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Edward Johnston
Born
Johnston Sans
Passengers needed to read Underground signs across platforms and at a glance. Johnston's clear lettering gave the network a consistent face, even when the station name changed. Look for that same balance on a roundel, where the name sits inside the blue bar.
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Stanley Morison
Born
Times New Roman
The newspaper brief was about printed columns. Morison worked with lettering artist Victor Lardent and Monotype on the new face for The Times. Its narrow proportions make sense when you imagine lines of small type competing for space. That's a different job from making the type look imposing on a title page.
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Eric Gill
Born
Gill Sans
Gill brought the proportions of carved Roman capitals into a sans serif. Look at its capitals on a railway sign beside a blockier industrial face. The work has a place in design history, and Gill's documented sexual abuse of his daughters is part of that history too.
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Paul Renner
Futura
Start with the round letters. They look as though they were drawn with a compass, although Renner and the Bauer foundry adjusted the shapes by eye. The slight ovals and other corrections are part of what makes this geometry work in a line of type.
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Max Miedinger
Born
Helvetica
Eduard Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger to draw a new sans serif at Haas. Helvetica's even, unobtrusive shapes give headlines, signs, and labels a consistent voice. Try reading the same short phrase in Helvetica and Gill Sans to see how different two familiar sans serifs can feel.
More about Max Miedinger6
Hermann Zapf
Born
Optima
Optima's strokes swell and taper, even though the letters have no conventional serifs. Zapf was drawing on inscriptional letters. Compare an enlarged capital with a plain, even-stroked sans serif and you can see why Optima gives short display text some of the rhythm of carved lettering.
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Adrian Frutiger
Born
Frutiger
The letters started with a wayfinding job at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Look for the recognizable shapes you can pick out across a concourse. Frutiger later adapted the airport lettering into a text typeface, carrying a design made for quick recognition onto the page.
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Patricia Saunders
Arial
Saunders helped turn Robin Nicholas's typeface for low-resolution laser printing into a full Monotype family. Look at the diagonal cuts at the ends of some strokes. Those small changes in shape soften the impression of a font you may know mostly from plain documents and slides.
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Matthew Carter
Born
Verdana
Carter gave Verdana roomy letters and spacing so small screen text stayed distinct on low-resolution displays. Try lowercase l, capital I, and the numeral 1 at a small size. How easily you can tell them apart is part of the point. Georgia is Carter's familiar serif answer to the screen.
More about Matthew Carter10
Erik Spiekermann
Born
FF Meta
The German postal service commissioned the original design and left it unused. Spiekermann later released it as FF Meta. On a short label, try comparing it with Helvetica. Meta gives individual letters more character, a useful distinction to remember when a sign needs personality as well as clarity.
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Carol Twombly
Born
Trajan
Twombly drew from the carved capitals on Trajan's Column for this Adobe typeface. The Last Samurai and The Mummy both used it on their posters. Compare the finely cut serifs and the spacing of those large capitals with the smaller lettering around them.
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Zuzana Licko
Mrs Eaves
Licko based her Baskerville interpretation on printed pages, where the ink had spread into the paper. She lowered the contrast and widened the lowercase letters. If a traditional serif looks severe to you, compare the two. Much of the quieter effect comes from the relationship between thin strokes and thick ones.
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Tobias Frere-Jones
Born
Gotham
The lettering on New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal helped set the direction. Frere-Jones studied the city's signs and turned what he found into a coherent family. Gotham is a good face to look for when you wonder how a new set of letters can already feel familiar.
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Lucas de Groot
Born
Calibri
The rounded stroke ends give Calibri a soft look, even in a long business document. De Groot designed it for Microsoft's ClearType collection with screen reading in mind. If it looks familiar from old office files, that's because it became the Office default in 2007.
More about Lucas de Groot15
Steve Matteson
Open Sans
Open Sans was built for print, web, and mobile. Start in a small block of screen text, where the open letter shapes help it feel less cramped. Matteson's design is handy for recognizing how an unassuming reading font can still have a point of view about spacing and clarity.
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