Fonts in Focus, December 2007

ITC Abaton™ was designed by Luis Siquot in 1997 as an ornamented typeface with exclusively capitals, regular and small caps. The letter outlines are filled with individual horizontal strokes, giving the characters a lighter feel. The forms are based on the rectangle and finished with small, triangular serifs. Abaton is reminiscent of the style popular in the early industrial period, first used in France in 1830, and is intended exclusively for headlines.

Franko Luin about Ad Hoc™: “Ad Hoc is a fake. My intention was to design a typeface with the looks of the characters drawn on paper with a marker pen. But they are all drawn on a monitor, with no scanner ever involved. That’s the reason why they look so regular. Ad Hoc is Latin and stands for, approximately, ‘for this reason’. The expression itself is often used for something unplanned, improvised.”

Andy™ was designed by Steve Matteson for Monotype. Andy is a casual typeface family with a controlled spontaneity that still offers legibility needed for long documents. The Andy font family has become a popular choice for those seeking handwriting fonts.

Arcana™ is a calligraphic exploration of the Victorian gothic aesthetic that created literary classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula. Designer Gabriel Martínez Meave first wrote with a fountain pen, then digitized the results to create this unique typeface. “Arcana” takes its name from the ultimate secrets that lie behind astrology, alchemy, and magic. In gothic novels, such secrets were written in forbidden books, hidden in the dark and grotesque sanctums of magicians or mad scientists (possibly the ancestors of today’s computer scientists and type designers).

ITC Bradley Hand™ is a calligraphy font from Richard Bradley, designed in 1995. The contours make it look as though it were written by hand with a felt tip pen on rough paper and it has all the details which give it a handwritten character. The font has a balanced, harmonious look and lends correspondence a personal touch. Bradley Hand is legible in point sizes as small as 8 and is good for headlines and short to middle length texts.

Linotype Cineplex™ is a typeface that shows its root in stencil lettering. Dario Muhafara created a modern sans serif type family which is ideally suited for cool, technical themes. A small caps font offer a widely usage in book production.

ITC Deelirious™ is a funky, handwritten-style typeface. The letters look quickly scrawled in a crazy manner – all jump up and down on the baseline and are different sizes. Yet it is not completely ‘delirious.’ Many characters are smooth and elegant showing much more consideration and care (the design is really more bi-polar rather than completely insane). So why not try it out and have a little fun with this wild design? It is perfect to express spontaneity, funkiness, and maybe a bit of lunacy for whatever your project may be.

In Adrian Frutiger, the discipline of a mathematically exact mind is joined with an unmistakable artistic sense. His independent work possesses the controllable language of letterforms. Personal and intensive, this work is the manifestation of his expressive will. Frutiger’s precise sense of outline reveals itself two- or three-dimensionally in wood, stone, or bronze, on printing plates and in the form of reliefs.
However, even his independent work can be understood as objectivized signs; in their symbolism, they are embedded in the fundamental questions of human existance. They might have developed in the spirit of playfulness, but their nature is always conceptual, directed towards a complex, yet harmonic, whole. Following function, form also necessarily follows the content of the language.
The entire spiritual world becomes readable through letters. Essentially, Adrian Frutiger attempts to fathom the basic, central truth which defines our lives: change, growth, division - beginning and end. In a virtual synthesis, he seems to close the circle in which the world reflects itself in symbolic forms.
Frutiger® Stones is for Adrian Frutiger the example of his formal artistic sensibility par excellence. Searching for the fundamental elements in nature, he has discovered the pebble, rounded and polished over innumerable years by gently flowing water.
And out of this, he has created his complete system, a ruralistic typeface of letters and symbols. It depicts animals and plants, as well as astrological and mythical signs. Because of its unique aura, Frutiger Stones is particularly well-suited to different purposes – in headlines and prominent pictograms, as symbol faces, illustrations, and more.
Frutiger Symbols is a symbol font of plants, animals and stars as well as religious and mythological symbols. Together with Frutiger Stones this typeface builds a complete design system, which offers endless possibilities. It can be used for illustrations or a symbol type with its distinctive pictograms. Frutiger Symbols is available in the weights regular, positive and negative.

The word “Text” in Goudy Text™ is short for Textura, and textura is the style of blackletter or gothic writing developed in Northern Europe in the middle ages. The use of space in blackletter is quite different from what we know about Roman letterforms. Lowercase forms in blackletter writing and typefaces must be evenly textured with black and white elements, like the texture of weaving or fabric. Capital letters can provide either an integration of the even texture (by the use of decoration in their construction) or, if they are wide and open and filled with white, they provide bright spots of visual emphasis. Goudy, despite being an American in the twentieth century, understood well the fundamental texture of medieval blackletter and the importance of both density and light. He designed Goudy Text in 1928 for Lanston Monotype after studying the type in Gutenberg’s 42-line bible; still one of the best models for designers of blackletter typefaces. The lowercase of Goudy Text has impact and medieval authenticity. The standard caps have some Victorian eccentricities but are mostly well drawn. The alternate, or “Lombardic” caps are spectacular - they set beautifully with the lowercase letters, providing the proverbial shafts of light through the Gothic cathedral’s stained glass windows. Use this potent font in sizes 14 point or larger, for Christmas greetings, certificates, wedding invitations, advertising, or music collateral pieces.

Index™ was designed by Christophe Badani with the character of a school book typeface. The goal was to create a sans serif font which gave an impression of both movement and harmony and the soft, round forms of this font has an almost ornamental feel. The influence of American advertisement and poster typefaces of the turn of the 20th century is clear to see. Index can be used as headline or text font in small or larger point sizes.