Canadian Serge Pichii was inspired by decorative lettering produced during the early 1920s by Jan Tschichold to create Ironwork. Similarly, his ITC Ancestor family was influenced by early work, but in this case, much earlier work: the characters carved by native British Columbian people on solid rock. He worked with anthropologists and linguists to produce a series of books dedicated to the history and culture of the people.

ITC Coconino is the work of Serbian designer Slobodan Miladinov. His original inspiration for this monostroked typeface was the idea of translating certain auditory impressions into type, in this case, the surprising and confusing music of the Serbian hip hop musician Voodoo Popeye." Miladinov is an art director in Belgrade and created Coconino using a "freemouse" technique with Adobe Illustrator and sees his work as "computer calligraphy which allows for a specific directness and immediacy in notation." The strokes of this font are simple and abrupt with a studied irregularity. The forms can look either cheerful and lighthearted or chaotic and subtly disturbing. Coconino was named for the home of hte Krazy KAt comics and even includes a few additional characters from the strip."

Einhorn is a peculiar typeface. Difficult to classify, this upright, bold, script-like semi serif typeface was designed in 1980 by Alan Meeks. Meeks was inspired by the art nouveau period, and may have been trying to liven up the design scene. In 1980, typefaces like Helvetica and Univers were ubiquitous, and the digital revolution was still years away. Experimental faces like Einhorn helped fill the gap for creative designers looking for untraditional choices in which to set headlines and advertising work. The merit of pioneer display faces like Einhorn have never lessened; Einhorn still sets a mean display text, and works great in logos and other corporate ID solutions.

Static looks almost like it was stamped on paper: the black color is not evenly distributed and the background comes through the letters and consciously irregular forms reinforce the effect. The characters do not all have the same height, nor do they stand straight and regularly on the base line. Static is a robust font with bold, rounded serifs and is best used for headlines and short texts in point sizes of 12 and larger.

ITC Anna is a labor of love by Daniel Pelavin. He designed the font for his wedding invitation and reused it on the birth announcement of his first child, Anna, whose namesake it is. The simple geometric forms and their proportions create a unique font appropriate for any special occasion.

ITC Flora is the work of Dutch designer Gerard Unger, and is named for his daughter. He started by doing calligraphy experiments with felt-tip and ballpoint pens, and developed these drawings into a formalized script typeface. Swiss typographer Max Caflisch advised the Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH technology firm to add a new round-nibbed script face to their Digiset type library, and in 1984, Flora was released by Hell. Unger used a chancery cursive skeleton in this design, which imparts grace and movement. Flora was also intentionally designed to be simple and sturdy, and with its minimal variation in thick/thin stroke ratio, it worked well on the early digital typesetting machines. In 1989, the International Typeface Corporation released the font. ITC Flora continues to work well on current printers and typesetters, and it has an enduring popularity for uses that range from short text passages to display headlines.

While designing ITC Spirit, Patty King was influenced by classic typeface styles. The letter forms are clearly based on those of the Unziale, which, like ITC Spirit, is also composed of only capital letters. Hints of the Asian brush script style also show in this font. The irregular outer contours are best highlighted in larger point sizes and give the font the look of handwriting. ITC Spirit with its calligraphic style is best used for headlines and short texts in point sizes of 12 and larger.

ITC Isbell font is the work of Dick Isbell and Jerry Campbell of Detroit, Michigan, a highly stylized roman typeface which retains an exceptional legibility. The unusual arches and curves of several lowercase characters give the typeface its individuality. ITC Isbell font is ideal for advertising, brochures, menus, and a variety of other applications.

Designer Nick Curtis found the inspiration for this typeface on a 1920s poster for a German bookseller, by Berlin poster artist Paul Scheurich. ITC Jeepers retains the spontaneity and playfulness of Scheurich's original lettering and adds a few surprises of its own, one being the somewhat exclamatory ear on the lowercase "g". It was, in fact, the excited look of this particular character that gave rise to the font's name. Not to be outdone, the exclamation point takes on an even more startling demeanor. The monoweight, slab serif design has a friendly personality, perfect for headlines and other display uses.

The designer of ITC Medea , Silvio Napoleone said: “I've always had an interest in early letter shapes, particularly how they influenced modern typographic designs. While I was on vacation in Greece, I had a chance to see, first-hand, examples of early letterforms and typography. They really made an impression on me.” The idea of combining the ancient and the modern to create something new was the primary inspiration behind ITC Medea. ITC Medea is essentially a careful blending of the modern sans serif with the elegant forms of the uncial. At first glance, Medea appears to be constructed of geometric shapes. However, closer inspection reveals many calligraphic subtleties. Stroke terminals are flared slightly in characters like the 'e' and 'c.' The top curve of the 'd' is more pronounced than the bottom, and characters like the 'o' are elliptical rather than round. “I gravitated towards the simplicity and legibility of the uncial and half-uncial,” Napoleone recalls. “I thought it would make a great titling font, and I was surprised at how attractive ITC Medea looked in a body text.”

ITC Kokoa is the work of German graphic designer Jochen Schuss. Schuss found the seeds of inspiration on a trip to Ghana and expanded and experimented with the idea on the computer. It includes an array of symbols and borders to complement its stylized letters. ITC Kokoa retains a touch of its African roots but is overall a modern, funky font.

ITC Juanita is the work of Argentinian-born designer Luis Siquot and was inspired by a text set only with woodcuts which he was reading during a long international flight. ITC Juanita is a series of six distinct typefaces which Siquot sees as a personal reinterpretation of designs that originated in the 1930s and 40s and were still popular during his childhood in the 1950s. For me, Juanita is like a toy, charming, expressive, and also dramatic," says Siquot. The ITC Juanita series offers designers a range of variations based on similar structures, each variation with its own look."

On a cold winter's night, George Ryan, of Galápagos Design Group, began musing on the possibilities for a “truly original” sans serif typeface. What came out of his musing, and his always-present sketchpad, was ITC Adderville, a typeface whose visual impact is immediate and strong. Ryan explains how he did it: “The rounded ends of its strokes and their skewed baseline contact create an illusion of dancing feet. The tops of lowercase stems emit serif buds, suggesting transition into or out of the serifed form. The spear-like lowercase stroke terminators, along with other distinctive elements such as the stylized reticulation of the lowercase 'g' segments, the salute of that same character's spur, and the bold, non-self-conscious 'i' and 'j' dots, all contribute to the playful and unique nature of this design.” The result is a friendly, lively type family whose graduated weights -- book, medium, and heavy -- lend themselves especially well to use at small display sizes and in short blocks of text.

ITC Abaton, by Argentinian designer Luis Siquot, is an exercise in geometry and simplification. “It is done,” says Siquot, “with few elements, with modules of only straight lines (horizontals, verticals and diagonals of almost 45 degrees). Drawing the I and the O, I got the basic elements, and so started the fight between strict geometry and optical impression, until I obtained the rest of the characters.” The basic rectangular form is characterized by wedge-shaped serifs, almost like caps on the heads and feet of the letters. “Abaton has the 'spirit' of 19th-century faces used on money bills or postage stamps, but the realization is totally different,” Siquot explains. Abaton is a “shaded” typeface of caps and slightly smaller caps, upright and slightly condensed in form. Although the letterforms are legible at small sizes, the shading tends to clog up if it gets too small, so Abaton is happiest as a distinctive display face.

ITC Noovo is from British designer Phill Grimshaw and grew out of his work on ITC Rennie Mackintosh. He says, I still had 'Nouveau' coming out of my ears" and he drew it after a series of computer-intensive projects, "when I was missing the smell of permanent marker pens and the feel of paper." ITC Noovo is highly stylized yet works as both a text and display typeface."

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.

ITC Merss proves that sometimes accidents work out just fine. Late one evening Eduardo Manso, an Argentinean graphic and type designer, spilled coffee on his desk. When he began to wipe up the mess, he noticed that one of the splashes looked like a roman letter 'l' - complete with serifs. This triggered his imagination. “What if a complete alphabet was created with this same irregular flow to the character designs?” ITC Merss was the result of Manso's experiments with “fluid” letter shapes. The oddly handsome design looks aged and spontaneous at the same time. Its irregular texture is striking-the result of careful modeling of character shapes. While Manso wanted to maintain the free-form character of spilled liquid, he also knew the individual letters had to work together with an underlying harmony. When not experimenting with typefaces - or spilled coffee - Manso creates award-winning graphic and publication designs. A contributor to the design magazine el Huevo (the Egg), he also writes articles on type and typography and is part of the publication's design team.

ITC Jaft is the work of New York designer Frank Marciuliano, an adventurous, energetic display typeface. It began with a series of posters designed by Marciuliano for the New York Times. The lettering was drawn with a bamboo pen and then filled in to create the unusual angles that give ITC Jaft its unique look.

ITC Farmhaus is the work of British designer Tim Donaldson and is, in his own words, Neil Young meets Paul Renner." Donaldson borrowed the perfect circles and clean lines of Renner's drawings for Futura and gave them jagged edges and uneven, thick strokes. Farmhaus contains one set of capitals and two sets of lower case letters."

ITC Kristen is the work of American designer George Ryan. He describes it as not your average text or display font." The inspiration for the design came from the handwritten menu at a neighborhood restaurant. With time, the forms moved away from the originals and towards something more like a child's scrawl. The result is singularly unique. ITC Kristen remains legible without losing any charm.

ITC Redonda is the work of Montreal designer Gerard Mariscalchi and based on a common style of 19th century French handwriting. It comes with two sets of caps, both highly flourished, which are complemented by a refined lowercase. ITC Redonda is a distinctive upright script with intricate forms and will lend elegance to any application.

ITC Esprit is the work of designer Jovica Veljović and blends the classic proportions of a serif typeface with the grace and charm of calligraphy. Highly legible even in small point sizes, the font can also be used as an impressive display face for use with sans serif text. In 2010 Veljovic revised this family and released this as ITC New Esprit.

ITC Rastko began as a series of initial letters for a book of poetry. Serbian designer Olivera Stojadinovic had been working with a small publishing house creating a special series of books under the Masterpieces" brand. Her goal was to draw a new set of initial letters for each book. ITC Rastko, named after the Serbian poet Rastko Petrovic, was a project that required initial letters for the entire alphabet. Once Stojadinovic had drawn the majority of the capital letters, she realized that a companion lowercase would make a distinctive script typeface. Sketches of the letters were drawn quickly with a pointed pen. Stojadinovic then refined these, keeping the spontaneous, hand-drawn quality. Capitals are wide and flourished, while the lowercase letters are more condensed and subdued. It's no surprise that the capitals also make great initial letters."

ITC Legacy¿ was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and character. As Jenson did not include a companion italic, Arnholm turned to the sixteenth-century types of Claude Garamond for inspiration for the italics of ITC Legacy. Arnholm was so taken by the strength and integrity of these oldstyle seriffed forms that he used their essential skeletal structures to develop a full set of sans serif faces. ITC Legacy includes a complete family of weights from book to ultra, with Old style Figures and small caps, making this a good choice for detailed book typography or multi-faceted graphic design projects. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e."" Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos

ITC Studio Script was designed by Robert Evans, an informal script for applications in which a calligraphic look would be appropriate. The font includes a wide variety of alternate characters, which give a graphic designer's creativity no limits.

ITC Cheltenham font in its present form is the work of designer Tony Stan. Originally designed by architect Bertram Goodhue, it was expanded by Morris Fuller Benton and completed by Stan in 1975 with a larger x-height and improved italic details. ITC Cheltenham font is an example of an up-to-date yet classic typeface. In 1993 Ed Benguiat added the Handtooled weights to this family.

ITC Humana Sans font is the work of British designer Timothy Donaldson, an extended and versatile font family with a large array of variations. Donaldson first created ITC Humana Script with a broad-tipped pen and then went on to design the corresponding roman. ITC Humana Sans is the perfect font for anything requiring both clarity and a touch of personality.

ITC Legacy¿ was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and character. As Jenson did not include a companion italic, Arnholm turned to the sixteenth-century types of Claude Garamond for inspiration for the italics of ITC Legacy. Arnholm was so taken by the strength and integrity of these oldstyle seriffed forms that he used their essential skeletal structures to develop a full set of sans serif faces. ITC Legacy includes a complete family of weights from book to ultra, with Old style Figures and small caps, making this a good choice for detailed book typography or multi-faceted graphic design projects. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e."" ITC Legacy® Sans font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

ITC Atelier Sans began as one of Curtis's renovations. His goal was to create a monoline design with Art Deco “sensibilities,” but without the geometric precision and relatively small x-height of faces like Futura or Kabel. Gentle curves and suggestions of serifs create a crisp, clean and open face that is at once sleek, sensuous and still affable. Available as a two-weight family with complementary italics, ITC Atelier Sans is another successful and usable revival from Nick Curtis.

ITC Humana Script font is the work of British designer Timothy Donaldson. He crafted this typeface with a broad-tipped pen on paper before carefully creating the final digital version. ITC Humana Script is the perfect font for anything requiring both clarity and a touch of personality.

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 intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost its innocence. No pretending anymore that it only needed two weights for office correspondence. As a face used in magazines and advertising, it needed proper headline weights and one more weight in between the original Book and Bold."" To add the new weights and small caps, Spiekermann collaborated with Ole Schaefer, director of typography and type design at MetaDesign. The extended ITC Officina family now includes Medium, Extra Bold, and Black weights with matching italics-all in both Sans and Serif -- as well as new small caps fonts for the original Book and Bold weights.

Controlled casualness is the watchword in this new handwriting script from the prolific young French designer Éric de Berranger, who also designed the sans serif type family ITC Octone. ITC Berranger Hand has its roots in chancery calligraphy, yet its surface looks like contemporary informal lettering that was written quickly with a felt-tip pen on slightly absorbent paper. The counters of some letters appear to almost fill in from ink spread, yet Berranger Hand is admirably readable at small sizes. The capital letters are restrained, without swashes, so they can be used together in all-caps combinations.

ITC Humana font is the work of British designer Timothy Donaldson, an extended and versatile font family with a large array of variations. Donaldson first created ITC Humana Script with a broad-tipped pen and then went on to design the corresponding roman. ITC Humana is the perfect font for anything requiring both clarity and a touch of personality.

The Zapf Dingbats originally had been a selection of 360 symbols, ornaments and typographic elements from over 1200 designs. (For the first time a lady's hand is shown for the index symbol, the fist). The exisiting Zapf Dingbats offers a small selection out of this great offer. Therefore Hermann Zapf created new symbols for the set of the Zapf Dingbats, which are available today from Linotype as "Zapf Essentials?" 6 fonts with new and fresh symbols like fax, cell phone and internet symbols.

Sumner Stone worked together with Bob Ishi of Adobe to create the Stone family fonts, which appeared in 1987. Coincidentally, ishi is the Japanese word for stone, which precluded any squabbling about whose name the font would carry. The family consists of three types of fonts, a serif, a sans-serif and an informal style. The Stone fonts are very legible and make a modern, dynamic impression.

Through his hands-on experience choosing fonts as a graphic designer, type newcomer André Simard developed a type family with a good measure of design sensibility. His ITC Migration™ Sans suite of fonts offers five readable weights that can be utilized across a variety of projects. Expect more to come from this designer-turned-typophile.