ITC Bookman/ITC Tabula

ITC Bookman

ITC Bookman was an instant success when it was first released in 1976. The design was an interpretation of the original Bookman typeface that dates back to the late 1800s. This earliest Bookman was very popular in the early part of the 20th century. Bookman fell out of use in the middle part of the last century, only to be “re-discovered” by graphic designers in the 1970s. The problem was: there was no complete and well-organized family of Bookman. Ed Benguiat came to the rescue when he drew the ITC Bookman family for phototypesetting.

Benguiat developed a full family of four weights plus complementary cursive designs. Benguiat also drew a suite of swash and alternate characters for each of the members of the family. When digital replaced photo as a typesetting technology, however, the special alternate and swash characters that Benguiat created were left out of the fonts. While most phototype display fonts could have virtually unlimited character sets, the first digital fonts could not.

Now, OpenType technology has allowed the release of a complete version of ITC Bookman, offering the full breadth of Benguiat’s design — which means all the original swash and alternate characters.

ITC Tabula

Tabula was at first a typographic study, Julien Janiszewski undertook for subtitles in movies. His goal was to design letterforms that reproduce at small size on film but that could be multiplied 2000 times to be read on the “big screen.” The typographic answer to that problem was a font that fulfills these constraints

The results of the study were then “filed in a drawer” for over a year. When Janiszewski later discovered his drawings he realized that the constraints he imposed on the subtitle font were not that far from those that would be put on a typeface design for signage. According to him, “In this field, people need a font that can be used easily in very large sizes for boards and quiet small sizes for reading texts.” These basic sketches became the foundation of what was to become ITC Tabula. When asked about the somewhat unusual stroke endings in some of the characters, Janiszewski’s reply was, “I wanted to keep the calligraphic ductus of letters, that's why some letter's ending strokes are beveled, as a reminder of the way the drawing pen traces the letters.”

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• Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs. He is also responsible for editorial content for the company’s type libraries and Web sites.
• Prior to working for Monotype, Mr. Haley was Principal of Resolution, a consulting firm with expertise in fonts, font technology, type and typographic communication. He was also executive vice president of International Typeface Corporation.
• Mr. Haley is ex officio Chairman of the Board of the Society of Typographic Aficionados, and past President of the New York Type Directors Club. He is highly regarded as an educator and is a frequently requested speaker at national computer and design conferences.
• Mr. Haley is also a prolific writer, with five books on type and graphic communication and hundreds of articles for graphic design publications to his credit.