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Avenir Adrian Frutiger 1988, Switzerland Avenir is French for “future” or “what is to come.” Frutiger, who also designed Univers, describes Avenir as his finest work – saying, “the intellectual idea behind it is my masterpiece.”
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Baskerville John Baskerville 1750, England Baskerville is one of the first typefaces to increase stroke contrast and have a more vertical axis, inspiring a series of typefaces, including: Bodoni, Didot, and Mrs Eaves. Baskerville developed this typeface while in efforts to offer books created with higherquality methods including: high quality of ink, smoother paper, and his new typeface.
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Clarendon Robert Beasly 1845, England Clarendon is a slab serif typeface, characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Slab serifs are commonly associated with wanted posters and the American Old West. Clarendon is known for its use on U.S. National Park Service road signs and the British Railway.
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Didot Firmin Didot 1799, France Didot is considered France’s greatest contribution to type design. It is named for the French printing and type-producing Didot family. Didot is known for its use as the typeface for the cover of Vogue magazine since 1955.
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Eurostile
e Aldo Novarese 1962, Italy
Eurostile solved the limitation of Novarese’s earlier typeface, Microgramma – which only came in uppercase.
It is known for its use by modern companies including: Geico, Nokia, Skechers, Subaru, and Toshiba. Variations of the typeface are popular in the music and television industry.
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Fette Fraktur Johann Christian Bauer 1850, Germany Fette Fraktur is a blackletter typeface. Fraktur is a notable script under the blackletter classification, but is not its own grouping of blackletter faces. Blackletter – also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura – was first a thick script hand-letter style and later designed into a typeface. Modern blackletter fonts drop rules of traditional typography such as the “long s.” 7
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Garamond Claude Garamond 1540, France “Typographical highlight of the 16th century.� Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime, was a type founder, publisher, punch cutter, and type designer. Garamond establishes old style typefaces, inspired by organic structure and resembles writing with a pen.
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Helvetica Max Miedinger & Eduard Hoffmann 1957, Switzerland
“Hallmark of international typographic style.�
Helvetica was originally named Neue Haas Grotesk. However, the name was later changed to be similar to the Latin adjective for Switzerland.
It was created to be a neutral typeface with no implied meaning attached to letterforms so it could be used on a wide variety of signage.
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Impact Geoffrey Lee 1965, England
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Following its release, Impact was promoted with a cleverly named brochure, “The Impact of Impact.” Lee’s goal for the design was to get as much ink on the paper as possible, giving the printed type high-contrast, making it a popular typeface for advertising.
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Joanna Eric Gill 1930, England
Joanna is named for one of Gill’s daughters, Joanna Gill. Designed to meet Gill’s typographic preferences; he created Joanna for proprietary use in the printing shop he owned with his son-in-law. Gill described the typeface as “free from all fancy business.”
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Kabel Rudolf Koch 1927, Germany Kabel’s letter structure is based loosely on circles and straight lines. It is known for its use in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, Monopoly board game, classic Disney cartoons, Nintendo ‘64 Super Smash Bros, and logos including: the Toronto Maple Leafs, NBC, The Sims, Six Flags, and Chuck E. Cheese’s.
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Letter Gothic Roger Roberson 1956, United States Letter Gothic is a monospaced typeface – which means letters and characters have a fixedwidth and occupy the same amount of horizontal space. It was created for IBM to use in manufacturing the Selectric electric typewriters.
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Mrs Eaves Zuzana Licko 1996, England Mrs Eaves is a prominent variant of Baskerville, known for its range of ligatures. Named for John Baskerville’s wife, Sarah Eaves, who was originally hired as a live-in housekeeper and eventually became Baskerville’s assistant in typesetting and printing.
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n Nobel Sjoerd Henrik de Roos & Dick Dooijes 1929, Netherlands
Nobel was created by the Dutch, as a competitor to Futura, which was released in 1927. In the 1990s Nobel was revived. One of the designers taking up the project commented the letterforms were an interesting compromise of Futura’s pure geometry and traditional letterforms or “Futura cooked in dirty pots and pans.”
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o Optima Hermann Zapf 1955, Germany To prove Optima’s versatility, Zapf set his book About Alphabets in the regular weight. He continued to expand this design idea into his eighties. Optima is known for its use in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the National September 11 Memorial, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, LDS Church conferences, and Aston Martin and Estee Lauder branding materials.
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Peignot A. M. Cassandre 1937, France “Serious exploration of typographic form and legibility.� Peignot is notable for combining lowercase and capital letters into a single multi-case typeface. It is known for its use in films and television shows including: The Pink Panther Strikes Again, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and several Muppets films.
Questrial Joe Prince 2011, United States Questrial is featured on more than 190,000 websites and is loaded over 100 million times in a week. It is heavily influenced by Swiss Design and shares similarities with Helvetica and grotesk style.
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Rockwell Frank Hinman Pierpont (Monotype Corporation) 1934, United States Monotype was founded in 1887, and developed many of the most widely used typefaces, including: Times New Roman, Gill Sans, and Arial. Since 2000, Monotype has acquired many other foundries, including digital companies specializing in font retail, and has gained rights to typeface designs, including: Helvetica, Optima, and Palatino. 22
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Stone Sumner Stone 1987, United States There are multiple editions of Stone, including: Stone Sans, Stone Humanist, Stone Serif, Stone Informal, and Stone II. Stone worked for Hallmark and Adobe, among other companies, before founding the Stone Type Foundry in 1990.
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Times New Roman Stanley Morison & Victor Lardent 1932, England The Times, a British Newspaper, commissioned the Monotype Foundry to create legible typeface for body text. Morison, the artistic director for Monotype, and Lardent, an artist from the advertising department at the paper, collaborated to design the typeface. Times New Roman is Monotype’s best selling metal typeface.
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Univers Adrian Frutiger 1957, Switzerland Univers and Helvetica were both released in 1957. They introduced the idea of typeface “families,� where a typeface remained consistent and related in design while creating a range of styles and weights.
u Univers is known for its use by corporations, including: Apple, Disney World, MGA Entertainment, General Electric, and Swissair. It has also been used for Summer Olympic Games and presidential campaigns.
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Voltaire Yvonne SchĂźttler 2015, Germany
Voltaire is featured internationally on more than 60,000 websites. It was inspired by the letterforms used on twentieth century Swedish posters and the sharp line work from the Art Deco era. 27
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Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch Rudolf Koch 1926, Germany Koch, an adamant German nationalist, was drawn to blackletter typefaces and their German origin. Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch was greatly influenced by handwritten manuscripts and gothic letterforms.
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Xenara Ray Larabie 2005, Canada Larabie created typefaces for over twenty-five years and is known for his futuristic or sci-fi style types.
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Xenara was inspired by letterforms on 1970s calculator keys and electric typewriters. This is exhibited in the rounded terminals of the letters.
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Yellowtail Brian Bonislawsky 2011, United States Yellowtail is featured on nearly 80,000 websites and loaded 30 million times a week. The flat-brush script style pays tribute to the looseness of classic hand painted signs from the 1930s.
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Zapf Dingbats Hermann Zapf 1977, Germany While designing Zapf Dingbats, over 1,200 sketches of signs and symbols were narrowed down to the published 360 dingbats. A dingbat is more formally known as a printer’s ornament or printer’s character and can be used as an ornament, character, or spacer. Zapf also designed Palatino, Optima, Zapf Chancery, and Zapfino.