Bitstream's version of Adsans originally released by Linotype & Machinery.

Humanist 521 is a Bitstream digitized version of Gill Sans typeface. The font was designed by Eric Gill and released by Monotype circa 1928-1930. Gill’s design is based on the typeface of Edward Johnston, the innovative British letterer and teacher, designed in 1916 for the signage of the London Underground. However, it has more classical proportions close to those of old style serifs, and thus is more suitable for text setting. With distinct roots in handwritten scripts, Gill’s typeface is classified as a humanist sans serif and is very legible and readable in text and display work. Having been released more than 80 years ago, it’s still very popular and in fact is an icon of British typographic style. The Cyrillic version of Ultra Bold weight was designed by Tagir Safaev in 1997. Six text styles and Extra Bold style in Cyrillic were designed later by Vladimir Yefimov and Isabella Chaeva. The Cyrillic version, in addition to the original Bitstream implementation of Humanist 521, has an alternative numeral 1 with the traditional shape and a set of old-style figures. Rereleased by ParaType in 2013.

I decided to draw the Regular style of Trivia Humanist not too light and the Bold not too dark. Delicate anatomy and moderate contrasts of serifed humanist typefaces aren’t usually born by interpolating between extremes, but rather by meticulous care for each individual letter. A delicious blend of a trace of punchcutter’s tool and calligrapher’s hand with as few historical reminiscences as possible. It stays away from any strong aesthetic colorations as well, which is a common feature of the Trivia family system. I wanted a clear and majestic typeface for book jackets, LP cover designs, posters, exhibition catalogues and shorter texts. But at the end it turned out excellent for largest books as well.

German type designer Jürgen Brinckmann created this blackletter FontFont in 1993. The font is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, poster and billboards as well as software and gaming. FF Humanist provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, and stylistic alternates. It comes with proportional oldstyle figures.

Humanist 531 is the Bitstream version of Syntax (Stempel, 1968) by Hans Eduard Meier. A humanist sans serif typeface with an optically even thickness of the line which interprets a humanist old style type of the Renaissance. Its vertical strokes are inclined to the right by one degree. Serves well in text and display typography. Cyrillic version was developed at ParaType in 1999 by Isay Slutsker and Manvel Shmavonyan and was awarded Diplomae at Kirillitsa'99 and "bukva:raz!" type design contests.

Chianti was designed at Bitstream by senior designer Dennis Pasternak in 1991 and initially released in 1995. The intent behind the design was to provide a humanist sanserif of high readability at a wide range of sizes and weights. Humanist sanserifs (others that fall into this category are Linotype’s Frutiger and Optima, and Monotype’s Gill Sans) are an attempt to improve the readability of sanserifs by applying classical roman structure to the letterforms. To enhance its versatility, Mr. Pasternak designed a wide variety of alternate characters, rare ligatures, ornaments and swashes. Chianti is a friendly sanserif useful for a broad range of typographic needs.

British designer Thomas Oldfield, who brought you Hombre BT and Reaper, has scratched out another typeface, this one called Jerk Chicken BT. I guess, if you can imagine a quill tip pen somehow wedged 'tween a scrawny chicken's toes, you'd end up with the scrawl, blobs, blotches and bleeds that would make most type designers run for the hen house. Not Thomas; he saw only commercial potential. So lay down some scratch and order up some Jerk Chicken BT. Hey, while you're at it, why not extend the license to a dozen users? Available as an OpenType font, Jerk Chicken BT includes of a couple of ornaments, well parts, namely a drumstick and a whole fryer, and its extended character set supports Baltic and Central European languages.

Adrian Frutiger’s distinguished and successful 1966 design for the European Computer Manufacturers’ Association improving readability of letters for both machines and humans. OCR-B is replacing OCR-A.

This freeform exercise in typographic design echoes the looseness of early 1960's advertising. Brian breaks almost every typographic rule we can think of — but so what? The bold letterforms of Big Limbo are anything but stuck!

Ray Cruz releases another typeface family, this time inspired by 1970's pop culture. Fat Albert Regular, Outline and Shadow are bold poster types that evoke the fun and funk of an era gone by. Go on bro, get Fat Albert and get down.

Bitstream developed Ang Thong for the Microsoft Windows operating system. The font is encoded with a Microsoft defined Thai character set, Thai Code Page 874. The font includes Thai glyphs and Latin glyphs from Dutch 801. Ang Thong (basin of gold) is a province in central Thailand which consists mostly of flat agricultural land used for growing rice.

The unusual name for this Deco style typeface comes from the playful and pun-laden 1960s Rocky & Bullwinkle TV show. It is the name of the newspaper in the mythical town of Frostbite Falls, MN, home of the two cartoon stars. The name, Picayune Intelligence, literally means “pretty dumb”, but we don’t think that describes Nick’s competent design at all. It is comforting to know that someone is still watching quality television.

A collaboration based on lettering by Vermont illustrator/artist Mary Trafton and brought to typographic life by Charles Gibbons, the Full Moon Suite is a collection of casual typefaces called after folk names for full moons. A winner of the TDC2 2003 Type Design Competition. Family members include: Falling Leaves, Rustling Branches, Black Cherry, Black Cherry Alternate, Black Cherry Ligatures and Black Cherry Doubles.

Possessing a distinctive Russian appearance, Chervonec Uzkj, or Chervonec Condensed, is a hybrid semi-serif designed by Russian designer Oleg Karpinsky. The typeface family includes three weights with drawn italics.

The standard American sanserif of the first two thirds of the twentieth century, prepared for ATF by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908 under the name News Gothic, with a matching lightface known as Lightline Gothic. Linotype’s Trade Gothic follows News Gothic except for its widely-spaced straight-sided boldface based on ATF Alternate Gothic No.3. Linotype matches News Gothic Bold, a boldface version that originated at Intertype, with Trade Gothic Bold No.2. Ludlow Record Gothic follows News Gothic more loosely. News Gothic BT™ font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

A set of capitals popular with American engravers and typefounders through the last third of the nineteenth century, shown under this name by ATF in 1903.

Mr. Gogoll's successful revival of Arno Drescher’s Super Grotesk was awarded the 1999 Kurt Christians Award. The Drescher Grotesk family consists of seven roman weights, including a version designed for use at small point sizes. Drescher Grotesk is a classic German geometric design, complete with the original “angled” brackets.

Artane, Tony Fahy's first typeface for Bitstream Inc., has a specific philosophy at the core of it's creation. He decided he would try to create a Roman sans that would have the elegance of a serifed italic, such as Stempel Garamond, Bembo, or Baskerville.

Gothic capitals of the same form as Copperplate Gothic, lacking only the oversharpened corners.

Lindisfarne Nova is an uncial-like design based on the script found in the Lindisfarne Gospels. Created by Harry Pears and Margaret Layson, it is available in two weights, regular and bold. Lindisfarne Nova is Harry’s first completed font. There are also two companion styles, Lindisfarne Nova Incised and Lindisfarne Runes.

Cruz Cantera is a crisp and stylish yet informal sans serif typeface created by NYC type designer Ray Cruz. It is a slightly condensed design. The vertical strokes have rounded terminals, and there are some characters with serifs. Notable characters include the upper and lowercase E. There are three weights and each works equally well alone, or together for both display and text. Original design by Ramon Cruz completed in 2002.

Wavy Rounded is a stylized sans serif display typeface by Japanese designer Hajime Kawakami. Some of the characters possess quirky features that randomly create fun visual “waves”. There is a handful of alternate characters including an old style figure set. Catch the Wave.

Frank-Rühl (or Ruehl) is the ubiquitous Hebrew text font style. There are many fonts that belong to this style, and all are based on an early 20th-century design by Raphael Frank. Some of the fonts are actually called Frank-Rühl (or Ruehl) and some are not. It was originally designed in a single weight. Bitstream developed Frank Ruehl for the Microsoft Windows operating system. The font is encoded with a Microsoft defined Hebrew character set, Hebrew Code Page 1255. Within the TrueType fonts, the characters are assigned Unicode character IDs. The font includes Hebrew characters, and Latin glyphs from Dutch 801 bold.

Inspired by European brutalist design aesthetic, Kunst strives for form dominated by pure geometric precision, utilising 45° angles based on a strict grid. See the PDF specimen | Also available in Normal and Imprint styles. Covers Western and Cyrillic character sets with a full range of Smallcaps. Includes Tabular Figures, Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, and Contextual Alternates such as arrows, Smart Quotes, and German Capital Eszett/scharfes (Sharp s).

Inspired by European brutalist design aesthetic, Kunst strives for form dominated by pure geometric precision, utilising 45° angles based on a strict grid. See the PDF specimen | Also available in Normal and Rounded styles. Covers Western and Cyrillic character sets with a full range of Smallcaps. Includes Tabular Figures, Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, and Contextual Alternates such as arrows, Smart Quotes, and German Capital Eszett/scharfes (Sharp s).

Calligrapher Humanist Minuscule Font, is one of the calligraphic group of fonts called “21 Alphabets for Calligraphers“. All graphemes are taken from calligraphic pages written in traditional Humanist Minuscule calligraphic style. This font is ideal for calligraphic sketches or for imitation of ancient manuscripts. Font contains all the Latin glyphs.

In 2007-8, Carolyn Puzzovio developed this OpenType typeface: Lagoon which is based on an Armenian model from the Mechitarist monastery, Venice, 1810. This project was supported by a grant from the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK) and won a first prize in the Granshan 08 type design competition. Oſten, Armenian digital types are designed to match the forms of Latin type characters and ‘Latinized’, by uprighting the forms; truncating ascenders and descenders and raising the x-height – but in this case the Latin characters in the OpenType font have been designed to blend in with the traditional Armenian proportions which are based on cursive forms – also incorporating some of the quirky shapes from the original model. Faithfully following the original created difficulties of ‘clashing’ characters, particularly those with long descenders, so the font contains over 100 alternative characters in the Armenian part, which will normally substitute automatically where necessary. The sloping lower case characters and upright capitals are traditional in Armenian – capitals are used less in the Armenian language. Three new characters for the Armenian unicode range are included: the Armenian dram (currency) symbol; the eternity symbol; and the index number symbol. This font which will be one of the first OpenType fonts to incorporate these newly unicoded characters.

Type designers have been integrating the design of sans serifs with serifed forms since the 1920s. Early examples are Edward Johnston's design for the London Underground, and Eric Gill's Gill Sans. These were followed by Jan van Krimpen's Romulus Sans, Frederic Goudy's ITC Goudy Sans, Hermann Zapf's Optima, Hans Meier's Syntax and Adrian Frutiger's Frutiger. Now, ITC Stone Humanist joins this tradition. It is a careful blend of traditional sans serif shapes and classical serifed letterforms. ITC Stone Humanist grew out an experiment with the medium weight of ITC Stone Sans, a design that already showed a relationship to these sans serif-serif hybrids. ITC Stone Sans has proportions based on those of ITC Stone Serif, and its thick-and-thin stroke contrast suggests the bloodline of humanistic sans serif typefaces. But other aspects of ITC Stone Sans are more closely aligned to the gothics and grotesques, a tradition that accounts for the largest portion of sans serif designs. Enter ITC Stone Humanist. During his experiments with the earlier design, Sumner Stone recalls, I was actually quite surprised at how seemingly subtle changes transformed the face," moving the design firmly into the humanist tradition. "The form of the 'g,' 'l,' 'M,' 'W,' and more subtly the 'a' and 'e' are part of the restructuring of the family," he explains. The top endings of vertical lower case strokes have been cropped on an angle, as have the ascender and descender stroke endings. ITC Stone Humanist is a full-fledged member of the ITC Stone family. It has been produced with the same complement of weights, and the x-heights, proportions, and underlying character shapes are completely compatible with the three original designs. The original ITC Stone Sans is a popular typeface, in part because of its notable versatility. ITC Stone Humanist shares this virtue, and can be used successfully at very small sizes, in long passages of text copy, and even as billboard-sized display type."

Calligrapher Humanistic Cursive is one of the calligraphic group of fonts called “21 alphabets for Calligraphers“. All graphemes are taken from calligraphic pages written on traditional cursive calligraphic stile. This font is ideal for calligraphic sketches or for imitation of ancient manuscripts. It contains all the Latin and specially-created Cyrillic glyphs.

New Lincoln Gothic is an elegant sanserif, generous in width and x-height. There are twelve weights ranging from Hairline to UltraBold and an italic for each weight. At the stroke ends are gentle flares, and some of the round characters possess an interesting and distinctive asymmetry. The character set supports Central Europe, and there are three figure sets, extended fractions, superior and inferior numbers, and a few alternates, all accessible via OpenType features. Back in 1965, Thomas Lincoln had an idea for a new sanserif typeface, a homage of sorts, to ancient Roman artisans. The Trajan Column in Rome, erected in 113 AD, has an inscription that is considered to be the basis for western European lettering. Lincoln admired these beautiful letterforms and so, being inspired, he set out to design a new sanserif typeface based on the proportions and subtleties of the letters found in the Trajan Inscription. Lincoln accomplished what he set out to do by creating Lincoln Gothic. The typeface consisted only of capital letters. Lincoln intentionally omitted a lowercase to keep true his reference to the Trajan Inscription, which contains only magiscule specimens. The design won him the first Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) National Typeface Competition in 1965. The legendary Herb Lubalin even used it to design a promotional poster! All this was back in the day when typositor film strips and photo type were all the rage in setting headlines. Fast forward now to the next millennium. Thomas Lincoln has had a long, illustrious career as a graphic designer. Still, he has one project that feels incomplete; Lincoln Gothic does not have a lowercase. It is the need to finish the design that drives Lincoln to resurrect his prize winning design and create its digital incarnation. Thus, New Lincoln Gothic was born. Lacking the original drawings, Lincoln had to locate some old typositor strips in order to get started. He had them scanned and imported the data into Freehand where he refined the shapes and sketched out a lowercase. He then imported that data into Fontographer, where he worked the glyphs again and refined the spacing, and started generating additional weights and italics. His enthusiasm went unchecked and he created 14 weights! It was about that time that Lincoln contacted Bitstream about publishing the family. Lincoln worked with Bitstream to narrow down the family (only to twelve weights), interpolate the various weights using three masters, and extend the character set to support CE and some alternate figure sets. Bitstream handled the hinting and all production details and built the final CFF OpenType fonts using FontLab Studio 5.

Designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1907; an improved version of the familiar nineteenth century blackletter as he had executed it in his Wedding Text.

Iowan Old Style was designed for Bitstream in 1990 by noted sign painter John Downer. Iowan Old Style is a hardy contemporary text design modeled after earlier revivals of Jenson and Griffo typefaces but with a larger x-height, tighter letterfit, and reproportioned capitals. Iowan Old Style Titling was designed by John Downer and added to the Iowan Old Style family in 2002. The cap-only character set includes several ornaments and fleurons, broadening the appeal and functionality of the typeface family. Iowan Old Style was originally designed for Bitstream in 1990 by Downer, a noted sign painter. Iowan Old Style is a hardy contemporary text design modeled after earlier revivals of Jenson and Griffo typefaces but with a larger x-height, tighter letterfit, and reproportioned capitals. Expert and old style figure font sets were added in 2000.