LinoLetter 2005/03

Hans-Jürgen Ellenberger began his work on Elementis in 1975 with the goal of transforming the rounded forms of an alphabet so that all letters would have the same gray value. However, as was typical of the time, his design required a number of complicated and cumbersome development steps and had to be postponed. He would not resume work on the the project until over 20 years later, when the desktop publishing revolution made it possible to digitize his designs for further processing. In one sense, the completed font family might be considered a tribute to the difficulties that all type designers faced in the pre-digital age.
Elementis’ letters display a delightfully quirky character sure to liven up any document. The five-member type family has received substantial critical acclaim. Aside from winning an honorable mention in Linotype’s 2003 International Type Design Conference, Elementis received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club’s 2005 TDC2 Type Design Contest, where it was even selected as one of the Judges’ Choices! Considered to be the most important annual competition among type designers, Ellenberger could be considered a perennial favorite at the TDC2: his Carlin Script family was a winner there in 2003.

Take a closer look at Elementis

A second Linotype typeface was awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design at the 2005 TDC2 as well: Pirouette. Japanese designer Ryuichi Tanteno developed this formal engravers’ hand from 1999-2003, and was heavily influenced by master calligrapher/type designer Hermann Zapf’s Zapfino in the process.

As far as sans serif text faces go, you’ll always be on the safe side with this old favorite: the Basic Commercial font family epitomizes clear and objective design. These classic forms have very few unusual qualities, and remain both lively and legible in all weights. Perhaps this anonymity is the reason that Basic Commercial’s style has been popular with graphic designers for decades!
Basic Commercial’s design has a century’s worth of history behind it. The typeface was distributed for many years in the United States under the name Standard Series, where it worked its way into many aspects of daily life and culture: for instance, it was the face chosen for use in the New York City subway system’s signage.

The Austrian designer Maria Martina Schmitt developed this series of fonts 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. Quartan’s three styles exude a curious industrial quality, which enhances their unicase, building block nature.

Linotype’s TypoTechnica 2005 conference at London’s St. Bride Printing Library was an intimate gathering of renowned type designers, industry-leading font technicians, small Internet font foundry owners, and students. All came to garner the latest updates from the world of font technology, and the program did not disappoint. At the top of the list of announcements was Quark, Inc., who gave their first public preview of QuarkXPress 7.0’s new typographic features.
Other conference highlights included lectures from Microsoft’s Paul Nelson and Adobe’s David Lemon concerning the future development of the now established OpenType format, as well as a visually inspiring keynote address by the legendary type designer Matthew Carter.

OpenType is a new cross-platform font format, collaboratively developed by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType fonts offer many advanced typographic features to their users, including the capability to switch between alternate glyphs, and to set multiple languages and writing systems harmoniously. The Linotype OpenType collection is constantly growing, and currently includes over 3,300 fonts.

What fonts are used in films? We constantly notice exceptional, humorous, and romantic typefaces on movie posters or announcements and wonder which fonts were used in them. Linotype’s up-to-date Movie Fonts page is worth a second look.