babe /headings

It was only after seeking the help of fellow type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby that Erik Spiekermann was able to fashion a suitable serif companion to his most famous sans, FF Meta. Rather than pasting serifs in place, the process took starting from scratch until a face appeared that looked and felt like a Meta, but that functioned more like a traditional seriffed text... Read More

With the help of Paul van der Laan for kerning, spacing and production, Mike Abbink developed FF Milo Serif as a companion for his FF Milo family. Nevertheless, FF Milo Serif is also perfectly suitable as a stand alone typeface, or for use together with any other sans serif. Like its counterpart, FF Milo Serif is also a resilient grain; although rooted with historical attributes it is truly a... Read More

FF Tundra is a compact serif with stressed forms and softened contours. Its concept developed from an investigation into narrow letterforms and optimal readability. To avoid the ‘picket fence’ effect, FF Tundra’s letterforms emphasize horizontal movement. Type designer Ludwig Übele combined strong serifs and flat shoulders (note the n) with open counters and heavy endings (see a, e, c) and a... Read More

Jan Tschichold designed Sabon™ in 1964, and it was produced jointly by three foundries: D. Stempel AG, Linotype and Monotype. This was in response to a request from German master printers to make a font family that was the same design for the three metal type technologies of the time: foundry type for hand composition, linecasting, and single-type machine composition. Tschichold turned to the... Read More

Frank Grießhammer started FF Quixo out as graduation project while studying in the Type and Media program at KABK Den Haag. Learning pointed-pen calligraphy, he explored a more casual dimension by interpreting the model with different-sized brushes. In the typeface presented at graduation each of the weights is based on a different writing tool. Afterward, the concept was re-evaluated and... Read More

ITC Charter font is the work of desigern Matthew Carter, who has been involved in type design since he was 19. The typeface is a traditional old style type with a few nontraditional characteristics. Charter font was designed as a highly legible text typeface for use on both laser writers and high resolution imagesetters.

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

The design of Sabon Next™ by Jean François Porchez, a revival of a revival, was a double challenge: to try to discern Jan Tschichold´s own schema for the original Sabon, and to interpret the complexity of a design originally made in two versions for different typecasting systems. The first was designed for use on Linotype and Monotype machines, and the second for Stempel hand composition.... Read More

Rotis is a large typeface family consisting of, Serif, Semi Serif, Semi Serif and Sans Serif font styles. Agfa Rotis was created for Agfa Compugraphic. The font styles are matched for weight and height to give consistency when mixed. Certain round characters have a distinctive calligraphic treatment which is apparent in all styles. A versatile family which can be used for text as well as... Read More

John Baskerville (1706-1775) was an accomplished writing master and printer from Birmingham, England. He was the designer of several types, punchcut by John Handy, which are the basis for the fonts that bear the name Baskerville today. The excellent quality of his printing influenced such famous printers as Didot in France and Bodoni in Italy. Though he was known internationally as an innovator... 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 Japanese word for stone, which precluded any squabbling about whose name the font would carry. The family consists of three types of fonts, a serif, a sans-serif and an informal style. The Stone fonts are very legible and make a modern, dynamic impression.

The first sketches for the FF Clifford typeface were done in 1994. These drew inspiration from Alexander Wilson’s Long Primer Roman type, which was used to set an edition of Pliny the Younger’s “Opera,” printed by the Foulis brothers in 1751. The Italic is loosely based on Joseph Fry and Sons’ Pica Italic No. 3, from their 1785 specimen. These Roman and Italic designs combine to create FF... Read More

Bodoni expresses the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; its serifs are flat, think and unbracketed, while the stress is always on the mathematically vertical strokes. Bodoni believed in plenty of white space and therefore descenders are long. The M is rather narrow; in the Q the tail at first descends vertically and the R has a curled tail. The italic, like most continental modern... Read More

Iridium™ was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1972 for Linotype. It is in the "modern" style like Bodoni or Didot, in that it has the sparkle created by a high thick/thin contrast and a symmetrical distribution of weight. But the sometimes harsh and rigid texture of the modern style is tempered by Frutiger's graceful interpretation. Iridium itself is a very hard, brittle and strong metal; yet the... Read More

Though Albert Boton designed these in 1974 for the Hollenstein collection, what later became FF Cellini only existed as phototype until the 90s. Boton designed the family’s regular in digital during that decade, and added the italic in 2002. For its release, Boton completed the medium and bold weights, as well as a set of small caps for the regular weight. He also drew a separate, two-style... Read More

Modern typefaces refer to designs that bear similarities to Bodoni and other Didone faces, which were first created during the late 1700s. Ed Benguiat developed ITC Modern No. 216 in 1982 for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC). Showing a high degree of contrast between thick and thin strokes, as well as a large x-height, this revival is more suited to advertising display purposes than... Read More