The ITC Stone Sans II typeface family is new from the drawing board up. Sumner Stone, who designed the original faces in 1988, recently collaborated with Delve Withrington and Jim Wasco of Monotype Imaging to update the family of faces that bears his name. Sumner was the lead designer and project director for the full-blown reworking – and his own greatest critic. The collaborative design effort began as a relatively simple upgrade to the ITC Stone Sans family. As so often happens, however, the upgrade proved to be not so simple, and grew into a major design undertaking. “My initial intent,” recalls Sumner, “was to provide ITC Stone Sans with even greater versatility. I planned to add an additional weight, maybe two, and to give the family some condensed designs.” As Sumner began to look more closely at his twenty-year-old typeface, he decided that it would benefit from more extensive design improvements. “I found myself making numerous refinements to character shapes and proportions,” says Sumner. “The project scope expanded dramatically, and I’m pleased with the final result. The redesign has improved both the legibility and the overall appearance of the face.” The original ITC Stone Sans is part of the ITC Stone super family, along with ITC Stone Serif and ITC Stone Informal. In 2005 ITC Stone Humanist joined the family. All of these designs have always offered the same three weights: Medium, Semibold, and Bold – each with an italic counterpart. Over time, Stone Sans has emerged as the godfather of the family, a powerful design used for everything from fine books, annual reports and corporate identity programs, to restaurant menus, movie credits and advertising campaigns. ITC Stone Sans, however, lacked one attribute of many sans serif families: a large range of widths and weights. “These fonts had enjoyed great popularity for many years – during which graphic designers repeatedly asked for more weights and condensed designs in the family,” says Sumner. “Their comments were the impetus.” ITC Stone Sans II includes six weights ranging from an elegant Light to a commanding Extra Bold. An italic counterpart and suite of condensed designs complements every weight. In all, the new family encompasses 24 typefaces. The ITC Stone Sans II family is also available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts, allowing graphic communicators to pair its versatile design with the capabilities of OpenType. These fonts offer automatic insertion of ligatures, small caps and use-sensitive figure designs; their extended character set also supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. ITC Stone® Sans II font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Modern typefaces refer to designs that bear similarities to Bodoni and other Didone faces, which were first created during the late 1700s. Ed Benguiat developed ITC Modern No. 216 in 1982 for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC). Showing a high degree of contrast between thick and thin strokes, as well as a large x-height, this revival is more suited to advertising display purposes than the setting of long running text, or books. Many traits in Benguiat's design are worth further notice. The thick stems of the roman weights have a very stately, solid presence. Their thin serifs have been finely grafted on, a masterful solution to the challenge of bracketing presented by Modernist designs. The italic weights have a very flowing, script-like feel to them, and the letters take the form of true italics, not obliques. The ITC Modern No. 216 family contains the following font styles: Light, Light Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Heavy, and Heavy Italic.

Inspired by the decayed lettering on the signs at Siesta Key beach painted on weather-worn old wood in Florida, these letters are made to look like peeling paint.

Emy Slab is a slab serif based on the classical proportions of Egyptian typefaces but with soft terminals that give the font a more friendly and modern look. Emy Slab consists of two subfamilies of 7 weights, ranging from Thin to Black with matching italics, resulting in a total of 28 fonts. The standard version is ideal for editorial design, tiles, books, magazines, corporate design and all types of publications. The Alt version—due to its display features, asymmetric shapes and contemporary appearance—is well suited for logotypes, branding, packaging, and use on web and Tv. Emy Slab contains a set of 440 characters that support 208 different languages.

Dem Bones is a bit of fun-display alphabet (capitals), numbers and punctuation assembled out of the sort of knobbly ended bones that dogs used to gnaw on in all the best childrens cartoons and comics. Thing Gnasher and Gnipper or Spike and Tyke. Dem Bones is particularly apt at Halloween, but can introduce some un at any time of the year...

Flagellum Dei is Latin for ‘The Scourge of God’. It is a title given by later generations to Attila the Hun (406-453 C.E.). Flagellum Dei is also a rather scary font, which I made with the use of a stiff brush and some China ink. Of course you could use this quite versatile font to scare the bejesus out of your friends, but I’d much rather see it used on book covers, posters and album artwork. Flagellum Dei comes with a horde of diacritics.