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.
Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, West Germany in 1958.
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius", he is also a figure of considerable controversy following the revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and of his pet dog.
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 typefaces.
Alexa is a typeface. It was designed for Adobe Systems in 1995 by John Benson, a United States carver of inscriptions, including those at the John F. Kennedy Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Benson modeled the friendly, casual script after his own handwriting and named it after his niece. Although based on the cancelleresca style of 16th-century Italian writing masters, Alexa has no swash terminals or ligatures. The absence of these features and its pronounced slope give this typeface a distinctly modern look for lively lines and pages. One can use Alexa for both text and display sizes.
Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch graphic designer, photographer, and the co-founder of Emigre Fonts with his wife Zuzana Licko. Emigre Fonts is an independent type foundry in Berkeley, CA. He was also the art director and editor of Emigre magazine, the legendary journal devoted to visual communications from 1984 to 2005. Since arriving in California in 1981, he has been photographing his adoptive Golden State as an ongoing side project. He has authored a total of 11 photo books on the topic, and staged two solo exhibits at Gallery 16 in San Francisco.
Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the "Aldine roman". Bembo is named for Manutius's first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo. The italic is based on work by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, a calligrapher who worked as a printer in the 1520s, after the time of Manutius and Griffo.
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.
Carol Twombly is an American designer, best known for her type design. She worked as a type designer at Adobe Systems from 1988 through 1999, during which time she designed, or contributed to the design of, many typefaces, including Trajan, Myriad and Adobe Caslon.
David Guy Barnabas Kindersley MBE was a British stone letter-carver and typeface designer, and the founder of the Kindersley Workshop. His carved plaques and inscriptions in stone and slate can be seen on many churches and public buildings in the United Kingdom. Kindersley was a designer of the Octavian font for Monotype Imaging in 1961, and he and his third wife Lida Lopes Cardozo designed the main gates for the British Library.
The John Stevens Shop, founded in 1705, is a stone carving business on Thames Street in Newport, Rhode Island, that is one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the United States.
Sumner Stone is a typeface designer and graphic artist. He notably designed ITC Stone while working for Adobe. A specimen of ITC Stone is shown at his personal website.
Nicholas Waite "Nick" Benson is a third generation American stone carver, stone letterer and owner of The John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island. He was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow.
John Hegnauer is an American stone carver.
Ralph Alexander Beyer was a German letter-cutter, sculptor and teacher. He was most noted for his work on Basil Spence's new Coventry Cathedral where Beyer carved Tablets of the Words.
Letter cutting is a form of inscriptional architectural lettering closely related to monumental masonry and stone carving, often practised by artists, sculptors, and typeface designers. Rather than traditional stone carving, where images and symbols are the dominant features, in letter cutting the unique skill is "meticulous setting out and skilled cutting of the lettering style, in terms of design, angle and depth of the lettering".
Letter carvers see the drawing and carving of letters as a particular craft in itself, allied to but distinct from masonry and carving in general. Most letter carvers are both designers and carvers. Typefaces designed for printing are rarely satisfactory when carved into stone, so most letter carvers design their own letterforms.
National Trust is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Barnes for the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is a corporate font family and not available for licensing.
John Howard Benson was an American calligrapher, stonecarver, incised letter designer, author, and educator.
Cyrus Highsmith is an American typeface designer, illustrator, and author.
Gilbert Alfred Franklin (1919–2004) was an English-born American sculptor and educator. He was active in Providence, Rhode Island and Wellfleet, Massachusetts; and was best known for his public art sculptures.
