ITC Officina Serif Alternatives

When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: "Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost... Read More

The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West... Read More

When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: "Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost... Read More

FF Zine is a fine example of Berlin-based designer Ole Schäfer’s logic. Art Directors often have trouble finding coordinated typefaces across several different styles. The design began with a related project. In 1996, Schäfer drew a two-weight headline face for Dresden’s Sächsische Zeitung newspaper. The brief called for a display system offering multiple “atmospheres.” The solution he came up... Read More

In the 1920s the Viennese government decided to standardize the street signs across the city. A typeface was especially constructed for... Read More

There is something straight-forward and no-nonsense about slab serifed typefaces. Calligraphic designs, on the other hand, evoke a sense of humanity and immediacy ¿ even intimacy. ITC Napoleone Slab combines both slab serif and calligraphic design traits into a single typeface design. Heady stuff. The result is unlike almost any other slab serif typeface.According to designer Silvio Napoleone,... Read More

Soho is the latest addition to the growing range of typefaces from Sebastian Lester. This grand opus of a project resulted in a typeface... Read More

The Siseriff family of types contains nine different styles, which were developed by the master Swedish typographer Bo Berndal in 2002. Siseriff is a contemporary slab serif face. Except for the Siseriff Black weight, all of the letters display a slightly condensed appearance that is coupled with a relatively uniform width throughout the alphabet. Siseriff's nine styles are distributed across... Read More

When the semi-serif Museo became a success in 2008, its designer Jos Buivenga researched some possibilities of other versions. Museo Sans... Read More

Aptifer Sans and Aptifer Slab are two 21st century typeface families created by Mårten Thavenius. Each family has seven weights, in roman and italic respectively, making 28 font styles in total. Each OpenType font contains 922 glyphs, with a total of 25,816 glyphs in both families together. The following codepages are fully supported in Aptifer: 1252 Latin 1, 1250 Latin 2: Eastern Europe, 1254... Read More

The first slab serif fonts appeared at the beginning of industrialization in Great Britain in 1820. Clarendon and Ionic became the names... Read More

In 1931, Morris Fuller Benton created the Stymie typeface for the American Type Founders (ATF). Later weights were later added by Sol Hess at Lanston Monotype and Gary Powell at ATF. Stymie, a redesign of the Inland Type Foundry's Rockwell Antique, could also be viewed as a reworking of a slab serif types that were popular in Europe at that time, like Memphis or Beton. For the past 150 years,... Read More

The Venus type family is a historic hot metal face with left slanted weights that is used for the german cartographic map production. There are also special typefaces required like the Roemisch and Topografische Zahlentafel type family.

Compatil is the first comprehensive type system which enables all typographical elements to be used to full effect in order to reproduce the message conveyed by text information. Four different type styles with a total of 16 weights including italics have been merged into a unique typographical network. There are now no limits to the font user's creativity. The system is a product of technical... Read More

Xavier Dupré’s FF Absara is a work of French proportions, but its shapes take influence from the Dutch style: less polished, and more direct. Its casualness refers to humanist written forms. FF Absara’s rough cut makes it interesting at display sizes, but thanks to its generous x-height and firm serifs, FF Absara works equally well setting text. The typeface’s idiosyncratic italic creates a... Read More