In typography, a typeface (also known as font family) is a set of one or more fonts each composed of glyphs that share common design features. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, ornamentation, and designer or foundry (and formerly size, in metal fonts). (e.g. "ITC Garamond Bold Condensed Italic" is a different font from "ITC Garamond Condensed Italic" and "ITC Garamond Bold Condensed," but all are fonts within the same typeface, "ITC Garamond." However, ITC Garamond is a different typeface than "Adobe Garamond" or "Monotype Garamond.") There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.
The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries. In digital typography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers.
Greek Digital Type Library
Ελληνική Ψηφιακή Τυποθήκη
http://www.fonts.gr/
Cannibal was founded in 1995 with the aim to enrich and renew the Greek typography. With the permanent members (Panayiotis Haratzopoulos, Yannis Karlopoulos) and their regular collaborators (Y. Kouroudis, T. Katsoulidis, D. Arvanitis, H. Charalambous, A. Bakas) have cooperated at times and many other graphic designers, equally skilled in typography and with a significant contribution to graphic design and visual arts.
In this site (fonts.gr) we plan to gather a collection of selected fonts designed by Greek and foreign designers, which share as common feature the support of Greek characters.
Cannibal
http://www.cannibal.gr
Cannibal has been active in the field of graphic design since 1994. The company started by Panayiotis Haratzopoulos as a personal business and later became a partnership. Panayiotis has graduated from the Graphic Design department - Graphic Arts and Design, from the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Athens. He has also obtained a Master of Arts -Graphic Fine Arts from the University of Kent, UK. His pursuit with type design is for him a valuable experience, which he uses when he is designing multimedia applications or working on other graphic design projects.
Katerina Charatzopoulou also participates in the partnership. She has obtained several degrees, the first being French Language and Literature from the University of Athens, followed by History of Art from Dijon University, France and Archaeology from Paris X - Nanterre and is currently finishing her PhD in Archaeology. Katerina is also specialised in documentation.
Parachute
http://www.parachute.gr
Parachute® is an award-winning type foundry. It landed in 1999, but it wasn’t till 2001 that it started operating as a full-scale company. Since then, 13 designers have joined in to form a select group of open minded, free spirited individuals. Parachute’s clientele includes multinational companies such as Disney, Time Warner, Financial Times, National Geographic, McGraw-Hill, Ikea, Vodafone, Nestle and Unilever.
Now more than ever, companies are looking for ways to set their corporate identity and products apart from the competition. In many cases it becomes apparent that a proprietary typeface could be the solution to the problem. Customers come to Parachute to request our expertise on this matter.
Emigre
http://www.emigre.com
Emigre, Inc. is a digital type foundry, publisher and distributor of graphic design related software and printed materials based in Northern California.
Founded in 1984, coinciding with the birth of the Macintosh, Emigre was one of the first independent type foundries to establish itself centered on personal computer technology.
Emigre holds exclusive license to over 300 original typeface designs created by a roster of contemporary designers. Emigre's full line of typefaces, ornaments and illustrations is available in Type 1 PostScript and TrueType for both the Macintosh and PC.
Emigre is also the publisher of the critically acclaimed design journal Emigre magazine which was published between 1984 and 2005.
Essays on Emigre
To learn more about Emigre, its history, and its place within graphic design, read these selected critical essays by Rick Poynor, Andrew Blauvelt, Kenneth FitzGerald and others.
For information about the founders of Emigre, read the interviews with Rudy Vander Lans and Zuzana Licko.
Font Shop
http://www.fontshop.com
Despite the thousands of typefaces available, there remain situations where a customized design is needed. Here are a few of the ways FontShop.com can build a typographic toolset that is right for your organization. Need a custom weight made in-between existing bold and black weights? We can make custom weights for your favorite typefaces.
ParaType Library
http://www.paratype.com
ParaType Inc. was established in 1998 as a successor of Type department of ParaGraph Intl. It's registered and located in California. ParaType develops and distributes computer fonts for different platforms in different formats with different encodings.
Fortes of ParaType: multilingual font design: besides Latin fonts we produce fonts for Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian scripts; manual TrueType hinting: high quality, fast, reasonable prices distinguished customer support Fonts for corporate and home use: ParaType library and other renowned font vendors.
Software: font editors, keyboard drivers and editors.
Custom type design: corporate fonts; personal handwriting fonts.
Custom font works: digitizing; hinting; conversion from format to format; adopting fonts to different platforms; reencoding fonts; adding OpenType features to existing PostScript and TrueType fonts ...
Linotype
http://www.linotype.com/
Linotype has taken its parent company’s name, and will now be known as Monotype GmbH, unifying type with technology and expertise. The team remains unchanged and can be contacted at the same numbers and addresses that you already have. The information below is valid and you can find further information at our new corporate website.
Certain technical requirements must be met before worldwide communication using the selected typeface is possible. Your typeface, in digital form as font software (also simply referred to as font) must exhibit the following characteristics:
Great design: We offer more than 10,500 typefaces that include all time bestsellers such as Helvetica®, Frutiger®, and Univers®. The designs cover a wide typographic spectrum and you can be sure to find what fits your requirements among the library gems. If not, then we are ready to customize existing designs to satisfy your requirements, or to design brand new custom typefaces for you.
Linotype OpenType fonts conform to international standards and thus provide for cross-platform compatibility. The OpenType format is tried and tested, has already been in use as the standard font format for several years.
Multi-language support: communication in the local language is a significant part of the corporate communication culture in many companies.
We can provide fonts for all required languages. Many of our fonts have already been developed for use in international communication. We also has a range of high quality fonts for the Asian market. Why not put us to the test? You will find that we can also speak the most obscure languages!
Supports special characters and logos: many companies have special requirements with regard to their corporate typeface. Unusual technical characters, logos or even straightforward symbols, such as arrows, are often needed.
We design and develops fonts that will meet your requirements for a highly integrated font as far as is technically possible. In accordance with your specifications, we can design individual characters for integration in your corporate font as well as integrating your logo into the font itself.
Best screen appearance: companies want a typeface that is clearly legible on-screen. In many countries, this is a necessity because of industrial safety legislation, but it also helps enhance the acceptance of the corporate design by employees and clients. It is also an essential commercial requirement in many companies where numbers, for example, should remain legible and distinct even in the smallest font sizes.
For some time now, we has been the market leader in the optimisation of the readability of screen fonts. Thanks to their many years of experience, our specialists can employ these optimisation techniques to meet your specifications.
Typography partnership: We are constantly expanding its design spectrum and portfolio by licensing and developing new typefaces, and partnerships with market leaders form the basis for new technology integration into our products. We can help you keep your fonts up-to-date and support your current as well as your future typographic needs.
Bitstream
http://www.bitstream.com
Bitstream Inc. develops software technologies and applications for the graphic art and mobile communications industries. Bitstream develops award winning fonts and font technologies, under the Bitstream brand, that enable device manufacturers and application developers to render the highest quality text in any language, on any device, at any resolution in resource-constrained environments such as mobile phones, set top boxes, and embedded operating systems.
The company’s MyFonts brand is the world’s leading provider of fonts to consumers. With more than 1 million registered users, MyFonts.com makes it easy to find, try and buy fonts from one of the largest selections of fonts online – over 62,000 fonts from more than 500 foundries worldwide.
My Fonts
http://www.myfonts.com
MyFonts is located near Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Our mission is to make it simple for everyone to find and buy fonts. In pursuit of this mission, MyFonts has pioneered new ways to search for fonts when you don’t have an exact font in mind, including:
- More Fonts Like This, to find related fonts using a particular font as a starting point
- WhatTheFont™, for instant automated identification of the font used in a photograph or scan WhatTheFont™ forum, to enlist help from font experts for hard-to-match font samples
- User-provided tags, harnessing the power of thousands of users to help each other categorize fonts
- The concept of MyFonts was born in 1999 when Charles Ying wanted to find a font for a particular project. He was horrified to discover that the only way to find fonts on the web was to know the name of the font you were looking for, or browse a flat alphabetical list.
- “Why can’t I just search for wedding fonts?” he asked. “This should be as easy as shopping for shoes! I should be able to point at a font in a magazine and say, ‘Show me fonts like this.’”
Charles reasoned that making it hard to find and buy fonts for the average computer user meant turning away 99.9% of the potential market for fonts. On the other side of the coin, he called for an open marketplace, where fonts from many vendors could compete side-by-side, instead of the more typical single-company walled gardens of the 1980s and ’90s.
FontHaus
http://www.fonthaus.com
FontHaus was founded in 1989 by Mark Solsburg and is the first independent font retailer in the US. If you buy from FontHaus, you are buying from one of the largest, most respected and experienced font suppliers in the world and since 1994, was one of the first to sell and deliver fonts online.
FontHaus distributes fonts for the world’s major font foundries including Adobe, Bitstream, E+F, The Font Bureau, ITC, LucasFonts, Monotype, Linotype, Lucas, MvB Fonts, P22, URW and many others. We currently have over 75,000 fonts. All fonts sold by FontHaus are fully-licensed and meet the highest quality standards before release.
Our font selection is as extensive as our customer list. From thousands of independent media producers to the most important and recognized advertising agencies, design studios and corporations in the world including AARP, Adobe Systems, American Express, Bank of America, The Condé Nast Publications, Fast Company, Grey Advertising, Deutsch Advertising, Disney, FutureBrand, Goldman Sachs, H&R Block, Harper Collins, HBO, The Howard Company, Mellon New England, Microsoft, Nike, People Espanol, Pixar, Solomon Smith Barney, Signa, Silicon Graphics, Sony Music, Time Inc., University of Chicago Press, US News, Yahoo, Yale University and many others.
ITC Fonts
http://www.fonts.com/font/itc#product_top
By far, the most influential and successful type foundry of the 1970s and well into the 1980s was International Typeface Corporation.
For nearly four decades, ITC has designed and marketed typefaces to creative professionals. The ITC® Library – comprised of more than 1,650 designs – features the work of world-class typeface designers.
The ethos driving International Typeface Corporation’s formation is as profound as the typefaces they produce:
ITC began as Lubalin, Burns & Co and called itself “the first typo-graphics agency.” Aaron Burns, Lubalin’s partner in the company, was one of the most successful type salespersons and marketers of the 1960s. One of his first companies, Aaron Burns & Co., was actually a division of one of New York’s then largest and most successful typesetting houses. Jobs that were sent to Aaron Burns & Co received special attention under the watchful typographic eye of Burns – and were billed at a premium for the service. While Aaron Burns & Co was a good moneymaker; Burns still longed to have his own company.
In 1970 Burns and Herb Lubalin joined forces to sell phototypesetting, lettering and typographic design services to New York advertising agencies and design studios. Their company, cleverly called Lubalin, Burns & Co, also offered several typeface designs created by Lubalin and his staff that could be purchased nowhere else; among them Avant Garde Gothic.
Jobs poured into the company. Burns – the consummate promoter and businessman – figured that if his exclusive typesetting company could be successful in New York, it would be equally so in other large cities. Shortly after Lubalin, Burns & Co was formed, Lubalin, Burns Affiliates, Ltd was also launched. The idea behind Lubalin, Burns Affiliates was that there would be an “affiliate” company in each American city large enough to support a typesetting community. The affiliate would be an existing typesetting house, which would be provided with an on-going stream of new typeface designs. The typesetting house would then pay a fixed monthly fee for the fonts – and for the association with Burns and Lubalin. The problem was, Lubalin and Burns did not have the capabilities to make phototype fonts – especially for text setting equipment.
In an attempt to solve the dilemma, Burns approached his good friend Mike Parker, who was then Director of Typeface Development at Linotype. Burns’ pitch to Parker was that Linotype manufacture fonts of his and Lubalin’s typefaces and provide them to one Linotype typesetting shop in each major American city. Parker wisely saw that if Linotype provided exclusive fonts to just one customer in a city, every other Linotype customer would be more than a little upset. Parker counseled, instead, that Burns take his idea to the next step. “Why not license your designs to every manufacturer of phototypesetting equipment,” he suggested, “and let them pay you a royalty on every font they sell that has one of your designs?”
ITC was born out of this conversation. Within three years, virtually every manufacturer of phototypesetting equipment was offering ITC fonts to their customers. Indeed, ITC was one of the first font providers to embrace digital technology – a harbinger of the future of typographic design and distribution. Additionally, Burns and Parker were also committed to licensing fonts in hardware based on royalty revenues, a notion that still informs the typographic market today.
In addition to crafting typefaces, ITC also left an indelible mark on the genre of typography-focused publications – in 1974 ITC began publishing U&lc, The International Journal of Typographics. Herb Lubalin was the editorial and art director of the first issue and his seminal design set the stage for future issues of trend setting and award winning editorial creations.
The modest 24-page first issue declared, “U&lc will provide a panoramic window, a showcase for the world of graphic arts – a clearing house for the international exchange of ideas and information.”
And, indeed, it did. Over the 26 years that it was published, U&lc gathered a following of thousands of avid readers that eagerly anticipated each issue. It became the most important typographic publication of its time. While a couple of years lacked a full complement, U&lc was published quarterly, in its – large format – tabloid size, until the fall of 1999. Early publications were limited to black and white, and color was introduced in 1988.
Now a part of Monotype Imaging, ITC continues true to its heritage, releasing exceptional type families crafted by exceptional designers.
Magenta
http://www.magenta.gr
Nice list ... I think MyFonts stands out from the crowd as the best place to buy fonts in my opinion ... It has all the tools to find the perfect font for any project ...
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