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Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry-transfer lettering method. Letraset was acquired by the Colart group and became part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton.
Letraset was founded in London, England, in 1959, with the launch of the Letraset Type Lettering System. [1] In 1961, Letraset came out with their dry transfer lettering system, which pioneered the technique. [2]
Starting in 1964, Letraset also applied the dry rub-down transfer technique to create a children's game called Action Transfers, which would later develop into Kalkitos (marketed by Gillette), and many other series of transferable figures that were very popular up to the 1980s. Letraset was acquired by the Swedish stationery company Esselte until 2000, when it was sold to a management buyout headed up by Martin Gibbs and Michael Travers. Eventually sold to ColArt in 2012.
Seeing a decline in the sales of its materials in the early 1990s, Letraset moved into the desktop publishing industry, releasing software packages such as ImageStudio and ColorStudio for the Macintosh. These never saw widespread success. However, as Letraset held the rights to their fonts that had been popular on the dry transfer sheets, it made sense to enter the digital font market (see, for example, Charlotte Sans). Letraset thus began releasing many fonts in formats such as PostScript.
Fonts from designers including Martin Wait, Tim Donaldson, and David Quay were released, and many can be found on online retailers such as FontShop. Some fonts retain "Letraset" in their title, whereas others have been renamed by their new vendors, among them ITC.
A selection of fonts is still sold from its website, separated into fonts from Fontek and Red Rooster. Software includes Manga Studio EX and Envelopes, a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator.
Letraset is the maker of the refillable Tria markers, formerly Pantone Tria markers, which have a three-nib design and 200 colours. Additionally, Letraset offers three lines of dual-tipped markers, the alcohol-based ProMarker and FlexMarker lines, each with 148 mostly different colours and the water-based AquaMarkers with 60 colours.
Letraset was based in Le Mans, France,[ citation needed ] having previously been based in Ashford, Kent, [3] until being acquired in June 2012 by the Colart group and becoming part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton. [4]
The dry rub-down transfer technique was used by the punk movement because of its ease of manipulation, its low price and the quality of the rendered layout. Letraset's ease of use and widespread availability aligned with the do-it-yourself value of this movement by allowing punks to create designs independent from printers and publishers. [5]
In common usage, the name Letraset originally referred to sheets of transfer lettering that were originally manufactured as a wet process in 1959, with each character selected and cut from a sheet, placed face-down on a small silk screen frame and wetted with a paint brush to soften and release the gum arabic adhesive which held it. The frame was then turned over and the letter located over the artwork, and the character pressed into contact with the page, with the mounting base slid away as with model aircraft transfers.
Later, in 1961, the process was simplified, and a dry transferable lettering system was developed. The range of available typefaces expanded, incorporating both classic and contemporary type designs of the period. Letraset sheets were used extensively by professional and amateur graphic designers, architects and artists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As a result of its relative affordability, and because of its ease of use, it also came to be used by printers, design studios and advertising agencies. In the late 1980s, Letraset started to be replaced by desktop publishing. Today, Letraset sheets are traded on eBay and elsewhere, and sometimes used so that a designer can avoid a digital look.
The name Letraset is also often used to refer generically to sheets of dry-transfer lettering of any brand. This technique was very widespread for lettering and other elements before the advent of the phototypesetting and laser computer techniques of word processing and desktop publishing. Currently, Letraset's line of print patterns and textures are more commonly used than its lettering.[ citation needed ]
Lorem ipsum filler text has been featured on Letraset advertisements for decades. There are some indications that its use predates Letraset, but nothing definite has surfaced prior to Letraset's popularising it. [6]
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, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. 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.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Lorem ipsum is a dummy or placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, publishing, and web development to fill empty spaces in a layout that does not yet have content.
William Addison Dwiggins, was an American type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books some of the boldness that he displayed in his advertising work. His work can be described as ornamented and geometric, similar to the Art Moderne and Art Deco styles of the period, using Oriental influences and breaking from the more antiquarian styles of his colleagues and mentors Updike, Cleland and Goudy.
Microgramma is a sans-serif typeface which was designed by Aldo Novarese and Alessandro Butti for the Nebiolo Type Foundry in 1952. It became popular for use with technical illustrations in the 1960s and was a favourite of graphic designers by the early seventies, its uses ranging from publicity and publication design to packaging, largely because of its availability as a Letraset typeface. Early typesetters also incorporated it.
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.
Action Transfers, also known as rub-on transfers, were an art-based children's pastime that was extremely popular throughout the world from the 1960s to the 1980s. They consisted of a printed cardboard background image and a transparent sheet of coloured dry transfer figures of people, animals, vehicles, weapons, explosions and so on. These transfers were supposed to be applied to the background scene by rubbing the top surface of the transparent sheet with a hard object or stylus; typically, this would mean a ball-point pen or a pencil; the figure would thereby be transferred from its sheet to the background. Since it was not customary to determine exactly where the transfers should be applied, surreal or comic effects could be achieved—whether deliberately or inadvertently—by juxtaposing the transfers and the background inappropriately. It was also possible to apply the transfer figures elsewhere than on the supplied background, and conversely it is quite common to come across finished transfer sets in which the descriptive lettering from the sheets has been applied to the background; an effect not intended by the manufacturer.
Filler text is text that shares some characteristics of a real written text, but is random or otherwise generated. It may be used to display a sample of fonts, generate text for testing, or to spoof an e-mail spam filter. The process of using filler text is sometimes called greeking, although the text itself may be nonsense, or largely Latin, as in Lorem ipsum.
DIN 1451 is a sans-serif typeface that is widely used for traffic, administrative and technical applications.
The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler. The company was one of the world's first type foundries to have no history in the production of metal type. It is now a wholly owned brand or subsidiary of Monotype Imaging.
Script typefaces are based on the varied and often fluid stroke created by handwriting. They are generally used for display or trade printing, rather than for extended body text in the Latin alphabet. Some Greek alphabet typefaces, especially historically, have been a closer simulation of handwriting.
Compacta is a condensed sans-serif typeface designed by Fred Lambert for Letraset in 1963. It is visually similar to the typefaces Impact and Haettenschweiler, though Compacta has a distinctively square shape in comparison. Letraset was a dry transfer system, widely used by amateur or small-scale lettering projects, although many professional designers used it as well. Compacta was Letraset's first original typeface design, and proved widely popular. Rights to it were acquired by Linotype and others, leading to it becoming available in other formats such as digitally.
URW Type Foundry GmbH is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the development of non-Latin fonts. It has been owned by Monotype Imaging since May 2020.
Permanent Headline is a bold, highly compressed sans-serif typeface in the neo-grotesque style. It was designed by Karlgeorg Hoefer for the type foundry Ludwig & Mayer in Frankfurt am Main. It was released from 1964 and later issued by a range of companies in phototypesetting and digital versions.
Martin Wait (1942–2012) was a British font designer and graphic designer. He was best known for his work for Letraset, which created dry transfer lettering used on advertising and other lettering projects.
Colart, or the Colart Group, is a large international supplier of art materials, with subsidiaries and brands such as Winsor & Newton, Liquitex and Lefranc & Bourgeois. The group's head office is situated in London.
Phill Grimshaw was an English typeface designer and calligrapher who designed dozens of fonts for Letraset and the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in the 1980s and 1990s.
Colin Brignall is an English type designer and photographer. In addition to designing typefaces himself, he has worked as a type director and typographic consultant to Letraset and the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), selecting and overseeing other designers' typefaces.
Thai typography concerns the representation of the Thai script in print and on displays, and dates to the earliest printed Thai text in 1819. The printing press was introduced by Western missionaries during the mid-nineteenth century, and the printed word became an increasingly popular medium, spreading modern knowledge and aiding reform as the country modernized. The printing of textbooks for a new education system and newspapers and magazines for a burgeoning press in the early twentieth century spurred innovation in typography and type design, and various styles of Thai typefaces were developed through the ages as metal type gave way to newer technologies. Modern media is now served by digital typography, and despite early obstacles including lack of copyright protection, the market now sees contributions by several type designers and digital type foundries.
Boutros Advertisers Naskh is an Arabic Naskh-style typeface developed by Lebanese typographer Mourad Boutros and his wife Arlette Boutros in collaboration with Letraset in 1977. It was designed to work “in perfect harmony” with various Latin-based typefaces, such as Helvetica, through the "addition of linked straight lines to match the Latin baseline level" while respecting Arabic calligraphy and cultural rules.
Registered Office: Letraset Limited, Kingsnorth Industrial Estate, Wotton Road, Ashford, Kent, TN23 6FL, United Kingdom.
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