ITC Stepp™ font family


Designed by  Hal Taylor in 2005
When Hal Taylor saw the 1930 logo for the Stetson Shoe Company of Weymouth, Massachusetts, he didn't run out and buy a pair of loafers. Instead, he seized on this striking example of an Art Deco logotype as the basis for a new typeface design. “I was impressed with the delicate and sophisticated letter forms,” Taylor recalls, “particularly the enlarged cap S -- in any other case it would have seemed unbalanced, but in the context of this logo, it worked perfectly.”

All the letters in the original all-caps Stetson Shoe logo were rendered with condensed proportions except the O, which was a perfect circle. While the prominent O added visual interest to the logo, Taylor knew that such a character would limit his typeface to display applications. For versatility's sake, he drew his O for ITC Stepp with the same proportions as the rest of the alphabet. Taylor also gave the logotype's inverted S a more traditional design, but kept the original as an alternate character in the OpenType font.

Taylor's toughest challenge during the design process was creating a lowercase. “A good type design tells you what it wants to be,” he says, “and after a little while the Stepp caps began to tell me what the lowercase should look like.” Taylor's lowercase is slightly more conventional than the caps. The jaunty g" and almost upside-down "s" add subtle charm, while the capital letters provide the broader gestures of Stepp's personality. Together, they create a versatile and distinctive typeface design.

One of Hal Taylor's first jobs was as a photo-lettering typographer in Philadelphia, setting headlines and creating custom lettering. This was followed by a stint doing finished lettering for John Langdon, whose ambigrams appear in Dan Brown's best-selling novel, Angels & Demons. Today, Taylor works as a graphic designer in the publishing industry, but he still finds time to create an occasional hand-lettered book jacket, and draw handsome typeface designs.

ITC Stepp is available in four weights, ranging from Light to Ultra Bold. All four weights have companion italics, and the lightest three weights also offer a suite of small caps."

ITC Stepp Bold

Desktop fonts are designed to be installed on a computer for use with applications. Licensed per user.
Annual web fonts are licensed for a set number of page views.
Annual web fonts are licensed for a set number of page views.
Application licensing allows fonts to be embedded in your software applications. The license may be based on the number of titles or the number of installations.
Electronic Document Fonts can be embedded in an eBook, eMagazine or eNewspaper. Fonts are licensed annually per issue.
Server fonts can be installed on a server and e.g. used by automated processes to create items. A license is per server core CPU per year.
A Digital Ads license allows you to embed web fonts in digital ads, such as ads created in HTML5. These license is based on the number of ad impressions.
ITC Stepp


Select technical format and
language support of the font.
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Std / OT CFF

supports at least

21 languages.















Technical details
Digital data from:
OpenType outline flavour:
CFF - PostScript-Outlines
Technical font names:
File name: SteppITCStd-Bold.otf
Windows menu name: Stepp ITC Std Medium
PostScript name: , SteppITCStd-Bold
PostScript full name: , SteppITCStd-Bold
Catalog number:
16783664
Characters:
333
US$ 299.90
Add to cart

Features

Languages

Case-Sensitive Forms

Tag: case

Function: Shifts various punctuation marks up to a position that works better with all-capital sequences or sets of lining figures; also changes oldstyle figures to lining figures. By default, glyphs in a text face are designed to work with lowercase characters. Some characters should be shifted vertically to fit the higher visual center of all-capital or lining text. Also, lining figures are the same height (or close to it) as capitals, and fit much better with all-capital text. The user selects a block of text and applies this feature. The dashes, bracketing characters, guillemet quotes and the like shift up to match the capitals, and oldstyle figures change to lining figures.

Fractions

Tag: frac

Function: Replaces figures separated by a slash with 'common' (diagonal) fractions. The user enters 3/4 in a recipe and gets the threequarters fraction.

Standard Ligatures

Tag: liga

Function: Replaces a sequence of glyphs with a single glyph which is preferred for typographic purposes. This feature covers the ligatures which the designer/manufacturer judges should be used in normal conditions. The glyph for ffl replaces the sequence of glyphs f f l.

Old Style Figures

Tag: onum

Function: This feature changes selected figures from the default lining style to oldstyle form. The user invokes this feature to get oldstyle figures, which fit better into the flow of normal upper- and lowercase text. Various characters designed to be used with figures may also have oldstyle versions.

Ordinals

Tag: ordn

Function: Replaces default alphabetic glyphs with the corresponding ordinal forms for use after figures. One exception to the follows-a-figure rule is the numero character (U+2116), which is actually a ligature substitution, but is best accessed through this feature. The user applies this feature to turn 2.o into 2.o (abbreviation for secundo).

Proportional Figures

Tag: pnum

Function: Replaces figure glyphs set on uniform (tabular) widths with corresponding glyphs set on glyph-specific (proportional) widths. Tabular widths will generally be the default, but this cannot be safely assumed. Of course this feature would not be present in monospaced designs. The user may apply this feature to get even spacing for lining figures used as dates in an all-cap headline.

Superscript

Tag: sups

Function: Replaces lining or oldstyle figures with superior figures (primarily for footnote indication), and replaces lowercase letters with superior letters (primarily for abbreviated French titles). The application can use this feature to automatically access the superior figures (more legible than scaled figures) for footnotes, or the user can apply it to Mssr to get the classic form.

Small Capitals From Capitals

Tag: c2sc

Function: Small Capitals From Capitals

Small Capitals

Tag: smcp

Function: This feature turns lowercase characters into small capitals. This corresponds to the common SC font layout. It is generally used for display lines set in Large & small caps, such as titles. Forms related to small capitals, such as oldstyle figures, may be included. The user enters text as mixed capitals and lowercase, and gets Large & small cap text.

Stylistic Alternates

Tag: salt

Function: Many fonts contain alternate glyph designs for a purely esthetic effect; these don't always fit into a clear category like swash or historical. As in the case of swash glyphs, there may be more than one alternate form. This feature replaces the default forms with the stylistic alternates. The user applies this feature to Industria to get the alternate form of g.

These fonts support the Basic Latin character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in d

Tag: Basic Latin

Function: These fonts support the Basic Latin character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in different formats. Please review the product information for each font to ensure it will meet your requirements.