Font Designers

5 Living Font Designers:

1) Erik Spiekermann (1947-?)
Spiekrmann is a type and graphic designer from Berlin. After his commission for the Deutsche Bundespost was cancelled late in development he decided to start his own type company, FontShop. Meta was the first typeface designed under this company. Meta is an informal and youthful typeface best for informal documents. It has small capitals.

2) Hermann Zapf (1918-?)
Zaph designed the typeface Optima which became available starting in 1958. He has designed many typefaces, and he is also a well known calligrapher. Optima was inspired by fifteenth century Florentine inscriptional capitals. He also worked as the type director of D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt.

3) Hans Eduard Meier (1922-?)
Meier is the type designer of Syntax. It is a sans-serif font that relates to the Renaissance humanists. It would not be categorized with Swiss design. Meier designed Syntax in 1955 but it was only used in the market in 1968 for cast metal typesetting.

4) Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum
These two designers work for their company LettError. They designed the typefaces ErikRightHand and JustLeftHand based off their own handwriting. They also have designed 'readymades' like Trixie which is based off of a type writer letter.

5) Carol Twombly
Carol Twombly worked on the font Adobe Trajan. She studied incriptions on the pillar of the emperor Trajanus. It was built in 113 AD in Rome. She corrected the letters so that they could be digitalised. She also added punctuation marks to the letters. This typeface is only available in capitals in Bold and Regular.


5 Dead Font Designers:

1) Bruce Rogers (1870-1957)
Rogers was schooled as both a painter and illustrator. He was famous for being one of the designers for bibliophile books. He designed the typeface Centaur. He first drew it out in ink and the calligraphic influence can be seen.

2) Charles Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790)
Cochin was one of the best engravers of his time. He was an illustrator in the court of Louis XV. The Peignot type foundry rendered Cochin's lettering into a typeface in 1912. It was redesigned in 1977 by Matthew Carter. It is not a conventional type for body text, but it is very useful in a decorative manner.

3) Claude Garamond (c. 1510-1561)
Famous both in the past and present, Garamond is known for having cut Greek types for Robert Estinne in Paris. Garamond created some of the best types ever known during his life, and printers used them in Europe. Robert Slimbach based the roman of 1989 Adobe Garamond on some surviving material from his work.

4) Eric Gill (1882-1940)
Gill was a controversial figure. He named his typeface Joanna after his daughter Joan Gill. He was Catholic, socialist, a social critic, sculptor, and a type designer. Joanna has many unique characteristics. It has a narrow italic and the serifs are very angular.

5) Frank Hinman Pierpont (1860-1937)
Pierpont with his team at Monotype designed the typeface Rockwell. It is a slab-serif. He is well known for his technical improvements in the Monotype machine park. He also contributed to the revival typeface Plantin.

All designers were researched using the book Letter Fountain: The anatomy of type