LinoLetter 2009/09

The Swift type first took newspapers by storm around 1985. Gerard Unger, one of the Netherland’s leading designers, created the typeface during the early 1980s for Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell in Kiel. This was the company who had created the world’s first digital typesetting machine – the Digiset &ndash back in the 1960s. Even before Linotype acquired that company in 1989, we had begun distributing the marvelous Swift family. In 1995, Gerard updated and re-released Swift on his own, naming the effort “Swift 2.0.” Recently, we worked together with Gerard to upgrade these fonts into fully featured OpenType text fonts. The result is our Neue Swift family®.
But that’s not all! Two months ago, at TypeCon 2009 in Atlanta, Gerard received the Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SoTA). Now 67 years old, Gerard continues to make significant contributions to the fields of graphic design, typeface design, design education, and legibility research. We are very pleased to be able to collaborate with him, and we congratulate Gerard for this recognition of his life’s work to date!

Neue Swift is an excellent choice for use in newspaper designs. Whether in text or headlines, the family offers editors and readers a clear, contemporary typeface choice. Linotype.com offers a wide array of additional selections that function aptly in newspapers, as well as in other documents that you’d like to lend a newspaper-like feel to.

Whether you are designing a newsletter, logo, or annual report, the right typeface is one of your work’s most important ingredients. Since the Linotype library includes thousands of fonts, remembering all of your favorite selections can be challenging, not to mention the scores of secrets our catalog holds that are available for your discovery. From time to time, we like to highlight some of the lesser-known hits in our collection; a new page on our website does just this!

Customers often ask us which fonts film studios use in the promotional materials for recent summer blockbusters. For years, our “movie fonts” page has been one of the most highly visited areas on our website. We’ve just refreshed it with a number of new examples.