Drawn by George Ryan and named after Robert Givens, the co-founder and first president of Monotype Imaging, the Givens Antiqua™ typeface speaks with elegance and subtle authority. The design's open proportions, generous x-height and soft serifs lend Givens Antiqua a gracious quality that invites reading. I didn't work from any single design model," Ryan recalls. "The face grew out of my experimenting with several characters from a hand-lettered headline in a magazine. I worked on the shapes and forms for some time before I put the drawings in a drawer." At that point Ryan had finished the basic alphabet in two weights, but had not yet tackled the italics. A new project came along that demanded his full attention, and it was two years before he revisited the drawings. He liked what he saw and decided to finish the job. "The italics were the most problematic designs in the family," says Ryan, "but once I had their basic shapes and proportions, the rest was basically a production project." Another year of sketching, testing, editing and reworking characters ensued before Givens Antiqua was ready for release. The result is a four-weight family of roman designs and small caps, with complementary italics for the lightest three weights and a suite of swash caps for the italic designs. Givens Antiqua and Givens Antiqua Light show a modest stroke weight stress and a light, even text color. Givens Antiqua Bold is an effective emphasizer for text copy and an authoritative communicator at display sizes. The Black weight performs best at large sizes and makes a powerful statement without shouting, while the italic swash capitals possess enough vitality to serve as standalone initial letters."

The original Avenir typeface was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, after years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces. The word Avenir means “future” in French and hints that the typeface owes some of its interpretation to Futura. But unlike Futura, Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. These nuances aid in legibility and give Avenir a harmonious and sensible appearance for both texts and headlines. In 2012, Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next to life, as a new take on the classic Avenir. The goal of the project was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. Since then, Monotype expanded the typeface to accommodate more languages. Akira’s deep familiarity with existing iterations of the Frutiger designs, along with his understanding of the design philosophy of the man himself, made him uniquely suited to lead the creation of different language fonts. Avenir Next World family, the most recent release from Monotype, is an expansive family of fonts that offers support for more than 150 languages and scripts that include Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Thai. Avenir Next World contains 10 weights, from UltraLight to Heavy. The respective 10 Italic styles do not support Arabic, Georgian and Thai, since Italic styles are unfamiliar in these scripts/languages. Separate Non-Latin products to support just the Arabic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Hebrew and Thai script are also available for those who do not need the full language support.

The original Avenir typeface was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, after years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces. The word Avenir means “future” in French and hints that the typeface owes some of its interpretation to Futura. But unlike Futura, Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. These nuances aid in legibility and give Avenir a harmonious and sensible appearance for both texts and headlines. In 2012, Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next to life, as a new take on the classic Avenir. The goal of the project was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. Since then, Monotype expanded the typeface to accommodate more languages. Akira’s deep familiarity with existing iterations of the Frutiger designs, along with his understanding of the design philosophy of the man himself, made him uniquely suited to lead the creation of different language fonts. Avenir Next World family, the most recent release from Monotype, is an expansive family of fonts that offers support for more than 150 languages and scripts that include Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Thai. Avenir Next World contains 10 weights, from UltraLight to Heavy. The respective 10 Italic styles do not support Arabic, Georgian and Thai, since Italic styles are unfamiliar in these scripts/languages. Separate Non-Latin products to support just the Arabic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Hebrew and Thai script are also available for those who do not need the full language support.

Kilkenny is a decorative, Victorian-style font based on the metal type named Nymphic that was designed by Hermann Ihlenberg. Ihlenburg was born in Germany in 1843 where he studied art and worked for several German type foundries. He moved to the USA in 1866 and worked for the L. Johnson & Co. foundry, later MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan. American Type Founders acquired this typeface when they took over the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry and Nymphic appears in the ATF catalog of 1896. For this digital version, the character set has been expanded to include accented characters, punctuation, and currency symbols—and most everything you would expect to find in a digital font. The original metal font consisted of swash caps, upper case characters, and a “morticed” lower case, which was raised off the baseline. This mortcied form was designed to nestle inside the ornate swash caps as well as to work with the upper case. The five digital versions contained in this set are basically different configurations of these different alphabet sets, they differ as follows: Kilkenny—the original upper case version with a modified lower case that has been enlarged, shifted to align along the baseline, and given taller ascenders to give it a more “regular” appearance. Kilkenny Eureka—true to the original design with the “morticed” or superior lowercase forms. Kilkenny Swash—original swash caps with the modified lower case. Kilkenny Swash Caps—original swash caps with the original caps as the lower case. Kilkenny Swash Eureka—swash caps that have been adjusted to match the weight of the original lower case forms. The OpenType version contains all of the above, plus additional Central European and Cyrillic characters for a total of almost 1000 glyphs.