ITC New Winchester is a revival of a typeface that never really had a first release. The original Winchester was an experimental design created by the American type designer W.A. Dwiggins in 1944. Dwiggins was interested in improving the legibility of the English language by reducing the number of ascenders and descenders; to do this, he gave Winchester very short descenders and created uncial forms for a number of letters. The result was a distinctive text typeface that was occasionally used by Dwiggins and Dorothy Abbe in handset form. Fifty years later, Indiana type designer Jim Spiece has turned Dwiggins's experiment into a new family of digital text types. Spiece gave New Winchester a bold weight, as well as small caps (both roman and italic) and old style figures; he also created two forms of the lowercase f, one with and one without an overhang (in metal type, a kern), and a full set of f-ligatures.