Brian Sooy

Designer Brian Sooy (born 9. 7. 1961) created the fonts ITC Coventry™ (/1998) and Verve™ (1998).
“ITC Coventry is what type would look like if you left a gothic font out in the rain. IF you look close, you’ll see the roots of a handsome sans serif font buried under a layer of grime and rust, basically.” The low-budget student flyers that Sooy saw in the Coventry section of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, inspired him to design this font and the result is a typeface which looks as though it has been faxed or photocopied many times. “While it looks very irregular in text, it’s very carefully spaced to give that effect,” says Sooy. ITC Coventry was designed to work just as well in text as in headlines or even on billboards.

Brian Sooy’s concept for the font Verve “was to create an elegant condensed typeface that would be a typeface for the millennium, in style and functionality.” Sooy’s 1998 vision of the new millenium takes shape in a typeface that suggests technology-driven humanism. Uniform character widths and vertical strokes create a rhythm of electronic precision, while subtle yet sensual curves evoke hand lettering. Verve can create strong identities for posters, packaging and Web sites, or punctuate headlines and titles.


ITC Coventry Font Family is part of the ITC Library OpenType Edition, Verve Font Family belongs to the Adobe Type Collection OpenType Edition.