The Parliament typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler beginning in 1995. A burlesque typeface in the Regency Blackletter style, Parliament was inspired by the ‘Four-line Pica Black No. 1’ typeface of William Caslon Jr (1821), whose enigmatic design for the letters E, G, I, N, V and Y hinted at a broader ambition to modernize the arcane shapes of the gothic alphabet’s capital letters. Parliament completes this project for the first time by including two sets of alphabets, one archaic and one modern, along with a third set of ‘small caps’ that restores to the blackletter the versatility of Roman type. Parliament was first used for the 1998 ATypI Conference in Lyon, and was published by Hoefler&Co in 2022.

German type designers Erik Spiekermann and Ole Schäfer created this sans FontFont between 1996 and 2000. The family has 10 weights, ranging from Regular to Bold (including italics) and is ideally suited for book text, editorial and publishing, small text as well as web and screen design. FF Info Text provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. In 1998, FF Info Text received the The Big Crit award. This FontFont is a member of the FF Info super family, which also includes FF Info Correspondence and FF Info Display.

Merlo Neue Round is the younger brother of Merlo Round and cousin of Merlo Neue. This new family received a refreshed, rounded style and a new shape of many glyphs. New Merlo consist of a wide range of instances' seven new weights with italics, from Hairline to Bold allows to use the family in a complex way, depending on the users' needs. The font has a glyph set for latin and cyrylic script, small caps and old-style figures. Merlo Neue Round would be a great choice for display use as well as for the longer texts. This family is inspired by a "You And Me Monthly" published by National Magazines Publisher RSW "Prasa" from May 1960 till December 1973 in Poland.

Made in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), hyperpolar is born while the designer (Bisou) watches "Godard mon amour", a biopic about Jean-Luc Godard's depression in 1967-68. A parade of murder mystery books is staged at the middle of the movie and at exactly 56 minutes and 47 seconds, the book "Confrontation" strikes Bisou's eye. It is the first inspiration for this awsome retro font. Hyperpolar is thought from ground up to give a strong impact. It’s retro 50’s crime stories style makes it best suitable book covers. It works perfectly with short texts for advertisement like a trench coat or a smoking pipe store. Just hang it over a video club and see what thrilling cinephiles will come in.

The Swedish designer/typographer Anders Bodebeck designed the Bodebeck type family in 2002. The family, which includes five different styles, is primarily intended for use as a titling, or display face, and belongs to the neo-transitional style of typefaces. Transitional style type first appeared in England during the late 1750s, when John Baskerville released his first sets of type. Bodeck bears similarities to another, later transitional style typeface as well - Eric Gill's Perpetua (originally released by the British Monotype Corporation in 1928). Like these two previous English stonecutters turned masters of typography, Anders Bodebeck has given us a modern re-interpretation of classic letterforms. Bodebeck, which is fitted with old style figures, is available in the following styles: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, and Extra Bold."

The hand composition typeface was developed at the Ossip Lehmann type foundry (St. Petersburg) in 1904-07 (after designs by Alexander Leo?). It was redeveloped at Polygraphmash in 1960s for slugcasting composition. Named after Russian Empress Elizabeth I (1709-61). Based on typefaces of George Revillon type foundry of 1840s, though some characters’ shapes were redrawn similar to Russian Academy of Sciences typefaces (mid-18th century). Sharp contrast, strong weight Modern Serif with archaic flavor. The typeface is useful in text and display composition, in fiction, historical, and art books, especially connected to the 18th or 19th centuries. It looks great in Russian classical literature such as Pushkin and Gogol works. The revised, improved and completed digital version was designed at ParaType in 2001 by Lyubov Kuznetsova.

Portmeirion No.6 started life as an experiment by our designer, who was exploring the possibilities of a completely 'over-the-top' display Roman face, bringing in elements of Tuscan and 'Circus' design, along with anything else he felt like. He's instilled a little more discipline in the finished result...but just ever so little. We have Fred Stevens, a regular reader of our website to thank for the name. He's comment on seeing a preview of the design was 'Over the top, Italianesque decorative and intriguing. add some 60's TV and voila Portmeirion.' Why No.6-well you'd need to know a bit about 1960s television to understand that, but we'll give you a hint..."Where am I?"..."In the village".

Steelplate Gothic Pro is a sans serif font family with traditional and drop shadow weights. It shares letterform similarities to conventional Copperplate Gothic families, but has no spur serif endings. Most of the original designs came from the Western Type Foundry when BB&S acquired it in 1918; all were cut by Robert Wiebking. It was recast in 1954 by American Type Founders (ATF). Steve Jackaman (ITF) designed and produced a digital version of the original single weight in 1997. In 2017, Jackaman completely redrew and expanded the family, adding entirely new condensed variants and true small caps. Steelplate Gothic Pro has a masculine, industrial feel, and works effortlessly at display and subhead sizes. It shares letterforms with its sans serif sister family, Barnsley Gothic.

The hand cut wood type which was the inspiration for Wood Nouveau JNL conjures up images of the artistic period between the Victorian Era and 1920s Moderne, as well as the hippie counterculture active in the later part of the 20th Century. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock posters, fliers, store signs and other printed ephemera of "the love generation" borrowed heavily from the Art Noveau style in both art and typography. An Alphonse Mucha-inspired flower girl could adorn a concert poster that also combined both vintage wood type and hand-lettered elements. Although this particular type design might well have preceded the actual start of the Nouveau period, the softer, rounder lines of each character lent themselves well to this emerging style.

Bitstream Cooper was designed at Bitstream in 1986 by means of adding light, medium, and bold styles, with the corresponding italics, to the existing black ones. Based on Cooper Black, 1919, by Oswald Bruce Cooper, which was firstly released as a hand composition font in 1922 by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler of Chicago and later spread by ATF. Cooper Black is an extra bold face based on Cooper Old Style. Bitstream Cooper is an old style face with rounded serifs and tilted back ovals. For use both in text (normal weights) and in advertising and display typography (heavy weights). Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType in 2000 by Manvel Shmavonyan and based on TM Oswald face of TypeMarket, 1996, by Victoria Grigorenko.

Set the wayback machine for about 1967. Smell the patchouli? Now you can inject just the right dose of swirly-licious mojo into your retro design with this original vintage-styled sixties font. But as with many psychedelic hippie lettering designs, the history reaches back even further; it owes a designer's debt of gratitude to the designs of the Art Nouveau era as well. This is predominantly a uni-case alphabet, but also features a few alternative characters in the lower case – at the full height of the capitals. With an extensive character set and multilingual glyphs, you can use Hippie Mojo to say "Groovy baby" in many languages. Evoke the carefree and tripped-out vibe of the psychedelic era with Hippie Mojo; it's pure retro fun!

Introducing Asheboro, a groovy retro font with modern style! Asheboro pairs the elements of groovy psychedelic lettering of the 1960's and 70's with the clean lines found in a modern geometric sans-serif. This combination creates a completely new aesthetic without losing the familiarity of the iconic typography of the past. With its iconic retro look, Asheboro is a great typeface selection for special branding projects, themed events, websites, even comic books and graphic novels. The Asheboro font family includes nine font weight variations for the ultimate font styling versatility. Each font weight is meticulously balanced and well-kerned for the optimal look. In addition, Asheboro includes a beautifully crafted number set, an expanded symbols set, and a large library of multilingual characters.

Honesty is sans serif font with flared stems. As such, it belongs to the incise genre which is historically inspired by the roman civilisation and letters carved in granite or marble. One of the major example of it is the Trajan’s Column in Rome which inspired a font called Trajan, designed by Carol Twombly in 1989. Honesty is also inspired by more brutal font such as the Albertus, designed in 1938 by Berthed Wolpe, and its shape is highly influence by the work of the hammer. Despite this brutality and urgency due to the carving technique, the design of Honesty bring softness to it thanks to its low contrast and smooth curves. Honesty’s design include 16 styles, from thin to black in roman and italic.

Released on the occasion of the 2012 London Olympics, Olympukes 2012 was a new set of pictograms telling the ‘real’ story of the Olympics and extending the unofficial project that began in 2004. The occasion of the London games provided an opportunity to revisit the complex contradictions of the modern Olympics and to acknowledge the geopolitical shifts of the intervening eight years. The 2012 games arrived at a time of great economic and political uncertainty for the nation and Europe. Greece – the host of the 2004 games – was now located at Ground Zero of a disintegrating Eurozone and the United Kingdom was two years into a programme of austerity enacted by the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Given that the previous London Olympics had been held in 1948, in a climate of recovery and austerity after a devastating World War (1948’s Olympiad was dubbed the ‘Austerity Games’) there was a sick irony to the 2012 games' arrival. The suppression of human rights in order to deliver the perfect games for PRoC’s Beijing games shocked no-one and yet, in London, the security measures seemed grossly excessive. Then again, in a country with an estimated 1.8 million cctv cameras, perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised. Another aspect of the Olympics that returned for 2012 was the unfettered commercialism – if you think the Games are about pure sport, about noble human endeavour, think again. Please note that Barnbrook Fonts is in no way affiliated with, or has received any endorsement from, the International Olympic Committee, the organising committees of the Olympic Games, or any national Olympic committee.

Albertina was a typeface ahead of its time. It was in the early 1960s when designer Chris Brand, an accomplished calligrapher, aspired to draw a typeface based on the principles of calligraphy. Unfortunately, typesetting machines of that era put many restrictions on designers. Characters had to be drawn within a very coarse grid, which also defined their spacing. Technological limitations meant that italic designs often had to share the same character widths as the romans. Designers were forced to draw italic faces much wider and with more open spacing than what would be typical in calligraphic lettering or hand-set type. Not surprisingly, production of the first Albertina fonts went very slowly. Brand would submit his character drawings, and the Monotype Drawing Office would modify them to be compatible with the company's typesetting equipment. The new drawings would then be sent back to Brand for approval or rework. Most were reworked. The process took so long, in fact, that by the time the face was completed it was once again out of phase with the times: instead of being released as metal type for the Monotype composing machines it had been tailored for, Albertina debuted as phototype fonts for the Monophoto typesetter. The design's first use was for a catalog of the work of Stanley Morison, exhibited at the Albertina Library in Brussels in 1966. Sales of the design were not remarkable. With the advent of digital type technology, Albertina's story took a far happier turn. Frank E. Blokland, of the Dutch Type Library, used Brand's original, uncompromised drawings as the foundation of a digital revival. The Monophoto version had taken a considerable battering from the limitations of Monotype's unit system," recalls Blokland, "but there was no need for me to incorporate these restrictions in the digital version." With the full backing of Monotype and original designer Brand looking over Blokland's shoulder, a new design for Albertina emerged, displaying all the grace and verve of Brand's original drawings. The basic family drawn by Brand also grew into three weights, each with an italic complement and a suite of small caps and old style figures."

Syntax was designed by Swiss typographer Hans Eduard Meier, and issued in 1968 by the D. Stempel AG type foundry as their last hot metal type family. Meier used an unusual rationale in the design of this sans serif typeface; it has the shapes of humanist letters or oldstyle types (such as Sabon), but with a modified monoline treatment. The original drawings were done in 1954; first by writing the letters with a brush, then redrawing their essential linear forms, and finally adding balanced amounts of weight to the skeletons to produce optically monoline letterforms. Meier wanted to subtly express the rhythmical dynamism of written letters and at the same time produce a legible sans serif typeface. This theme was supported by using a very slight slope in the roman, tall ascenders, terminals at right angles to stroke direction, caps with classical proportions, and the humanist style a and g. The original foundry metal type was digitized in 1989 to make this family of four romans and one italic. Meier completely reworked Syntax in 2000, completing an expanded and improved font family that is available exclusively from Linotype GmbH as Linotype Syntax. In 2009 the typeface family was renamed into a more logical naming of "Syntax Next" to fit better in the Platinum Collection naming."

Ladoga — one of the most beautiful Russian designs from the soviet period. The type family was developed in Polygraphmash in 1968 by Anatoly Shchukin on the base of his own lettering for book covers and titles. It was one of the first attempts in Cyrillic typography to create text face in a style of renaissance antiqua. Stylization to broad pen calligraphy resembles early forms of Latin types that were based on handwritten humanistic minuscule. Unique in its character set digital version of Ladoga was designed by Viktor Kharik on the base of artworks of Shchukin for ParaType. The family consists of roman and italic styles in text and display versions. Character set includes characters of original shapes as well as more modern alternatives. Besides there are a set of additional characters, old style figures and small caps. The fonts cover all modern languages based on Latin and Cyrillic scripts, Greek alphabet (including polytonic extension), Hebrew and historical Cyrillic letters. Ladoga is gorgeous in display sizes and pretty readable in texts. It’s well suitable for fiction literature, historical books, art criticism, religious and philologist works. It will be extreme helpful for multilingual issues and for inclusions into body text historical passages in original orthography. The family was released in 2010.

Kirshaw is not your grandfather's sans serif from the 1950s and 1960s. All those old classics like Helvetica, Futura, Franklin Gothic, and Univers are showing their age like an old Elvis Presley song. Kirshaw is a clean, rounded design with sharp contrasting edges. Like those classics, Kirshaw is easy to read in small body copy and captions, plus it's delightfully modern and stylish for headlines and logos. I designed Kirshaw and Kirkly while undergoing cancer treatment at Stanford Medical Center. Font design was always in the back of my mind and now I had extra time. Kirshaw is a distinctive, modern, easy-to-read sans serif family consists of 14 weights (including italics). It’s an Adobe Latin 3 Character Set containing 350 glyphs per style (including special characters).

Roundhand was created by Matthew Carter in 1966 on the basis of handwriting by Charles Snell, an English calligrapher of XVII-XVIII known in particular by his "The Pen-man's Treasury Open'd" written in 1694. The typeface has continuous cursive shapes with oval aspect, high contrast emphasized by abrupt transitions from thin to thick and regularity of slope. Its capitals are often used as initials in combinations with other typefaces. The current digital version of the typeface has 3 styles of different weights. Roundhand is clear and easy to read and is well-suited for medium size texts and headlines. It will work well in invitations, menus, packaging, and advertising accentuating elegance and the subtle nature of the content. The Cyrillic version was developed by Vladimir Yefimov and Isabella Chaeva. Released by ParaType in 2013.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the sound of 1990s music, personal computers, and new font creation software. For years, Alexander Branczyk and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. The typeface F2F OCRAlexczyk is one of the Face2Face fonts in Linotype's Take Type Library. It is based on the popular computer font OCR A, which was developed by the American National Standards Institute in 1966 as a system of letters that both humans and machines could easily read. Alexander Branczyk made a more 1990s/techno version, which later became this font.

Envoy is a serif type inspired primarily by Garalde oldstyle types like those of Claude Garamond. As such, it is particularly well suited for book and magazine text. Characteristic details more typical of Venetian oldstyle faces serve to give Envoy just a bit more personality. The base family includes regular, italic, bold, bold italic and small capitals. Expert sets add ligatures and alternate letterforms. Display sets include letterforms customized for titling. Originally designed in 1995 and 1996, for the 1996 Morisawa International Typeface Design Competition, Envoy was later revived, completed and publicly released in 1998. During the initial design, the family was known as Truman in honor of Northeast Missouri State University becoming Truman State University, but the name was changed to Envoy prior to entry in the competition.

In the early 1960s, the Duro Decal Company of Chicago, Illinois added to its line of water-applied decal lettering a retail sign cabinet of die-cut, pressure sensitive vinyl letters and numbers. Four of the six sizes offered for sale were cut from white plastic with a black outline and a secondary gold inline for a tri-color effect. Sign Stickers JNL emulates as closely as possible the look of these nostalgic pieces, complete with the slight shifts in line weight due to hand-cut silk screens and the printing process. For those of you who prefer to make your own multi-colored letters, a three piece fill font set is available for the low price of a single font purchase. Combine the backfill, midfill and frontfill layers for a truly retro look!

The basis for Series A Signage JNL is Highway Gothic; a type style design formally known as the FHWA Series. The font was developed by the United States Federal Highway Administration, and originally consisted of only capital letters and figures. Each Letter designation represented a character width from "A" (condensed) to "F" (wide). Due to poor visibility at high speeds, Series "A" was discontinued. At one point lower case characters were added to the various widths of the design, but this typeface revival is based on the original guidelines specified in the 1948 (reprinted 1952) book "Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs" [this was the original name for the FHWA series fonts preceding the eventual name change to Highway Gothic]. Unlike the original, Series A Signage JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Probably one of the most unusual applications of a stencil took place in 1964 when Union Carbide [then-owner of the still-new line of "Glad" brand plastic wrap and storage bags] sponsored a $100,000 contest to match up a stencil of their logo in order to win a prize. The magazine ad told of how one thousand lucky participants would win $100 by simply taking a die-cut stencil of the brand name to the store and overlaying it on the logo printed on the food wrap box to see if it aligned perfectly. The hand-lettered title proclaiming "match the stencil and win" was done in a casual sans design and reflected the cheerfulness of many typestyles found in ads during the late 50s and early 60s.

During the turbulent era of the 1960s, the youth of America found various ways to protest against "The Establishment". Whether it was campus unrest, protest songs, sit-ins or other methods, the message was the counter-culture movement. Arising from this disenchantment with traditional social standards, a small but effective means of protest arose that made no sound, yet spoke volumes - the pin button. Statements against the war in Vietnam, free love, drug use and other messages popped up on little metal discs pinned to tee shirts, suspenders, head band and hats. Sixties Pin Buttons JNL recreates twenty-six of these messages in both white on black (upper case keys) and black on white (lower case keys). Blank buttons in both white and black are found on the parenthesis keys.

Dave West’s Italiano is a smooth and sensuous typographic dish with a few extra savory dashes. The silky semi-serif combines ingredients from eighteenth-century engraved italics and nineteenth-century Italian Modern, softened by fine stroke endings and plump dolloped terminals. Preserve Italiano’s subtle flavors by maximizing its size in headlines, advertising captions, and identity campaigns, or capitalize on its swash characters to sweeten package and poster designs. However you use it, Plinc Italiano is a tasty typographic treat—non ci piove! Drawn in the late 1960s for Photo-Lettering, Inc., Italiano was digitized by Steve Ross with Ken Barber in 2015. Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

Rocket Pop and Rocket Pop Outline are influenced by product packaging and cereal box art from the 1960's and 1970's. The fonts will work as companions or separate. Best used over 36pt as a headline display face, these fonts will bring a bold playfulness to any project where a vintage or retro style is in the concept. The style reflects the era when things were indeed, mad, where men (and some women) did crazy art for vinyl records, food packaging and kiddie products. Sugar frosted blue donut cereal is yummy for your tummy like... Rocket Pop and Rocket Pop Outline. Buy both and get the discount! Watch for the Cerealboxx Set coming soon that will include the astroluxtype fonts, Sugarbang! Koo Koo Puff and Rocket Pop together in one box.

Vasili Vasilyevich Radlof or Wilhelm Radloff (Russian: Василий Васильевич Радлов; German: Wilhelm Radloff; 17 January 1837 - 12 May 1918) was a German-born Russian orientalist and founder of Turcology. Radloff is a Russian Turkologist of German origin, who researches the Turkish world from different aspects, opens a new era in the history of Turkology by bringing them to light, and has devoted 60 years of his 81-year long life to these studies. In his work known as Radloff Atlas, it was published with a runic font that he developed specifically for the Old Turkish Runic Alphabet. I made the Turkish Runic Font using Radloff's Atlas. I developed this viking font based on this font and adapted it to Viking writing. I will adapt other runic versions when I have the opportunity.

Sabon was designed by Jan Tschichold and released in 1967. Sabon was created in response to the specific needs of a group of German printers who wanted a typeface that would be identical in form when produced by three different metal-casting technologies. Named after Jacques Sabon, a sixteenth century typefounder whose widow married another typefounder, Konrad Berner, who is credited with issuing the first typefounder's specimen sheet. Several types on the sheet were attributed to Claude Garamond, and one of these served Tschichold as the source for Sabon roman. The italic was based on another face on Berner's sheet, cut by Robert Granjon. Tschichold's skillful adaptation of these old style faces has produced an elegant and workmanlike book face. The Sabon font family is a popular choice for setting text.

Firing Imaginations and lively connected script family of three weights, ornament and banner sets and separate caps and small caps designed to support the script. Frost is influenced by the hand lettering and sign painting of the 1950s and 1960s with more polished appearance to better suit contemporary design trends. Frost is equipped with loads of automatic ligatures to make the text better flowing and has minimum three alternatives to every basic letter: To activate the alternates click on Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates in any OpenType Savvy program or manually choose from even more alternate characters from the Glyph Palette. Frost is an effective and easy to use font family for creating ambitious headlines, logos & posters with a custom-made feeling. For the absolutely best price purchase the complete family!

In 1978 I went to work at Mergenthaler as a letter drawer. Being an inquisitive sort I decided that I should take a stab at this type design 'stuff'. I drew 25 or 30 glyphs before the work found its way to a high shelf in a dark corner of my apartment. Just 23 years later I found the drawings on a different shelf, in a different home, in a different city and decided to finish what I had started. I'm still trying to deal with my predisposition toward procrastination but I've finished the font. The name of the font is the last name of somebody I played softball with before I moved to Beantown. Ronnie Geis was one of the courageous firefighters we lost on September 11th when the WTC collapsed.

Haven font family is based on the compositionality of constructive elements that create the final shape of individual letters. Mechanical connecting was continuously adjusted by a type designer’s feeling. In this way Haven differs from similar typefaces of the 1960s and 1990s. Six fonts of different stroke intensity create a rich family of typefaces for a variety of uses in typography for special occasions. Although the typeface was drawn for headings, it is suitable for typesetting of long texts in a book. Even in extreme reduction it retains its technical basis, negating classic book alphabets, and it adds an experimental look to the text. Both extreme fonts Thin and Black create strong contrast and their magnification brings attention to their interconnection of all details. Serif version Haven Serif is also being prepared.

Mirabel is based on the handwriting of Beverly Bouwsma (Philip's mother), which she developed in the 1930s in, as she puts it, an act of teenage rebellion. In the 1960s, Philip gave her a broad-edged Osmiroid fountain pen which she took to immediately and has used ever since, along with the computer fonts he made from her script. Since Beverly Bouwsma mixed loops and straight ascenders, two interchangeable fonts have emerged, a formal package that sacrifices some flamboyance for classical balance and legibility, but retains the quality of the writing and celebrates the personality of its creator. The Mirabel fonts are available in all popular font formats, and the character sets cover a wide range of codepages, including Central and Eastern European languages, Esperanto, Turkish, Baltic, Celtic/Welsh.

Our Pardner font finds its inspiration from the title screens of the 1965 film “West and Soda”, an animated Italian film that was a parody on American Westerns. Director Bruno Bozetto claimed in an interview that he was in fact the originator of the Spaghetti Western, not Sergio Leone. This offbeat and animated serif typeface has characters of varying width and weighting incorporated into opentype scripting as well as numerous alternates to give a lot of fun and frolicking play in typesetting. You can type with just as much diversity as the titling themselves. Opentype features include: - 6 Stylistic Alternate Sets. - A collection of ligatures as well as programming to automatically alternates between Caps and Lowercase. - Full set of Inferiors and Superiors for limitless fractions. - 731 characters of pure joy.

Graham Cracker is a fun, cartoony and child-like font that can't help but fill you with happiness! The font was inspired by hand-drawn lettering on an old 1960s movie poster, and contains over 175 interlocking ligatures that add a hand-lettered feel. Stylistic substitutions like this are where the OpenType technology really shines, allowing computer fonts to more closely mimic the variations of hand drawn lettering. The ligatures can be found under the Discretionary Ligatures OT feature, or applied from the glyph palette. Jukebox fonts are available in OpenType format and downloadable packages contain both .otf and .ttf versions of the font. They are compatible on both Mac and Windows. All fonts contain basic OpenType features as well as support for Latin-based and most Eastern European languages.

Gia is 7 weights, true small caps and unicase options, designed after iconic letterforms of the 1960’s to 1980’s. In the early years of the American tech revolution, when Silicon Valley was more closely identified with Dallas, Texas, a curious type of letterform began to appear—strict in geometry, and curiously minimal in geometry and stroke, making it easier to be read by machine-readers, and people more used to reading machine-generated typography. Coders! As the years went on, this kind of sinewy, curved letterform began popping up in logotypes and music videos and upright video games: NASA, The Buggles, Atari, Pong, Sega, Namco, Stern, Devo, Apple. Gia pays homage to that letterform, and is named after Gia Carangi, the iconic face of early 1980’s pop fashion.

In the early 1960s, the German Master Printers’ Association requested that a new typeface be designed and produced in identical form on both Linotype and Monotype machines so that text and technical composition would match. Walter Cunz at Stempel responded by commissioning Jan Tschichold to design a new version of Claude Garamond’s serene and classical Roman. Its bold, and particularly its italic styles are limited by the requirements of Linotype casting machines, forcing the character widths of a given letter to match between styles, giving the italic its characteristic narrow f. The family’s name is taken from Jacques Sabon, who introduced Garamond’s Romans to Frankfurt. Sabon has long been a favorite of typographers for setting book text, due to its smooth texture, and in large part because Tschichold’s book typography remains world famous.