From retro show­card dis­play designs, to mod­ern rework­ings of clas­sic typefaces, to vir­tual clones of antique fonts, there are more typeface reviv­als avail­able to graphic design­ers today than ever before. Maybe Fred Goudy was right, “The old guys stole all our good ideas.”

Although Goudy had noth­ing to do with this pro­ject, ITC just released an upgraded and enlarged ver­sion of the ITC Stone® Sans typeface fam­ily. The ori­ginal plan was to add some con­densed designs to the exist­ing fam­ily, and call it a day. Once Sum­ner Stone, the designer of the ori­ginal ITC Stone Sans and the new revival, got into the pro­ject, how­ever, he real­ized that more extens­ive design improve­ment were called for. The end res­ult is a com­pletely new addi­tion to the ITC Stone super fam­ily, con­sist­ing of 24 typefaces in the Open­Type™ font format.

A little over two years ago, ITC also released an enlarged and improved ver­sion of the ITC Frank­lin Gothic™ typeface fam­ily. Called simply ITC Frank­lin™, the new design, cre­ated by David Ber­low, has 48 designs and is also avail­able as Open­Type fonts. The new designs range from the very wil­lowy Thin to the robust Ultra – with Light, Medium Bold and Black weights in between. Each weight is also avail­able in Nar­row, Con­densed and Com­pressed vari­ants, and each design has a com­ple­ment­ary Italic.

Prior to these two designs, ITC had not released upgraded or improved ver­sions of typefaces in its lib­rary. It has, from time to time, added new weights and pro­por­tions to exist­ing fam­il­ies but never reworked the basic designs from scratch.

My ques­tion to you is: would you like to see more ITC typeface re-released to higher stand­ards of design excel­lence – and would you like to seen exist­ing ITC typeface fam­il­ies enlarged to con­tain a broader range of weights and proportions?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Type for Print.