The Origins of some Digital Fonts.

Scanning through piles of old foundry and printer’s specimen books, it can become clear how fonts are the result of redrawing, copying, reviving and/or the change in ownership of type foundries. Here are a few pretty randomly selected faces issued by the defunct Stephenson Blake foundry, showing the fonts that they spawned. Some faces, rarely, never made it into the post-metal world and have been revived as digital fonts much later. Most though have spawned many times, mostly as a result of competition between foundries and/or the merging of foundries.

Amanda Ronde (above) – previously ‘Undine Ronde’, issued by SB in 1939 = Digitised in 2005 by Canada Type as ‘Adore’

Mercury – (copy of ‘Forelle (‘Rhinegold’)’ by Erich Mollowitz, 1936)  = ‘Forelle’, Mecanorma 2004  = ‘Forelle Pro’, RMU Typedesign 2010  = ‘Jaunty Gent’, Nicks Fonts 2007.

Madonna (above) = Lucian Bernhard’s ‘Bernhard Cursive’, 1925 = ‘Liberty’, American Type Founders 1927 = ‘Lotus’, Intertype  = ‘Bernhard Script’, (2005) Profonts = ‘Liberty’, Bitstream = ‘Liberty Script, Monotype = ‘EF Bernhard Schönschrift’, Elsner+Flake.

Playbill (1938) = Scangraphic = Elsner+Flake = URW = Bitstream.

Impact (1965) = Adobe = Monotype = URW.

Auriol (1907) = Linotype = Adobe

Basuto (1927) = ‘Basuto’, Red Rooster/International Type Founders.

Bold Latin (SB acquired from Deberney & Piegnot, 1885) = Monotype = URW =Linotype

Clearface (original Design by Fuller Benton for ATF, 1907) = Elsner+Flake = Adobe = Monotype = ITC = Linotype = Typeshop

This small, random, selection, are direct redraws or conscious revivals. Moving into the area of fonts ‘inspired by’ or ‘drawing from’ earlier faces, the spread become almost too wide to chart, for example the range of faces that draw from the Stephenson Blake’s grotesques and san serifs would be vast and complex.

Picking the Stephenson Blake Foundry, as one random example, and tracing the lineage of just some of their typefaces, can show  how fonts are ‘designed’; they are not the work of single ‘auters’ but instead the product of various technological, economic and aesthetic shifts.