One of the original nineteenth century designs, cut at Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in Chicago about 1880, passed on to us through ATF. Unlike most Circus types, the serifs of P.T. Barnum are bracketed.

Odile is a text typeface with bracketed head and bracket-free bottom lower case serifs, a quality that counters rigidness most traditional slab serif typefaces possess. This contemporary design draws inspiration from an experimental typeface named Charter originally designed by the American book and type designer William Addision Dwiggins. It consisted of an informal lowercase alphabet, a narrow seemingly non-inclined vertical letter with script attributes, featuring non-joining letterforms. Dwiggins’ contemplated Charter as the italic companion to Arcadia, Experimental No. 221. The Charter project progressed sporadic stalled during the Second World War and came to a halt in 1955. Charter remained incomplete and was never commercially released. Assessing Charter’s whimsical design, its fragments were rethought and developed into a comprehensive text family. Odile Upright Italic reveals recognizable similarities shared by Dwiggin’s Charter and defines the design approach for the family. The steep calligraphic outstroke and low junctions off the stem as in the upright italic “n” or “r”, for example, are gradually lessened in the italic and moved up for the roman weights. The six optically balanced weights range from the delicate Light to stark Black, accompanied by display variants with feminine flair and ardent Ornaments. Two sorts of Initials, one amplified with interweaving swashes, the other more restrained, both are clearly derived from the Upright Italic. This mid-contrast serif offers a wide range of tools for text and display typographies with a palette of strict to playful. This family shines in magazine, book and display use. The graceful serifed type harmonizes perfectly with Elido, Odile’s sans companion. Sans and serif share the family array and OpenType features in perfect tune. Odile offers an extensive character set, numerous OT features including roman and italic Small Caps, five sets of numerals, alluring ligatures, and many more. OT stylistic variants (with accents) offer a one-story “a” for the roman weights, alternate “g” and “s” designs for the italics, and a variant “s” for the Upright Italic.

Karl-Heinz Lange presented his first drafts of Rotola during a Typoart® type design competition in 1985 under the name "Boutique". A year later, Norbert du Vinage, former manager of the type design department, integrated "Boutique" in his production plan. Due the Fall of the Wall, it took about 18 years until Lange finished this font family in cooperation with Elsner+Flake. Karl-Heinz Lange was born on July 29, 1929 in Wiesenkirch in West Prussia. He was enrolled in the Humanistic Gymnasium at Elbing from 1939 to 1945 and changed to the Wernigerode High School after his family had to flee to central Germany. From 1949 to 1951, Karl-Heinz Lange studied at the Werkkunstschule Halle, where one of his teachers was Professor Post. After 1951, he continued his studies at the Hochschule for Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig with an emphasis on book design. He received his diploma in 1955 with distinction based on his design of a hot metal typeface. From 1956 to 1961, Karl-Heinz Lange worked as a lecturer for Type and Commercial Graphics at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Magdeburg. From 1961 to 1963, he taught at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, and finally as a freelance commercial designer in Magdeburg. He worked on a variety of assignments, one of which was the design of trick films. From 1969 to 1976 he took the position of Artistic Director of the Henschelverlag, Berlin; from 1976 to 1994 he was Professor of Type and Typography at the Fachschule für Werbung und Gestaltung in Berlin; and, until 2004, he taught at various institutes for advanced professional education. From 2005 to 2007 he taught at the Fachhochschule Magdeburg/Stendal. Karl-Heinz Lange was awarded the second prize at the "International Type Design Contest 1971" for a headline typeface, and, in 1984, at the XI. Biannual of Graphic Design in Brno, he won a Silver Medal for the design of his typeface family Publica. He created the telephone book typeface Minima and re-designed the Typoart Super Grotesk® (Arno Drescher, 1930) as well as the Newspaper typeface Magna® by Herbert Thannhaeuser for the use on digital typesetting systems. To the day of his death on June 29, 2010, Karl-Heinz Lange lived and worked as a type designer. Among others, he closely followed the designs of the typefaces which were developed under his guidance for Typoart®: "Publica®", "Typoart Super Grotesk®" and "Minima®" which he launched as "Publicala", "Minimala" and "Superla" in 2009. In cooperation with Elsner+Flake, he developed the Typeface family "Rotola" between 2006 and 2009 as well as the script families of the "Viabella®" series. To the end, he followed the development of his first typeface, the "Diplom Antiqua", which he also wanted to bring to market together with Elsner+Flake.