ITC Officina Serif Alternatives

In 1983, D. Stempel AG redesigned the famous Helvetica typeface for the digital age, creating Neue Helvetica for Linotype: a... Read More

In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older... Read More

The Handel Gothic™ typeface has been a mainstay of graphic communication for over 40 years - all the while looking as current as tomorrow. Designed by Don Handel in the mid-1960s, and used in the 1973 United Airlines logo developed by Saul Bass, Handel Gothic was an instant success when released to the graphic design community. Its generous lowercase x-height, full-bodied counters and square... 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... Read More

When Christian Schwartz and Erik Spiekermann were working on FF Meta Serif, they had plans to also expand the FF Unit family (a closely... 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

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

Just as the camera adds weight to human faces, serifs can add weight to typographic faces. Rod McDonald trimmed and adjusted his new Egyptian Slate design as it emerged from its sans serif predecessor, the Slate typeface family. Slate is a great sans serif design, and the addition of his Egyptian Slate to your typeface library will make it even more versatile.Egyptian Slate is a solid and... 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

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

One of Berlin’s must-visit cultural stops is the Prater, a beer garden in Prenzlauer Berg, a district in the eastern part of Berlin. The... Read More

It was only after seeking the help of fellow type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby that Erik Spiekermann was able to... Read More

The idea for the Generis type system came to Erik Faulhaber while he was traveling in the USA. Seeing typefaces mixed together in a business district motivated him to create a new type system with interrelated forms. The first design scheme came about in 1997, following the space saving model of these American Gothics. Faulhaber then examined the demands of legibility and various communications... Read More

Sumner Stone worked together with Bob Ishi of Adobe to create the Stone family fonts, which appeared in 1987. Coincidentally, ishi is the... 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

Chaparral is the work of type designer Carol Twombly and combines the legibility of slab serif designs popularized in the 19th century with the grace of 16th century roman book lettering. The result is a versatile, hybrid slab-serif design. Unlike "geometric" slab serif designs, Chaparral has varying letter proportions that give it an accessible and friendly appearance in all weights from light... 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

Pacella was designed by Vincent Pacella and fashioned in the tradiation of Century Schoolbook, Corona and Nimrod. Pacella maintains high legibilty and exhibits a character and personality all its own.

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

Rockwell font appeared with Monotype Design Studio in 1934, a time which saw the return to popularity of slab serif fonts. Rockwell's strong and harmonious characters make this font particularly flexible.