Minion Alternatives

FF Celeste is a typeface for designers who like the idea of a Bodoni or Walbaum, but look for a robust and readable text face which tempers the sobriety of romance type with friendlier Renaissance-era features. The serifs tend to the triangular and the italics harmonize well with the roman in tone and width. The letterforms are less rationalized and modular than the starkest modern faces, but... Read More

Utopia, created by Robert Slimbach and presented by Adobe in 1992, was intended to solve a number of typographic problems related to office correspondence. This demanded versatility, so Slimbach created a font family with cuts for text, for titles, extra bold for headlines, small caps, all caps with numerals, old face numerals, fractions, ligatures and scientific markings. Not just its forms,... Read More

Sumner Stone worked together with Bob Ishi of Adobe to create the Stone family fonts, which appeared in 1987. Coincidentally, ishi is the... Read More

Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books... Read More

In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older... Read More

It was only after seeking the help of fellow type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby that Erik Spiekermann was able to... Read More

Claude Garamond (ca. 1480-1561) cut types for the Parisian scholar-printer Robert Estienne in the first part of the sixteenth century, basing his romans on the types cut by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1495. Garamond refined his romans in later versions, adding his own concepts as he developed his skills as a punchcutter. After his death in 1561, the Garamond punches... Read More

The first sketches for the FF Clifford typeface were done in 1994. These drew inspiration from Alexander Wilson’s Long Primer Roman type,... Read More

Over the course of 50 years, the charismatic and enterprising Frederic W. Goudy designed more than 100 typefaces; he was the American master of type design in the first half of the twentieth century. Goudy Old Style, designed for American Type Founders in 1915-1916, is the best known of his designs, and forms the basis for a large family of variants. Goudy said he was initially inspired by the... Read More

Pilgrim is a font family is a re-cut from Linotype from a face that Eric Gill originally has designed for a book published by the Limited Edition Club of New York. Admired for its tranquil dignity, the Pilgrim type is both firm and elegant. It resembles in its general appearance to Gill's Joanna font family. The contrast of the font is not very strong. The serifs are bracketed. Eric Gill, who... Read More

From alphabets created for book illustrations in the 1970s to lettering created for a book jacket in the 1990s, the Mentor family of typefaces has developed along its own slow and circuitous path. Always present in its evolution, though, has been the influence of three 20th century design giants: Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, and Hermann Zapf, as filtered through the meticulous sensibility of... Read More

Sabon was designed by Jan Tschichold and released in 1967. Sabon was created in response to the specific needs of a group of German printers who wanted a typeface that would be identical in form when produced by three different metal-casting technologies. Named after Jacques Sabon, a sixteenth century typefounder whose widow married another typefounder, Konrad Berner, who is credited with... Read More

Originally drawn in 1985, Jovica Veljović had intended to add a few kerning pairs and make some minor refinements to the letterforms. However, his work lead him to take a fresh look at the family. Veljović recalls, "… I soon realized that some characters could benefit by more refined shapes and proportions. By the time I was done, I had worked on just about every character in the... Read More

ITC Esprit is the work of designer Jovica Veljović and blends the classic proportions of a serif typeface with the grace and charm of calligraphy. Highly legible even in small point sizes, the font can also be used as an impressive display face for use with sans serif text.

John Baskerville (1706-1775) was an accomplished writing master and printer from Birmingham, England. He was the designer of several... Read More

ITC Legacy® was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and... Read More

The original Swift (1985) proved its worth in corporate identities, magazines and newspapers and occasionally in books. It is a versatile type and can be used in a wide range of circumstances. It is a striking type, with large serifs, large counters and letters that produce a particularly strong horizontal impression. This means that words and lines in Neue Swift are easily distinguished, even... Read More

French designer Albert Boton developed FF Tibere as a caps-only titling face for titles and headlines. During the process however he saw... Read More