ITC American Typewriter is a happy melding of its office forerunner, traits that make it a friendly, broad-shouldered typeface at large sizes, and time-proven characteristics that ensure high levels of legibility in text copy. The design does away with the typewriter’s rigid spacing (which assigns the same amount of space to a lowercase “i” as it does to a capital “W”). And while the letterforms of ITC American Typewriter are clearly influenced by a typewriter font, they are far more legible and ultimately more readable than any standard typewriter output. What’s not to like?

Traditional typographic history would have us believe that Aldus Manutius invented italic types, in the 14th century, as a space saving device. The story is told that Aldus paid the type designer Francesco Griffo da Bologna to develop a cursive type for a new series of small books that he was planning to produce. It is said that Aldus’s goal was to cut paper costs and thus make his publications less expensive. These inexpensive books would thus be available to those who previously could not afford them. Then, as now, paper was expensive, but saving paper was not Aldus’s goal in the creating of italic type – and Aldus never sold an “inexpensive” book.

Aldus’s italic type evolved from a popular writing style used by the educated. Its heritage can be traced back to Niccolo de Niccoli, an Italian scholar of the early 15th century. De Niccoli started to oblique and added flourishes to his letters when “he wished to write in a faster more relaxed fashion than usual.” By the mid-century other scholars began to imitate his writing style, and by the late 1400s, italic became the official writing style of the educated, and of the professional scribes of southern Italy. In fact, the style came to be called Cancellaresca because of the large volume of work produced in that type for the city chancelleries.

Most of Aldus’ customers for his books were the same people who used the cursive style of writing. In adapting the style to print, he and Griffo were making books more appealing to their intended audience. Today, we would call this concept creative marketing.

Aldus’s Idea proved very successful; so successful in fact that other printers felt obliged to produce their own books in this new typestyle. The problem was that Aldus knew a product differentiator when he saw one, and was not about to sell fonts of his new invention to the competition. So the early printers did what has become a tradition in the history of type design – they copied the designs they could not buy. Not wishing to call attention to the plagiarism, but still needing to give the new offering a name, they chose “italic,” after Italy, the country in which Aldus worked.

1. If you can afford it, have a custom font created that is explicitly for your brand. If you can’t afford a custom design, choose a typeface that is both distinctive and versatile. The key is to pick something that walks the fine line between a bland design that is versatile and a distinctive design that will not be appropriate for a multitude of uses.
2. Chose a type family with several styles. Roman, italic and bold versions of a family are almost never enough for a large branding system. Perhaps not immediately, but sooner or later the client is going to run into instances where condensed, very bold, or even other styles may be required.
3. Use typefaces that have legs. There are more than 200,000 fonts in the world to choose from. Many have a short life – and then become about as fashionable as tie-dyed t-shirts. Brands are supposed to last a long time. Pick a typeface that will not look out of date in a short time.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee took all three of the guidelines to heart when they chose the Neo® Sans typeface design as part of the branding for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Ali Gardiner, vice president of brand and creative services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, sums it up perfectly. “We selected Neo Sans,” she recalls, “because it felt contemporary and would represent Canada as a modern, progressive country, but it also feels like it will ‘age well’…which is important for Olympic design because it’s seen for decades and even centuries after the Games themselves. Neo Sans also has many weights, which made it practical across the tens of thousands of uses for which it would be required.”

To add a little more distinction to the use of the design, the Vancouver team requested that a special custom font be developed by Monotype Imaging. According to Gardiner, “We thought that a unicase font (one that had several lowercase characters designed to the height and proportions of the capitals) could be used for display text in a way that felt both warm and friendly as well as contemporary and cool, which was how we wanted to represent Canada to the world. It also had the potential to become a unique, recognizable typeface for Vancouver 2010, which was important as we established our own look and feel and brand identity leading up to the Games.”

Sebastian Lester, the designer of Neo Sans and the custom unicase font, is delighted that his design was chosen for the Winter Games. “I’ve always sought to design appealing, useful and versatile typefaces,” he says. “The face that the design was chosen for the Winter Games confirms that I met my goal with Neo Sans.”

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?

These devices, however, are not books. They are readers. Books have pages that turn, they have a heft and a smell, you can dog-ear their pages, you can press flowers in them – and they are put on a shelf when you are done with them for the time being. E-readers will not replace books – at least not all books.

First, because E-readers, at about $200, are relatively expensive – and you still have to purchase books for them. Eventually, the price will come down, but there will still be many people that cannot afford the devices and would like to continue purchase their books from a bookstore or borrow them from a library.

Next, there are some books that cannot be replaced – at least with current E-reader technology. Children’s books that you read to your nieces and nephews, sons and daughters, and grandchildren when they snuggle up next to you on a sofa, come to mind. Art books will continue to be published in traditional form. E-readers will probably not replace books on graphic design – and certainly not books on typography. (He wrote with tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

E-readers, however can be a strong competition to books for entertainment. You may eagerly anticipate Dan Brown’s next novel. You may thoroughly enjoy reading it. But, when you are done, what do you do with it? Put it on a shelf where it will sit until you decide to throw it out. Unless it’s a signed first edition, Dan Brown’s new novel will have little value once it is read. That’s where e-readers come in. When you are done with an E-book, you can simply delete it from the E-reader and it will be stored in the cloud for you for future use.

You can also put over 1,000 E-books – or many very big E-books – on a single E-reader. Required reading for scholars, educators, students and professionals in the technical trades is today satisfied by many – heavy – books. E-readers can be a godsend to these folks. One E-reader has to be better than carrying 30-pounds of traditional books in a backpack.

To become more mainstream, however, E-readers will also need to improve their typographic presentation. One or two fonts are simply not enough. Kerning, line spacing, paragraphing, column alignment, and all those other typographic details we sweat over as designers, and appreciate as readers, will have to be addressed in a much better fashion. Technology has done a pretty good job of putting words and letters on digital substrata. It will, however, take the knowledge, skill and, yes, the passion that we put into traditional graphic communication, for E-readers to make much of a dent in real book sales.

Handwriting fonts are somewhat less sophisticated than formal scripts. They lack the refinement of most calligraphic designs. They differ from casual scripts in that their characters are not made from flowing brush strokes. They are rarely subtle, and sometimes are actually in-your-face. And, yet, they definitely have their own beauty as well as a “certain something.” Used appropriately, they make their point with speed and style.

A handwriting font does not have a personality per se — the usage creates the personality. But a handwriting font does have a persona or attitude, affecting the content in a distinctive way. Handwriting scripts can be edgy, laid-back, playful, or ingenuous. You wouldn’t want to set more than a couple of words in one of them. (If you did, the repeated idiosyncratic characters would call attention to themselves, making the copy look contrived.) They are, however, perfect designs for logotypes and wordmarks, posters and headlines. They are also ideal for successions of words not in big blocks of text. Such uses include invitations, menus, certificates and captions. These pieces, whether on a page, a sign, a banner or a screen, seem personal, like correspondence — perhaps because of the relatively quiet way in which they’re read. So, even though part of your brain knows it’s not processing a personal note, the piece “feels” a bit like one.

Please let us know if you are interested in seeing more of these kinds of fonts available from Fonts.com

Take, for instance, the typographic rule of avoiding all cap headlines. It’s one of the first typographic rules on an educator’s hit lists. It’s also one of the first rules professional graphic designers break. The tenet about not setting all capitals, however, is really based on little more than simple logic. Capital letters take up more space than lowercase letters—up to 30% more space. Headlines, subheads and pull-quotes are about setting brief blocks of copy in a relatively small space. It’s only common sense to use the most space-efficient letters: lowercase. Sure, there’s all that stuff about how “word shapes” (made from ascending, descending and x-height lowercase letters) help us to read faster and that all capitals only create rectangles as visual identifiers, but just the fact that the little letters can pack more information than capitals into a given piece of design real estate, ought to be enough reason to rely on them.

Oh, it helps to know when to use an em-dash instead of an en-dash or that “smart quotes” are preferable to foot and inch marks, but so much of what it takes to create good typography is just paying attention to the type.

Points, picas, line spacing, and kerning are only the mechanics. Software applications are just tools. It takes common sense and a careful eye to create communication that is inviting, makes an impact, focuses attention, organizes information and creates a mood – ultimately giving life and personality to the printed word.

Want to be able to tell a fellow designer what the hot new typeface is? It just might be possible.

Fonts.com makes a major new typeface release announcement just about every month. Many of these are new additions to the ITC®, Monotype®, and Linotype® typeface libraries. If there are particular kinds of typefaces you would like to see designed (scripts, sans serif typefaces, serif designs, decorative faces, etc.) let me know and I will pass along your requests to the team that determines what typefaces will be developed for these libraries.

This is a real opportunity for you to have a voice into what new typefaces will be designed. A board of type experts meets three times a year to determine what new additions will be added to the ITC, Monotype, and Linotype typeface libraries. Their next meeting will be on January 21st, and I will be sure that the review board is aware of your preferences.

Independent type designers and type foundries (big and small) want to provide graphic communicators with typographic tools they want and need. Few, however, reach out to their customers and ask them what they want. While I can’t guarantee that all your typographic wishes will be granted, I can ensure that your request will be heard.

Sure, it’s overused, but that doesn’t make it a bad design – just popular. And Papyrus does tend to show up in less than stellar graphic design solutions – but, if this is the reason for supposedly sophisticated designers reviling the design, it smacks of elitism.

Would I, use the Papyrus? Probably not – but not because it’s a bad design. If I wanted to make a distinctive graphic statement, I would use a typeface with a little less “face time” – one that really would stand out from the crowd.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this. I saw the movie Avatar™ last weekend and was blown away. While the story was little more than a rewriting of “Dances With Wolves,” the cinematography, animation and special effects were virtually beyond belief. Like the original Wizard of OZ™, Gone With the Wind™ and Star Wars™ movies, Avatar has set a new benchmark for film making excellence.

So why are the subtitles for the Na’vi people, the alien protagonists of the film, set in Papyrus? It is the only unimaginative visual aspect of the movie. If the choice were mine, the subtitles would have been original calligraphy. (There are times when custom handlettering is the perfect answer.) One would think that, in the $300,000,000+ budget for Avatar, there would have been some room for hiring a lettering artist or calligrapher. If there was only $30 allotted to the subtitle typeface (which appears to be the case), designs like ITC Noovo™, ITC Tempus™ Sans, Briem™ Script or Carolina™ would have carried off the alien and beautifully exotic demeanor of the Na’vi quite well – and would not have reminded the audience of a restaurant menu.

For a myriad of reasons, the western world has become aware of and, hopefully, more sensitive to the Arabic culture. As a result, graphic communicators in the western world are being asked to add insight into Arabic culture and graphic communication to their creative palette. This, however, is clearly easier said than done. Creating design that will perform acceptably in the Arabic community takes a lot more than adding a new suite of fonts to your hard drive. It takes the realization that the foundation of Arabic graphic communication is very different from that in the western world.

The good news is that there is a book that goes a long way in helping the western design community learn about this issue. Extensively illustrated with more than 200 examples of the best in contemporary Arabic typography and graphic design, “Arabic for Designers” by Mourad Boutros is an authoritative guide for designers unfamiliar with Arabic script.

Using visual examples and case studies, Mourad Boutros takes the reader through the entire range of graphic design applications – newspaper and television news typefaces, book jacket designs, corporate and brand identity, logotype conversions, advertising, design for print and fine art.

The author shows how non-Arabic speaking designers can work with the language and understand and respect its cultural nuances, whilst avoiding the pitfalls and mistakes to which many others have fallen victim.

Arabic for Designers demonstrates how designing with Arabic can yield incredibly innovative, beautiful and successful results. Based upon over 40 years’ experience of working with an array of corporate and creative clients, Mourad Boutros addresses the rise in global awareness about Arab culture in ways that inform and inspire.

This book is an invaluable reference for design students, design professionals, marketers and anyone interested in Arabic culture and language.