Font Design Releases 2004/2005

Palatino™ nova is Prof. Hermann Zapf’s redesign of his own masterpiece, Palatino. The original Palatino was cut in metal by August Rosenberger at D. Stempel AG typefoundry in Frankfurt, and released in 1950. Palatino was later adapted for mechanical composition on the Linotype machine, and became one of the most-used typefaces of the 20th Century. Palatino was designed for legibility, and has open counters and carefully weighted strokes. The type was named after Giambattista Palatino, a master of calligraphy from the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Palatino is a typeface based on classical Italian Renaissance forms. A modern classic in its own right, Palatino is popular among professional graphic designers and amateurs alike, working well for both text and display typography.

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At first glance, Frutiger™ Capitalis may seem related to the roman type Capitalis Monumentalis, but opon closer examination, the fonts reveal a vitality unknown to the characters the Romans etched in stone. Designer Adrian Frutiger confesses that creating Capitalis was “a liberation”. After working on so many sophisticated and meticulously designed typefaces, Capitalis was a breath of fresh air.
Stylistically, Frutiger Capitalis Outline forms a bridge to Frutiger Capitalis Signs – a whole universe of its own. Frutiger Capitalis Signs is a personal cosmos of symbols, many are immediately “legible”, others leave room for interpretation. Some of the symbols are the product of Frutiger’s imagination, such as his “Life Signs” – soft, hand drawn figures whose lines have no apparent beginning or end, creating both interior and exterior spaces, new forms emerging at each glance. These contoured drawings have accompanied Frutiger throughout his professional life –a fantasy garden which has provided an important balance to his many years of disciplined typeface design. Yet he does not consider himself an artist. Frutiger says he simply “wants to tell stories, to draw thin lines, create contours of signs: that is my style”.

Linotype Gothic™ is a revised version of the News Gothic™ typeface, updated for 21st Century needs and conventions. News Gothic was first designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908 for American Type Founders (ATF); it is one of the quintessential sans serif designs of the early 1900s. Like News Gothic, Linotype Gothic’s capital letters bear similar visual width to each other, and the lowercase is compact and powerful. Linotype Gothic supports all Western, Central, and Eastern European languages that make use of the Roman alphabet. The font has been superbly hinted, rendering it apt for office applications and onscreen reading. Linotype Gothic may be used in print at any size; it is legible in both text and display settings.

Werner Schneider created a calligraphic type trilogy of the highest aesthetic order; he named this typeface family after Buddha’s stepbrother, Sunetta. The result is an outstanding choice for contemporary display type purposes. Its combination of lively forms overcome sterile text passages, lending them a more personal note and feeling. But Sunetta™ is not only recommended for documents bestowing distinction and accolades; the fonts are superb for shorter text passages as well. Sunetta’s spirited flow raises it above the fray that so many generic letterforms find themselves mired in, creating an unforgettable impression.
Sunetta’s three complementary styles, Sunetta Flair, Sunetta Charme, and Sunetta Magic, offer three varying degrees of calligraphic verve.

Veronika Grüger designed the Veronika™ sans-serif family in 2004. This series of text faces have near-uniform stroke widths, but still maintain some calligraphic aspects in their forms, which add dynamic and movement-like qualities to text. Veronika’s proportions allow it to function very well in long amounts of copy set in small sizes. However, only when you design larger headlines, logos, or other elements with Veronika, will you notice all of the type’s special qualities, such as its weight distribution and stroke characteristics.

Take a look at our Veronika usage sample

The Danish designer Nina Lee Storm designed Noa™ for use on television and computer screens during the late 1990s. She began her six-member type family with the creation of bitmap fonts, developing their print outlines only secondarily. Noa’s letters exhibit a tall x-height, coupled with very short ascenders and descenders. Storm is proud to report that her typeface also looks very “Danish”. Why don’t you give it a try?

Cisalpin™, designed by Swiss typographer Felix Arnold, is a type family for cartographers. The font is very legible at small sizes. The linear sans serif design bears resemblance to renaissance serif types, and its various weights are all clearly differentiated from one another. Space is at a premium on maps, so Cisalpin is a narrow face. Its letterforms in are durable, maintaining their readability even over top of complex backgrounds. With open interior forms, flattened curves, tall x-heights, and a capital height that almost reaches the tops of the ascenders, Cisalpin’s design also includes pronounced Italics, with a very clear angle of inclination. In short, each letterform in the family has been optimized so that they cannot be easily mistaken for another. This helps minimize the misunderstandings that often occur because of illegibility. Although Cisalpin was developed for use in cartography, it may be used for countless other purposes; any font that can work well in small sizes on a map could be used almost anywhere else!

Take a look at our Cisalpin usage sample

Diverda™ Sans is a geometric family of typefaces that are all free from ornament. Swiss designer Daniel Lanz optimized Diverda Sans for maximum legibility. In contrast to many other modern typefaces, which try to squeeze the traditional rounder forms of the alphabet into square designs, and which often attempt to equalize the widths of the capital letters, Diverda Sans remains true to the proper proportions of the Roman alphabet. The x-heights of Diverda’s characters are low, and the differences between curved, square, and triangular elements are very clear. Like the more calligraphic typefaces of the past, Diverda’s strokes exhibit contrast that is inspired by movements of the pen on paper; down strokes are heavier than up strokes. Possible applications for the Diverda Sans include magazine design, as well as advertising for fashion, design, or architectural products. Because of its 10 different individual styles or weights, Diverda Sans is also a good fit for Corporate Identity solutions.
Diverda Serif’s 10 styles/weights are modeled off of the same design principle underlying Diverda Sans. This slab serif family may also be used for all of the applications mentioned in Diverda Sans. Additionally, these 10 styles/weights would be a great choice for use in contemporary book design.

Take a look at our Diverda usage sample

Roman Sehrer, a seasoned German advertising professional, has digitized his handwriting to create a family of three fonts to meet your free-feeling and laid back design needs. Sehrer recommends that you try AdPro™ out on posters, logos, and restaurant menus, where in each case it will offer a great combination and contrast to traditional sans serifs like Helvetica or like Univers.

Take a look at our AdPro usage sample

Inspired by calligraphic styles from 15th century Italy, master Swedish typographer Bo Berndal designed the Byngve™ font family. With four styles-Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic-Byngve proudly shows its process: Berndal wrote out the entire family by hand before digitizing it and converting its beauty into a typeface. Byngve is most suited for advertising uses, and for greeting cards.
The name Byngve comes from Bo Berndal’s two Christian names: Bo Yngve. He just put the two names together and it formed “Byngve”.

Take a look at our Byngve usage sample

The American designer Paul Veres designed the Caterina™ family in 1999. Caterina, which has six different styles, is a calligraphic sans serif face. While he was producing the film “The Legend of Suriyothai”, director Francis Ford Coppola personally selected Caterina for use in some of the films subtitles – in this case, they functioned like chapter titles in a book, or silent movie captions. Aside from Hollywood films, Caterina can be used for a wide variety of applications, including wedding invitations, greeting cards, and advertising purposes.

Take a look at our Caterina usage sample

Swedish designer Karl-Erik Forsberg created the original Berling™ typeface in 1951. Owned by Verbum in Sweden, Berling was completely redesigned and released in 2004, under the name Berling™ Nova. Forsberg (1914–1995) is considered one of Sweden’s most masterful graphic designers, and his original Berling has come to be seen as possibly the most definitive Swedish typeface. But typesetting technology has changed significantly since the 1950s; a redesign was necessary in order to secure that the spirit of Berling would survive in the digital age.
Berling Nova is an OpenType “Pro” font, it supports a range of languages used across western, central, and eastern Europe, including the Central European languages that use the CE character set.
Berling Nova is well suited for longer text passages in books, publications, and magazines. This typeface fulfils all the demands that one can make on a legible newspaper typeface. Access to both text and display versions are important to the demanding typographer. This is the first time since the typeface was digitalized that it is possible to use it in order to create truly beautiful and functional typography in all type sizes.

Take a look at our Berling Nova usage sample

The Legal™ typeface family grew out a sans serif project that Hellmut G. Bomm began in the 1970s (his HGB Grotesk). This refined, industrial type family is well suited for short amounts of text, headlines, corporate identity and logo design. In small sizes, the typeface works like many other sans serifs, but with better differentiation between characters. The Legal family includes Old Style Figures and true Italics.

Quartan™ is an industrial, unicase sans serif family, with three weights. The Austrian designer Maria Martina Schmitt developed this series of typefaces for designers to use when setting chunks of text en masse. Being a unicase design, Quartan’s letterforms have no ascenders or descenders; lines of text may be stacked virtually on top of one other. This offers a multitude of possibilities for headline, logo, or corporate identity design.

Take a look at our Quartan usage sample

Sharquefin™ is a round, constructed display face, which contains shark fin-like elements that rise out from part of its letterforms. Gary Tennant, a designer from the UK, designed Sharquefin especially for fun uses, like party flyers. Sharquefin has two styles available: regular and oblique.

Varius™, designed by André Maaßen, is a funky, calligraphic, serif type family. Eight different fonts are available, including three separate Romans, each of which has a matching Italic. An ornaments font and a font of musical symbols and notations are also available. Varius’s letterforms have been drawn slightly narrow, and traces of the wide-nibbed pen can still be seen within them. This family is a great choice for use in greeting cards.

Zoran Kostik began designing the Just Square™ font family in 1999, based on a logo that his son, an art student, had designed. The design project grew until Kostic had designed eight weights, for both the Latin and the Cyrillic writing systems. Just Square is a very geometric and constricted face best used in experimental designs (i.e., logos, web sites, flyers, and expressive headlines).

The 15 different fonts in the Why Square™ family are an extension of the designs begun in Zoran Kostic’s Just Square family. Why Square’s lowercase letters are all more condensed versions of Just Square’s letters, and in some of the fonts, the uppercase letters are wider. The first five of the 15 fonts are the different weights of Why Square (Ultra Thin, Ultra Light, Thin, Light, and Regular). Here, all of the characters – both upper and lowercase – are more condensed versions of the geometric letters from the Just Square family. The next five fonts (Ultra Thin, Ultra Light, Thin, Light, and Regular weights) include identical lowercase letters to those from the first five fonts in the family, but their capitals are considerably wider. These may be used as initials, either with the other fonts in the Why Square family, or with the Just Square family. The last five fonts in the Why Square family are Cyrillic versions of the first five weights (Ultra Thin, Ultra Light, Thin, Light, and Regular).

Bringing variety to the dry Christmas card genre, Xmas™ font can also be used on posters to spread holiday cheer at home. No limits are placed on your creativity here!The family has three different fonts, each with more than 60 symbols inside: Xmas Story includes the whole figure palette necessary for a classical Christmas story. From a cute little Baby Jesus to the Three Wise Men and wooly Aramaic sheep, and everything that one needs to add special flair to a letter to grandma, or to set up a Nativity Scene at home for the kids is included. Customers who aren’t searching for a biblical font should check out Xmas Essentials. This font contains typical non-denominational end-of-the-year holiday ornaments, such as snowflakes, decorated Christmas trees, nutcrackers, and stars. Last but not least is the Xmas Modern font. Just as global warming poses severe risks to snowmen, this font will make recipients of your holiday and New Year’s cards melt. Glyphs such as Santa Claus riding on a Vespa – complete with iPod – speed away from normal, stuffy holiday seriousness, and signal that the Fun Generation has arrived! The best choice, of course, is to treat yourself to all three fonts this Christmas. Then you’ll be prepared for every situation. Happy Holidays!

Take a look at our Xmas Font usage sample

The symbol family Tips™, (which stands for “Type-Image-Piktogramm-Schrift” in German, or type-image-pictogram-font in English) contains six different fonts of pictograms and stylized icons. Tips Active is a font filled with characters reminiscent of Otl Aicher’s sports pictograms from the 1972 Olympic Games. Tips Astro contains astrological signs. Tips Bcom depicts icons for use in business communication or web page design. Tips Count is a font featuring numbers inside of various circles. Tips This Way and Tips Travel are both collections of pictograms for use in navigation and other signage systems. Tips is a font of Jochen Hasinger.