Fonts in Focus, September 2007

Botanical™ is a small, yet varied collection of floral and organic images. The leaves, trees, and flower icons make the perfect detailed adornments to invitations, cards, or posters. They can also be combined and repeated in interesting ways to form unique borders and patterns.

At first glance, Burgstaedt Antiqua™ looks like an old typewriter face, or rather like a typeface from a typewriter that has gone hopelessly wrong! Only after your second glance will you see this font for what it really is – a thoroughly new text face. Several features of Burgstaedt Antiqua, and its companion italic face, are worth special attention: First, the terminal styles of the letters vary throughout the alphabet. This gives text set in Burgstaedt Antiqua a slightly jittery feeling. A second interesting feature is the lowercase “q”, which takes the form of a shrunken-down uppercase “Q”. Careful viewing of our specially prepared PDF specimen will reveal even more hidden features!
Burgstaedt Antiqua Regular and Burgstaedt Antiqua Italic may be used in both text and headlines. For use in text, we recommend employing a slightly larger point size (12 pt or 14 pt and above). British designer Richard Yeend designed this family in 2002, and both of its fonts are included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH.

Aldo Novarese designed the Fluidum typeface in 1951. As its name implies, the design is very fluid. This high contrast script face curls and twists across the line. It is sort of a cross between Giambattista Bodoni’s cursive letters, and Aldo Novarese’s later, heavier designs, like Microgramma™ , Eurostile™, and Sprint™. Fludium should be set in very large point sizes. It is perfect for invitations, greeting cards, and fine logos.

Haarlemmer™ is a recreation of a never-produced Jan van Krimpen typeface that goes one step beyond authentic: it shows how he wanted it to be designed in the first place.
The original, drawn in the late 1930s, was created for the Dutch Society for the Art of Printing and Books and was to be used to set a new edition of the Bible, using Monotype typesetting. Hence the problem: fonts for metal typesetting machines like the Linotype and Monotype had to be created within a crude system of predetermined character width values. Every letter had to fit within and have its spacing determined by a grid of only 18 units. Often, the italic characters had to share the same widths as those in the roman design. Van Krimpen believed this severely impaired the design process.
The invasion of Holland in World War II halted all work on the Bible project, and the original Haarlemmer never went into production. Flash forward about sixty years.
Frank E. Blokland, of The Dutch Type Library, wanted to revive the original Haarlemmer, but this time as Van Krimpen would have intended. Blokland reinterpreted the original drawings and created a typeface that matched, as much as possible, Van Krimpen’s initial concept. While Van Krimpen’s hand could no longer be on the tiller, a thorough study of his work made up for his absence.
The result is an exceptional text family of three weights, with complementary italic designs and a full suite of small caps and old style figures. Van Krimpen would be proud.

ITC Flora® is the work of Dutch designer Gerard Unger, and is named for his daughter. He started by doing calligraphy experiments with felt-tip and ballpoint pens, and developed these drawings into a formalized script typeface. Swiss typographer Max Caflisch advised the Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH technology firm to add a new round-nibbed script face to their Digiset type library, and in 1984, Flora was released by Hell. Unger used a chancery cursive skeleton in this design, which imparts grace and movement. Flora was also intentionally designed to be simple and sturdy, and with its minimal variation in thick/thin stroke ratio, it worked well on the early digital typesetting machines. In 1989, the International Typeface Corporation released the font. ITC Flora continues to work well on current printers and typesetters, and it has an enduring popularity for uses that range from short text passages to display headlines.

Designer Nick Curtis found the inspiration for this typeface on a 1920s poster for a German bookseller, by Berlin poster artist Paul Scheurich. ITC Jeepers™ retains the spontaneity and playfulness of Scheurich’s original lettering and adds a few surprises of its own, one being the somewhat exclamatory ear on the lowercase ‘g.’ It was, in fact, the excited look of this particular character that gave rise to the font’s name.
The monoweight, slab serif design has a friendly personality, perfect for headlines and other display uses.

The unusual and noticeable Linotype Grassy™ was created by German designer Inka Menne during her communication design studies at the FH Potsdam. One project involved the development of a writing utensil. Menne designed a wooden stylus with a rubber eraser as the writing tip. “The result of this pen and a bit of ‘puffing’ were the basis for Grassy ... As I found out that Grassy had won a prize in the 3rd International Type Design Contest, I decided to extend the typeface family to include three weights, so I drew and ‘puffed’ a full character set for each weight”, explained Menne. One look is enough to see where the typeface got its name. Each letter is sprouting a few blades of grass and an entire line resembles a front lawn in one of three stages of overgrowth. Linotype Grassy not only attracts attention but its appearance is also not easily forgotten.

Morocco™ is a round, curvaceous font from Swiss designer Michael Parson. Many of the letterforms in Morocco are inspired by the Modern Greek alphabet. Five of the lowercase letters have additional ascenders/descenders that are not typical in the Roman alphabet (h, n, s, u, x). This experimentation continues into the uppercase as well; many capital letters in this font have been bequeathed with ascender or descender-like elements, and some capital letters, like the “Q”, only come up to the x-height of the lowercase letters. This experiment in type design is one of ten from Parson that has been included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH.

The branding agency’s client wanted an “ultra modern” typeface that was “futuristic without being gimmicky or ephemeral,” according to the design brief. Designer Sebastian Lester took on this intriguing custom font assignment, but soon, a bureaucratic decision cancelled the project.
“I was left with a sketchbook full of ideas and thought it would be a shame not to see what came of them,” says Lester. He decided to finish the design on his own.
Lester’s research confirmed that the principal ingredient of an “ultra modern” typeface was simplicity of character structure: a carefully drawn, monoline form, open letter shapes and smooth, strong curves. To conceive a typeface that crossed the line from modern to futuristic, Lester decided to amplify these qualities.
About a year after Lester’s initial conceptual work, two highly functional and versatile typefaces emerged. These are Neo® Sans and Neo Tech , designs Lester describes as “legible without being neutral, nuanced without being fussy, and expressive without being distracting.“
Both the Neo Sans and the more-minimalist Neo Tech families are available in six weights, ranging from Light to Ultra. Each has a companion italic, and Neo Tech offers a suite of alternate characters.
While engineered to look modern as tomorrow, Neo Sans and Neo Tech display the functional and aesthetic excellence that earns them a place in the list of classic designs from the Monotype typeface library.

Regatta™ is a bold, narrow sans serif designed by Alan Meeks in 1987. Its strong, robust figures makes it a particularly good font for headlines in larger point sizes. Regatta is distinguished by its diamond shaped dots on i and j as well as the slanted strokes of several figures. These characteristics relax the closed, static image of Regatta and let the font seem cheerful and friendly.

Stockholm™ is a contemporary roman typeface designed by Paul Shaw in collaboration with Garrett Boge in 1998. Its strong yet refined roman character shapes were inspired by twentieth century Swedish lettering. The face is appropriate for both text and display settings.

Tannhaeuser™ is the work of British designer Alan Meeks, a sans serif typeface with conventional capitals letter complemented by an unusual lowercase alphabet. It looks best when close letter spaced, especially the lowercase, whose lower right extensions are designed to overlap or join in a script fashion.