekermann interpreted the specifications for the new typeface, which needed to have robust characters and be distinguishable, narrow, technically up-to-date and available. The result was the linear sans-serif “PT 55”, which was quickly digitised in regular, italic and bold fonts, using Ikarus, so that in theory it could have been available on all typesetting equipment within a matter of weeks.
In 1986, after lengthy discussions, the Post Office decided to keep its Helveticas as the corporate typeface. So it was back to square one for PT 55.
In retrospect one can say that FF Meta was the catalyst for a worldwide trend towards “alternative” sans-serifs, with text figures, small capitals, numerous ligatures, arrows and brackets. None of the secret favourites of many type designers in the late 1980s and early 1990s – neither Syntax, nor Polo, nor Letter Gothic – had offered such treats before. Even ITC Officina is influenced by Meta, not to mention FF Unit, Amplitude, FF Fago and several others.
Source: Fontshop
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Trinité
Bram De Does
1982
When Bram de Does was studying graphic design in Amsterdam in the 1950s, the curriculum was still very much influenced by Bauhaus and Jan Tschichold. Lectures on “asymmetrical typography” inspired him to rebellion, and he designed his pages symmetrically, just for the sake of doing things differently from the way he had been taught.
After graduating, he started work as art director at the respected typesetting and -founding company, Joh. Enschedé en Zonen in Haarlem. He proved his talent for type design between 1980 and 1982 when he was entrusted by Enschedé with the task of producing an exclusive typeface for their Autologic phototypesetting equipment. Trinité emerged as an elegant and subtle body text font, which is also entirely suitable for non-literary purposes.
The digitised version of Trinité has an impressive wealth of forms. Ascenders and descenders with three graded lengths, and a sleek italic font which works well with both Trinité Wide and Condensed, all bear witness to the ingenious typographical concept of the font family. It is for good reason that Trinité is one of Holland’s favourite typefaces.
Source: Fontshop
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DIN
Ludwig Goller
1926
For decades, the DIN typeface was considered to be a fatherless creation, the product of a government authority. But research by Albert-Jan Pool, designer of the FF DIN, has shown that from 1925, the Siemens engineer Ludwig Goller (1884–1964) was responsible, as chairman of the DIN committee for design, for the development of the typeface DIN 1451. Following his publication Normschriften (“Standard Typefaces”) in 1936, it became the prescribed typeface for German street and house-number signage. Siemens began using it in its company logo that same year.
In 1926, the idea of constructing a typeface was not new. Poster artists, shop-window designers and sign writers had been doing it for generations. In the Dessau period of the Bauhaus (1925 to 1931), the construction of sans-serif typefaces with geometrical elements was a regular feature in Joost Schmidt’s classes.
When Albert-Jan Pool was designing FF DIN in 1995, he took into consideration typographical rules concerning readability. Horizontal strokes are thinner than vertical ones, and the transitions between circles and straight lines are harmonised. Evert Bloemsma attributed the success of FF DIN, which is among the five bestselling FontFonts, to the following formula: 80% hi-tech, 10% imperfection (which equates with charm) and 10% static.
Source: Fontshop
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Matrix
Zuzana Licko
1986
The genius of American designer and typographer Zuzana Licko is that of making a virtue of necessity, as even her earliest typefaces demonstrate. They are distinctive pixel fonts, which she needed in 1985 for the third edition of her magazine Emigre. It was to be produced using only a computer and a dot matrix printer: a sensation in ambitious graphic design. Among these fonts was the bitmap font Emigre Fourteen, a forerunner of Matrix, which was released a year later.
Matrix was Licko’s first entirely vectorised typeface, and was designed to use as few interpolation points as possible, so as not to overload the computer and printer. Hence the wedge serifs, which need one corner-point fewer than slab serifs, and the standard 45° angle, because it creates the smallest steps on the screen and in the dot matrix printer.
Four years later, Roger Black and the Poynter Institute established in printing surveys that Matrix was just as readable as a Times font. The font family has since grown, and now even embraces curves, as demonstrated by the popular font Matrix Script.
Source: Fontshop
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OCR
American Type Founders
1965
David Shepard affectionately christened the rickety machine in his attic “Gismo”. It could read Morse code, sheet music, and even typewriter text. In April 1951, he registered his Optical Character Recognition (OCR) under US Patent 2,663,758, and founded the Intelligent Machines Research Corporation.
His first client was Reader’s Digest in 1955, which was soon able to simplify the management of millions of subscriber records dramatically. The addresses needed to be printed in a special typeface, with machine-readable characters and figures. One version, OCR-A, can still be found on credit cards and cheques today.
By the late 1960s, OCR was speeding up the data flow in Europe too. A new generation of reading devices dealt more tolerantly with the characters, making it possible in 1968 for the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) to commission a typeface from Adrian Frutiger that could be read easily by both humans and machines: OCR-B.
The technical OCR typefaces were rediscovered (in PostScript format) by computer designers in the early 1990s, and have remained among the most popular fonts for posters, magazines and covers ever since.
Source: Fontshop
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Avant Garde
Herb Lubalin
1968
It was the mid-1960s, and in New York the idea for a magazine with the title Avant Garde had just been conceived. In the publishers’ own words, it was to be “a thoughtful, joyous magazine on art and politics, [aimed at people] ahead of their time”.
The publishers Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin worked together on the design scheme for the magazine. “It was a difficult collaboration”, Ginzburg remembers. “His first logo was in Hebrew. He thought that was funny. Then he did it in Coca-Cola script. We went through a dozen designs, all masterfully executed. But none felt right.”
One day, Ginzburg and his wife Shoshana went to see the frustrated Herb Lubalin at his studio. They explained the concept of the planned publication again to him. “I asked him to picture a modern European airport”, Shoshana Ginzburg recalls. “‘Imagine a jet taking off the runway into the future.’ I used my hand to describe the plane flying skyward as an upward diagonal. He had me repeat that a couple of times. I explained that the logos he had offered us so far would suit all kinds of magazines, but that Avant Garde needed something nobody had ever seen before: something singular and entirely new.”
As Herb Lubalin was driving to work the following morning from his home in Woodmere, New York, he suddenly pulled the car over to the side of the road. He rang Ralph Ginzburg from a telephone box, something he had never done before: “Ralph, I’ve got the answer. You’ll see.” And the rest is design history.
Lubalin’s starting points were capitals in the style of a geometrical sans-serif typeface (known in the USA as a “Gothic”), something between Futura and Helvetica. Remembering Shoshana Ginzburg’s hand movement, he angularised the two As and the V in such a way that they fitted together like slices of cake. He halved the T, joining it to the N. The third A had one of its legs in the circular G, with the horizontal strokes coinciding. The R, D and E touched one other, so that the final result was two compact blocks of type. These became the unmistakeable Avant Garde logo.
In order to attract advertisers, Ginzburg and Lubalin devised a promotional brochure in which all the headings needed to be set in the Avant Garde type – all in capitals. Lubalin exhausted three assistants in his efforts to get the 26 letters of the alphabet drawn at record speed. At this point, his partner Tom Carnese stepped in, and quickly realised that it would be almost impossible to produce serviceable results with the geometrical font unless they used ligatures. With every word that they drew, new ligatures were created. Eventually, they had enough characters to complete the booklet. Indeed they could now even commission a phototypesetting prototype for Avant Garde from Photo Lettering, Inc.
From 1968, word of the new typeface spread through New York like wildfire, despite its limited distribution. Advertisers and art directors were crazy about the lettering and wanted to use it in their own work too. Eventually, Photo Lettering began offering headlines set in Avant Garde, but the typesetting company had not requested permission to use the font, much to the resentment of its designers.
In the hope of taking the wind out of the pirates’ sails, Tom Carnese produced a set of specimen cards. With these, Lubalin Smith Carnese began bidding for work as the only authorised setters of Avant Garde type. They were soon overrun with orders.
A logical consequence of this was the founding of the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) by Herb Lubalin, Aaron Burns and Ed Rondthaler in 1970. The revolutionary idea behind ITC was that of a hardware-independent font library which would license its designs to typesetting equipment manufacturers. Until that point, Monotype, Linotype and Co. had used proprietary type designs, sometimes exchanging licenses or copying from one another. ITC’s aim was to create clarity from then on with regard to copyright protection for the type designer.
ITC’s first endurance test was the Avant Garde typeface itself, which was released amid considerable legal wrangling. Although Herb Lubalin owned the rights to the design, it was Ralph Ginzburg who held the name and trademark rights. He made them available free of charge on the condition that the font name was always marked with the copyright symbol ®. Lubalin and Burns ignored this demand, which angered Ginzberg. But he did not have the financial means to take action against the trademark violation. On the contrary, soon he even had to close down his magazine, while the font that bore its name became famous around the world.
“I think a number of people got really rich off that typeface, including Herb”, Ralph Ginzberg suspects today. “But Carnese, who made all the original drawings for the light, medium and bold weights, didn’t share in any of the profits. I resent them for that. It was no way to treat a partner.”
Perhaps Carnese took comfort in the fact that very few people were able to use the idiosyncratic typeface well. Many only concerned themselves superficially with the ligatures. And if set incorrectly, the lower case r and n would touch, inevitably giving the appearance of an m. Thus, many Avant Garde users ruined their pet font themselves.
After its phenomenal premiere, ITC soon released a serif version of Avant Garde, which was designed by Toni Di Spigna and given the name Lubalin Graph.
Few typefaces reflect the spirit of an era quite as precisely as Avant Garde. It comes from an age of unclouded faith in technology, with humanity just preparing to make its first landing on the moon. The font is so strongly of its era as to make it unserviceable for contemporary communication purposes, unless one wishes to make deliberate reference to the 1970s.
It is an extremely popular font nevertheless, particularly among amateurs. Perhaps it takes such extreme forms for the untrained eye to notice that different typefaces exist. And from then on the assumption is: “If we want it to look professionally designed, we’d better use Avant Garde.”
But it is not a beginner’s typeface. As with most constructed sans-serifs, its areas of application are limited. The idea of constructing a typeface, rather than evolving it from handwritten lettering, goes back to the 1920s, to Functionalism and the “mechanised graphics” of Paul Renner. Futura, Erbar and Bernhard Gothic all date from this period. But nobody had dared to depart as far from typographical norms as Herb Lubalin.
The prevalence of Avant Garde in the digital era, which began in the late 1980s, can be attributed to the page description language PostScript. The first PostScript printers included Avant Garde as one of their fonts. And as only a handful of fonts were available at that time, Avant Garde was always required to serve as the “outlandish option”.
Source: Fontshop
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Lucida
Kris Holmes & Charles Bigelow
1985
Millions of computer users work with Lucida without even realising it. The Wingdings symbols were originally a Lucida font, until type designers Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow sold the collection to Microsoft. And there is also a Lucida at work in the Macintosh operating system, ensuring good readability in menus, dialogue boxes and e-mails.
Bigelow & Holmes have been an authority on screen and printer fonts since 1985. Lucida was the first to respond to the technical deficits of monitors (72 dpi) and laser printers (300 dpi), while still offering all the most important font styles: sans-serif, serif, script, typewriter and even blackletter.
What was easily readable under poor conditions has proved to be equally so under ideal ones, and thus the Lucida superfamily continues to gain new supporters to this day.
Source: Fontshop
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Sabon
Jan Tschichold
1964
In the early 1960s, German printing firms were in need of a text font that would run on both Linotype and Monotype equipment, as well as being suitable for manual typesetting. Walter Cunz from the Stempel foundry commissioned the typographer Jan Tschichold to design a Roman typeface in the tradition of Claude Garamond that would meet the requirements of modern letterpress printing.
Tschichold was able to refer to original print samples from 1592, which were made available to him by the Konrad Berner foundry, Jacques Sabon’s successor. He not only ironed out typical blemishes such as colliding descenders and blotting, but reinterpreted Garamond’s models in a contemporary way.
Like many Garamond cutters, he chose a typeface by Garamond’s contemporary Robert Granjon as a template for the italic font. This he also found at the Berner foundry. The typeface’s name, Sabon, commemorates the man who bought up Claude Garamond’s estate after his death, and took the tools with him when he moved to Frankfurt, thus introducing the elegant, French Renaissance serif typeface to Germany’s printers.
Source: Fontshop
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