ITC Handel Gothic Alternatives

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

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool and Erik Spiekermann discussed Pool’s prospects, Spiekermann knowing that his friend’s employer had just gone out of business. He suggested that if Pool wanted to make some money in type design, that he take a closer... Read More

In 1983, D. Stempel AG redesigned the famous Helvetica typeface for the digital age, creating Neue Helvetica for Linotype: a self-contained font family. Today, this family consists of 51 different font weights. It’s original numbering system for the weight designations came from Adrian Frutiger’s numbering system for the Univers family. The basic font weight, “Neue Helvetica Roman”, is at the... Read More

FF Enzo is a vigorous Scandinavian sans. Drawn by Swedish designer Tobias Kvant, the family comes in five weights from Thin to Black, each complete with companion italic. Inspired by past and present type styles, the face achieves a unique look; this mix of various sans serif design currents creates a quite contemporary, lively texture. The design features a high x-height with particularly... Read More

Eurostile Next is Linotype's redrawn and expanded version of Aldo Novarese's 1962 design. This new version refers back to the original metal types and to its mid-century modern aesthetic of squarish characters and subtle curves. Eurostile Next brings back the gentle curves, which were lost in other digital versions, therefore regaining the spirit of the original design and its somewhat softer... Read More

Created for magazine and newspaper headlines, FF Turmino is probably the first typeface that inverts the usual relation between weight and width. In other words: the heavier the font the more condensed it is. When using the family for newspapers or magazines it is now possible for the first time ever to set more text in Black than in Normal or Light. The result is a happy little family that... Read More

The ITC Franklin™ typeface design marks the next phase in the evolution of one of the most important American gothic typefaces. Morris Fuller Benton drew the original design in 1902 for American Type Founders (ATF); it was the first significant modernization of a nineteenth-century grotesque. Named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, the design not only became a best seller, it also served as a... Read More

Similar in design to Franklin Gothic, News Gothic was one of a number of sans serif faces manufactured by American Type Founders in the early years of the twentieth century. Initially cut as a light sans, heavier versions were made in the 1940s and 50s along with some condensed weights. The News Gothic font family offers an uncomplicated design that is well suited for use in newspapers and... Read More

FF Bau is a large workhorse family of sans serif typefaces drawn in the “Grotesk” genre. Christian Schwartz is its designer, working under the inspiration of Grotesk types cast by the Schelter & Giesecke foundry in Leipzig. Schelter & Giesecke sold these popular Grotesks for many decades; they were first introduced around 1880. When the Bauhaus moved nearby in Dessau in the mid-1920s, these... Read More

Originally drawn for a logotype, the FF District Bold style was completed in 2001. For French designer Albert Boton, it was refreshing to work in this style, and to tinker with the weight and the limitations peculiar to this kind of family. The rounded corners and subtle details gave the design stylishness and personality. First released in 2002 as part of FF Bastille Display family (together... Read More

The ideal typeface for cartographyThe Swiss designer/typographer Felix Arnold designed Cisalpin during the late 1990s, after he had challenged himself to create a contemporary typeface that could be used for cartographic uses. Arnold came to the subject of cartographic typefaces after analyzing many maps and atlases, and discovering that there was no standard typeface for these types of... Read More

The Venus type family is a historic hot metal face with left slanted weights that is used for the german cartographic map production. There are also special typefaces required like the Roemisch and Topografische Zahlentafel type family.

The Handel Gothic™ typeface has been a mainstay of graphic communication for over 40 years - all the while looking as current as tomorrow. Designed by Don Handel in the mid-1960s, and used in the 1973 United Airlines logo developed by Saul Bass, Handel Gothic was an instant success when released to the graphic design community. Its generous lowercase x-height, full-bodied counters and square... Read More

Following Generis, Aeonis is Erik Faulhaber’s second large type family. Lapidary inscriptions from Ancient Greece supured Faulhaber on to create this typeface’s basic sans serif forms. This clarity is visible in the simplified form of the typeface's capital A. Further inspiration came from a domed lamp designed in 1952 by Wilhelm Wagonfeld; this went on to inspire the roundness in Aeonis.... Read More

Typefaces without serifs were known in nineteenth-century England as Grotesque (or Grotesk in German) because they seemed so unusual to most readers. Monotype Grotesque font is a straightforward 1926 design that is among the earliest sans serifs cut for hot-metal machine typesetting. Its simple, clean lines make it amenable for text use, and the condensed and extended versions are useful for... Read More

The Azbuka™ typeface family has its roots in a fairly pedestrian source. “The idea came in part from an old sign in London that read ‘SPRINKLER STOP VALVE’,” says Dave Farey, designer of the typeface. Like all good sign spotters, Farey took a photograph of the sign and filed it away for possible use in a lettering or typeface design project. In Prague a number of years later, the street signs... Read More