James Montalbano is a Brooklyn-based type designer and founder of Terminal Design Inc. [1] [2] [3] He is a past president of the Type Directors Club, and has taught typography and typeface design at Pratt Institute, Parsons The New School for Design, and the School of Visual Arts. [2] He has designed custom fonts for magazines including Glamour and Vanity Fair. [1]
Mantalbano was co-designer on the ClearviewHwy signage system, [1] [2] approved for use on all federal roads by the US Federal Highway Administration in 2004. [2] [4] More than 20 states have adopted use of the typeface as of 2011. [2]
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and letter-spacing (tracking), as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group and commissioned by Steve Ballmer. The name "Verdana" is derived from "verdant" (green) and "Ana".
A typeface is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts.
Frutiger is a series of typefaces named after its Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif typeface, intended to be clear and highly legible at a distance or at small text sizes. A very popular design worldwide, type designer Steve Matteson described its structure as "the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation" at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann named it as "the best general typeface ever".
Emigre, Inc., doing business as Emigre Fonts, is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1985 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry grew out of Emigre magazine, a publication founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends who met in San Francisco, CA in 1984. Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents.
Zuzana Licko is a Slovak-born American type designer and visual artist known for co-founding Emigre Fonts, a digital type foundry in Berkeley, CA. She has designed and produced numerous digital typefaces including the popular Mrs Eaves, Modula, Filosofia, and Matrix. As a corresponding interest she also creates ceramic sculptures, textile prints and jacquard weavings.
Georgia is a serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for the Microsoft Corporation. It was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century and was based on designs for a print typeface on which Carter was working when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name Miller the following year. The typeface's name referred to a tabloid headline, "Alien heads found in Georgia."
Clearview, also known as Clearview Hwy, is the name of a humanist sans-serif typeface family for guide signs used on roads in the United States, Canada, Indonesia, the Philippines, Israel, Brazil and Sri Lanka. It was developed by independent researchers with the help of the Texas Transportation Institute and the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, under the supervision of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). It was once expected to replace the FHWA typefaces in many applications, although newer studies of its effectiveness have called its benefits into question.
Tobias Frere-Jones is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program.
Highway Gothic is a sans-serif typeface developed by the United States Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and used for road signage in the Americas, including the U.S., Canada, Latin America and some Caribbean countries, as well as in Asian countries influenced by American signage practices, including the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Variants, major and minor, but not the exact U.S. typeface, are used in countries like Turkey, Mexico, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, New Zealand, Macau, and some signs in countries like India and Saudi Arabia, when written in English. The typefaces were developed to maximize legibility at a distance and at high speed. Computer typeface versions, known as Highway Gothic or Interstate, a separate typeface, which are for sale to the general public, include punctuation marks based on a rectangular shape. However, on signage, the official FHWA Series punctuation is based on a circular shape.
Hoefler&Co. (H&Co) is a digital type foundry in Woburn, Massachusetts, founded by type designer Jonathan Hoefler. H&Co designs typefaces for clients and for retail on its website.
DIN 1451 is a sans-serif typeface that is widely used for traffic, administrative and technical applications.
Gotham is a geometric sans-serif typeface family designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones with Jesse Ragan and released through the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry from 2000. Gotham's letterforms were inspired by examples of architectural signs of the mid-twentieth century. Gotham has a relatively broad design with a reasonably high x-height and wide apertures.
Interstate is a digital typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in the period 1993–1999, and licensed by Font Bureau. The typeface is based on Style Type E of the FHWA series of fonts, a signage alphabet drawn for the United States Federal Highway Administration by Dr. Theodore W. Forbes in 1949.
Gerard Unger was a Dutch graphic and type designer. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1963–67, and subsequently worked at Total Design, Prad and Joh. Enschedé. In 1975, he established himself as an independent developer. A long-time guest lecturer at the University of Reading, he mentored many modern typeface designers. He lived and worked in Bussum, Netherlands.
Peter Biľak is a Slovak graphic and typeface designer, based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design; teaches typeface design at the postgraduate course Type&Media at the KABK, Royal Academy of Art. He started Typotheque in 1999, Dot Dot Dot in 2000, Indian Type Foundry in 2009, Works That Work magazine in 2012, and Fontstand in 2015. He is a member of AGI, and lectures on his work internationally. He is a writer for numerous design magazines and frequently contributes writing and design to books and publications that include Print, Emigre, Eye (magazine), Items, tipoGrafica, Idea (magazine), Abitare and, Page.
Erik van Blokland is a Dutch typeface designer, educator and computer programmer. He is the head of the Type Media Master of Design program in Typeface Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in the Netherlands.
A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use in display type at large sizes for titles, headings, pull quotes, and other eye-catching elements, rather than for extended passages of body text.