Fonts from 1989

Without Trajan, Hollywood would probably have disappeared from the movie business 2 decades ago.

Font designer Tony Geddes worked at Panache Graphic and created some long-lasting headline bestsellers like Flamenco Inline, Musketeer and ITC Spotlight. Latter is a robust alphabet with extreme stroke contrasts, however, Geddes gave his font a more relaxed feel by not filling in the strokes completely and giving the glyphs a three dimensional look.

Utopia is an Adobe Originals text face designed by Robert Slimbach. It combines the vertical stress and pronounced stroke contrast of 18th century transitional types like Baskerville and Walbaum with contemporary innovations in character shapes and stroke details. Six weights and four optical sizes for each make Utopia a flexible family for all purposes.

The Rotis family, designed by Otl Aicher for Agfa, pioneered the idea of matching subfamilies: Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Semi Serif, and Serif. Readily identifiable in all four subfamilies is the leftward leaning upper and lowercase C. The typefaces share weights, heights, and proportions, making this a functional mix-and-match family for a variety of uses.

Probably the most readable member of the Rotis super family: a linear humanist sans, with minimal variation on stroke width. It includes 45 Light, 46 Light Italic, 55 Roman, 56 Italic, 65 Bold, and 75 Extra Bold.

Giovanni was designed by Robert Slimbach and released by the International Typeface Corporation. Beginning at the drawing board and then moving to a computer, Slimbach based his design on classic oldstyle typefaces such as Garamond and Bembo. He then gave the typeface more contemporary proportions and weights, which resulted in a legible text type.

Designed by Arthur Baker in 1989 for Agfa Compugraphic, Amigo is based on spontaneous pen lettering and an exaggerated calligraphic look. The letter shapes are especially unusual with stems that are wide at the top and taper to very narrow at the base. Designers loved to use Amigo for announcements and flyers, which needs an informal brush or pen-written look.

During the reign of the Emperor Charlemagne in the 8th and 9th centuries, the use of classical roman letterforms was revived. They were the basis of the highly refined versal capitals of late tenth-century England, which were the inspiration for Carol Twombly’’s 1989 Adobe Originals typeface. Charlemagne has spiky serifs, but retains clean lines and proportions.

It was one of the first authentic fun fonts, with dancing letters and handwritten charm. Its creator Garrett Boge began his career as a lettering artist and type designer at Hallmark Cards in the early 1980s. He was one of the first independent type designers to embrace digital tools and started his own foundry LetterPerfect in 1986.

Parallel to his exhibition “The Graphic Language of Neville Brody”, the British design star published his first typefaces Arcadia®, Industria®, Insignia®, once developed for the editorial design of the The Face magazine. The strong, cool Industria became an instant hit among designers.