ITC Blackadder is the work of British designer Bob Anderton, an eerie transformation of insurrectionist Guy Fawkes' signature after his torture. Anderton based his design on 16th century handwriting, captured the scrolls and curlicues and then added the sinister tremble. This elegant, yet potentially menacing display face is perfect for theatrical or scary" applications."

Galliard was originally designed for Mergenthaler Linotype in 1978 as a photocomposition typeface. It is modeled on the work of Robert Granjon, a sixteenth-century punchcutter whose typefaces are renowned for their beauty and legibility. ITC Galliard is a notable typeface for text; the italic is very distinctive in occasional pieces such as invitations and informal announcements.

Olivera Stojadinovic made her first sketches of the ITC Resavska family with the goal of creating a typeface that would be readable at small sizes. Stojadinovic added geometric serifs to the original design to create four weights in serif and sans serif sub-families. Each weight (except the black) has an italic counterpart.

ITC Matisse was designed by Gregory Gray while he was designing an editorial layout for Madame Figaro, a supplement to the Paris newspaper Figaro. While working on a feature on the work of Henri Matisse, Gray created a typeface with paper and an X-Acto knife, and then scanned the cutouts into a computer. The style of the design comes in part from Gray's passion for African art, with its contrasts between flat areas and protruding surfaces. ITC Matisse is ideal for offbeat display applications and initial capitals.

I've been obsessed with type since I was very young, says designer Pelle Piano. “In fact, when I was ten, I used to sneak into stores who sold Letraset sheets, and I actually stole their catalog with all the typefaces. They were perfect good-night stories for me - alphabet after alphabet!” In ITC Lingo, Piano tried out the effect of taking a very rigid underlying letter shape and representing it with “really sloppy outlines.” The underlying form is a condensed Bodoni-like alphabet, with high contrast between thick and thin strokes, but the effect of Lingo is sketchy and informal.

ITC Odyssée is the work of French designers Roselyne and Michel Besnard, who were inspired by the digital imagine of type which opened up possibilities for new visual illusions. The serifs of this font recreate the virtual lines formed by optical residue" on TV screens, looking like horizontal serifs trailing off to the right. ITC Odyssée is a clear and legible typeface which features a simplicity and grace in its forms."

ITC Magnifico Daytime and ITC Magnifico Nighttime are inspired by nineteenth-century decorated types and letterings. “Although they are designed as display typefaces, their use is not limited to large headings. Usually three-dimensional types are employed in gigantic headings in large posters, but I thought it would be interesting if such decorative types were used as well in small sizes, say at 12 point,” says designer Akira Kobayashi. “There were a few examples of small three-dimensional types used in cards printed in the nineteenth-century. I studied their letterforms carefully and became more and more interested in those small three-dimensional types. The outlines of ITC Magnifico are robust enough to endure use at small sizes. Sometimes the angle or the shape of the 'shadow' had to be slightly modified or even illogical, because the letterforms ought to look as simple as possible. The resulting types are fairly easy to read at small sizes, and I hope that at large sizes those occasional oddities will appear charming.”

ITC Lennox is the work of German designer Alexander Ruehl. Ruehl had long digitized typefaces for other designers and decided to give design a try himself. ITC Lennox is suitable for a wide variety of headlines uses, a sans serif display face with a modern feel yet based on classical elements.

Hal Taylor's ITC Outpost was not the result of a detailed design brief, nor was there a methodical development of key concepts or characters. Outpost just seemed to emerge all at once during a brief sketching session," says Taylor. "I guess what I was thinking of was an antiquated Western perception of some sort of Middle Eastern hand lettering - a 'mysterious East' sort of thing." ITC Outpost's sense of the exotic has an almost Art Nouveau quality, with its sensuous curves and sweeping strokes. The open bowls and opposing weight bias in many of the characters add to the design's striking personality. A suite of alternate and swash letters enables the setting of distinctive display copy. ITC Outpost's family of roman, italic, and swash characters is compact but versatile. The caps have the grace and authority of a titling face. Add in the lowercase and swash letters and copy is transformed into something lighthearted and full of verve. ITC Outpost creates dramatic headlines and adds a flourish to invitations, menus, logos and packaging An accomplished designer, Taylor has spent most of his career in the lettering and typographic arts. He began as a photo-lettering typographer, setting headlines and creating custom lettering, and now works in the publishing industry. "

ITC Korigan is a work of French designer Thierry Puyfoulhoux, an uncial typeface which he wanted to offer as an alternative to Victor Hammer's American Uncial, which remains for him the uncial character of reference." The roundness of an uncial gives it the look of pearls on a string, as Hammer said, and ITC Korigan is true to its heritage in this respect. Despite the roundness, however, the forms remain familiar and legible to the modern eye."

The calligraphic ITC Regallia is, like ITC Samual, a work of Phill Grimshaw. Generous capitals contrast beautifully with reserved lower case letters whose flowing ascenders and descenders create the flow which characterizes this font. ITC Regallia is graceful and almost poetic, its capitals also suited for use as initials. ITC Regallia includes several ligatures and is best used for short and middle length texts in point sizes of 12 and larger.

ITC Obelisk is the work of British designer Phill Grimshaw. He classified his typeface as glyphic" in style, meaning chiseled rather than calligraphic in form. ITC Obelisk is a legible, elegant text typeface."

ITC Woodland is the work of Japanese designer Akira Kobayashi. It is based on Kobayashi's hand lettering with a flat brush or square-edged pen. I wanted to design each weight to act its own part," says the designer. "The light version tends to look almost fading in small sizes, but the heavy weight is as black as Cooper Black." The cheerful ITC Woodland is ideal for graphics, greeting cards, correspondence, and other applications requiring a light touch.

For some time, Eric de Berranger had wanted to create a distressed typeface design - one that gave the appearance of antique printing and showed signs of wear, yet was still highly readable. He was busy designing a new face called Maxime, when an idea struck: I realized that I could use these lettershapes as the basis for my antique typeface," he says. The two faces ended up being designed in tandem. While ITC Oldbook clearly captures the flavor of aged, uneven and imperfect printing, it also meets de Berranger's goal of being exceptionally readable in text sizes. Beginning with well-drawn characters was the key, and these were carefully modeled into the distressed forms. "The process was more difficult than I originally thought," says de Berranger. "The antique letters had to be tested and modified several times to work correctly." ITC Oldbook elegantly simulates antique printing in both text and display sizes. And while stroke weights are uneven and curves are irregular, the design has remarkably even color when set in blocks of text copy. Add to this the design's inherent legibility, and ITC Oldbook acquires a range far beyond replication of things old; it's suitable for any project that calls for warm and weathered typography. ITC Oldbook is available in roman and bold weights with complementary italic designs. Small caps, old style figures and a suite of alternate characters and ornaments provide additional flexibility and personality to the design."

ITC Stranger is the work of California designer Jill Bell, a slashing, almost menacing calligraphic typeface in a narrow, upright style. In small sizes, the strokes themselves draw more attention than the letterforms. In larger sizes, the effect is a little rougher and more diffuse, as the bristled ends of some strokes become apparent.

ITC Dyadis font is the work of Austrian designer Yvonne Diedrich. It is named for the Greek word dyas", meaning duality and explores the duality of serif and sans serif letterforms, blending their styles and focusing on their connection with one another. The forms were inspired by the typefaces of the 1920s and 30s and combine the legibility and elegance of a serif font with the simplicity of sans serif."

ITC Ironwork is the work of Serge Pichii, who was inspired by a piece of decorative lettering done by Jan Tschichold in the early 1920s. Tschichold had interlocked a series of rough sans serif letters and embellished them with scattered decorative elements. The original was of only capital letters, touching and overlapping like an ironwork gate made of letters. Pichii completed the typeface with lowercase forms and smoothed the edges. The scrolls of the capitals were extended to the lowercase and Pichii based them on iron scrollwork he found in Vienna and Prague. A lot of attention was paid to the elements of the typeface in order to 'smooth out' and balance proportional relations between the elements," says Pichii. ITC Ironwork is great for signage and display but also works well in short texts."

ITC Stylus is the work of American designer Dennis Pasternak, who based its forms on those of freehand architectural lettering from historical and contemporary sources. Pasternak points out that while the typeface emulates hand lettering, no pencil drawings or scanned art were used in its creation. The letters bounce slightly across the baseline, giving the typeface the look of true handwriting. ITC Stylus emanates warmth when used for extended text and a fresh quality in display sizes.

Jochen Schuss, the Biedenkopf, Germany, designer who was most recently responsible for ITC Vino Bianco, has created in ITC Whiskey a condensed display face that's both angular and soft at the same time. While the letterforms of Whiskey are clearly roman, there's a slight reminiscence of blackletter in the face's narrow proportions, its dark weight, and its persistent internal angle - not quite the 45 degrees common in a classic German textura, but a gentler angle of 25 or 30 degrees. And the counters are all rounded, as are the ends of all the strokes, giving Whiskey a comfortable friendliness despite its severe structure. The character set includes an alternate z" and an "ft" ligature."

A roman face designed in the early 1980s by Ed Benguiat for ITC, ITC Benguiat shows a strong Art Nouveau influence. As with ITC Korinna, the stress of the ITC Benguiat font family occurs in the upper half of each capital. This distinctive typeface is particularly useful for display and advertising work. ITC Benguiat® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

When Patricia Lillie was growing up, she thought the coolest thing in the world would be finding her own name listed in a library catalog. The fantasy came true in 1986 when her first children's book was published. Five more followed. The thrill of seeing her work on library shelves hasn't abated, but today, Lillie is just as likely to see one of her typefaces on the cover of a book. She has created several display faces and image fonts. My first typeface designs were based on lettering I'd done while working for a library, doing graphics work for the children's section," she explains. "I currently do a lot of web design, but type is my favorite thing." The Tickles (ITC Tickle and ITC Tickle Too) are Lillie's first ITC typeface releases. "I was playing around with a Sharpie marker one day and liked the way the letters looked," she recalls. "I started redoing the letters from scratch in Fontographer to see what developed, and liked those letters too." ITC Tickle is a bi-form font (with both cap and lowercase letters of the same size) that clearly breaks a typographic rule or two. ITC Tickle Too has the same basic lettershapes, but they've grown clusters of stipples that give a three-dimensional quality to the design. The result is a friendly, offbeat display family that's guaranteed to add a giggle to your work."

ITC Serengeti is a font of narrow, high reaching capital letters designed by Bob Alonso in 1996. In the form of small caps, the letters combine to make words. This font is at the same time modern and nostalgic, with letters like N and M being reminiscent of those on posters in the 1920s. One can also interpret this small caps alphabet as one influenced by the Jugendstil. ITC Serengeti should be used only for headlines and display in point sizes of 18 or larger.

ITC Luna is the work of Japanese designer Akira Kobayashi. He turned to the designs of the 1930s for his inspiration for both ITC Luna and ITC Silvermoon. Luna is designed to fill the gap between a pure Art Deco display face and an ordinary text face," says Kobayashi. "It has an Art Deco style but is still fairly easy to read. It can be used in short passages of text. As for individual characters, I especially liked the distinctive O, shaded only on one side. Lowercase a and g are also unusual, but they are somehow legible enough in text matter." And for a finishing touch on his Luna, Kobayashi added the charming moon face as an extra character.

ITC Ziggy was designed by Bob Alonso, who says it started out as phone doodles in the early 1970s." Alonso rediscovered the sketches years later, thought they revived the feel of the 70s, and decided to digitize the typeface. He liked the form of the letter Z best, so named the font Ziggy. ITC Ziggy reminds its designer of "elephant bellbottoms" and its style as a display face instantly evokes a nostalgia for the 1970s.

ITC Jellybaby is the work of British designer Timothy Donaldson, bouncing all over the place but somehow remaining compact and legible. It began as an extremely fattened version of Donaldson't typeface Pink but then became transformed into a play on the futuristic" typefaces of the 1960s. Jellybaby expresses both retro and modern design."

ITC Veljovic was designed by Jovica Veljovic and displays an obvious calligraphic heritage. The designer was strongly influenced by German designer Hermann Zapf and Israeli designer Henri Friedlander. ITC Veljovic exhibits a crisp precision, as if the letters were cut in stone rather than drawn with pen and ink. In 2014 Veljovic revised this family and ITC New Veljovic was released with many more weights and styles

When Hal Taylor saw the 1930 logo for the Stetson Shoe Company of Weymouth, Massachusetts, he didn't run out and buy a pair of loafers. Instead, he seized on this striking example of an Art Deco logotype as the basis for a new typeface design. “I was impressed with the delicate and sophisticated letter forms,” Taylor recalls, “particularly the enlarged cap S -- in any other case it would have seemed unbalanced, but in the context of this logo, it worked perfectly.” All the letters in the original all-caps Stetson Shoe logo were rendered with condensed proportions except the O, which was a perfect circle. While the prominent O added visual interest to the logo, Taylor knew that such a character would limit his typeface to display applications. For versatility's sake, he drew his O for ITC Stepp with the same proportions as the rest of the alphabet. Taylor also gave the logotype's inverted S a more traditional design, but kept the original as an alternate character in the OpenType font. Taylor's toughest challenge during the design process was creating a lowercase. “A good type design tells you what it wants to be,” he says, “and after a little while the Stepp caps began to tell me what the lowercase should look like.” Taylor's lowercase is slightly more conventional than the caps. The jaunty g" and almost upside-down "s" add subtle charm, while the capital letters provide the broader gestures of Stepp's personality. Together, they create a versatile and distinctive typeface design. One of Hal Taylor's first jobs was as a photo-lettering typographer in Philadelphia, setting headlines and creating custom lettering. This was followed by a stint doing finished lettering for John Langdon, whose ambigrams appear in Dan Brown's best-selling novel, Angels & Demons. Today, Taylor works as a graphic designer in the publishing industry, but he still finds time to create an occasional hand-lettered book jacket, and draw handsome typeface designs. ITC Stepp is available in four weights, ranging from Light to Ultra Bold. All four weights have companion italics, and the lightest three weights also offer a suite of small caps."

ITC Forkbeard is the work of British designer Michael Gills and named after a famous Viking warrior. Gills was inspired by the work of Victor Hammer as well as a lesser known uncial style called Andromaque. Distinguishing characteristics of ITC Forkbeard are its geometric overtones and its distinct capital and lower case letterforms.

ITC Scarborough was designed by Akira Kobayashi in 1998 to be reminiscent of the typefaces in advertisements of the 1930s. The special written form of the font has no connection between the letters and follows the principles of the brush scripts often used in the headlines and film trailers of this time. Kobayashi chose dynamic forms for his font, small yet robust with contrast between the strokes. ITC Scarborough is available in regular and bold weights and is best used for headlines and short texts.

Fat, bold, and comfortably bulbous; that's ITC Liverpool, designed by Kevin Bailey. The letterforms are soft and mildly eccentric, characterized by tiny counters that shift around from letter to letter like the highlights on cartoon eyeballs. Some of Liverpool's letters are reminiscent of display lettering from the '30s, yet this exuberant face would also be right at home in the '60s. Not for the typographically timid.

There are a few professions in which being left-handed confers an advantage-think of the great southpaw pitchers in major league baseball, like Sandy Koufax. Now, think of all the great left-handed calligraphers. Not so easy, right? Here's a hint: Luis Siquot. Far from being an advantage, Siquot's lefty orientation proved a hurdle to overcome. When I was young, I had serious problems writing," he recalls. "If there was a lot of text, I almost always soiled the paper with wet ink as my hand followed the pen." Then, a friend told Siquot about a special store in London that catered to left-handed people. It was there that he found an Osmiroid pen specially designed for left-handed calligraphers. ITC Cali is based on Siquot's use of this pen. "Electronic scans of my calligraphy were the foundation of the design," he says. "I was careful to leave in some imperfections to avoid an excessively mechanical look, and added the little notches in the strokes to imitate the texture of writing on a rough cotton paper." ITC Cali works equally well in text and display sizes, but it is a calligraphic script, Siquot warns, "and shouldn't be set in all capitals." That said, ITC Cali is a remarkably versatile design, well-suited to a variety of communication projects."

Australian typographer Harry Pears continues to explore ancient type forms while maintaining his consultancy business Typeface Research Pty. Ltd., of Lake Cathie, Australia. Born in Quirindi, Australia, Harry has had a long career in printing and graphic arts and has been the guiding force behind the creation of the Lindisfarne Nova family. Lindisfarne Nova Incised and Lindisfarne Runes are wonderful illustrative companions to the Lindisfarne Nova text fonts. In a unique partnership, Harry develops the concepts, and calligrapher Margaret Layson brings the designs to life. They both then work on the digital incarnation in a true collaboration.

ITC Studio Script was designed by Robert Evans, an informal script for applications in which a calligraphic look would be appropriate. The font includes a wide variety of alternate characters, which give a graphic designer's creativity no limits.

Some words from the designer... Like long legs walking a runway in stiletto heels, ITC Cherie is both sophisticated and feminine. West coast designer Teri Kahan developed this art nouveau-style font into two distinct all capital alphabets – one with a “high waist”, placed in the capital position, and the other a “low-waist,” placed in the lower case position. They work separately or together, and this dual nature gives a designer the ability to make subtle changes in a logo or line of text. Additional flourished letters round out this versatile headline font.

As if gliding in on the tide, ITC Kahana floats across the page with the pulse and sway of the sacred Hawaiian hula dance. The original drawings for this display typeface were created while designer Teri Kahan lived in the Aloha State, and its bold verticals symbolically convey the power and strength of the Polynesian people. Kahan has spent most of her life working with letters. She discovered Speedball lettering pens in her teens, opened a design studio that specialized in the lettering and calligraphic arts while in her early twenties, and grew her business in California and Hawaii. Today, she embraces new design challenges and digital technology, but letters are still at the core of her work. In ITC Kahana, Kahan created a design that is both distinctive and versatile. Menus, posters, display headlines, packaging and brochures fall easily within this typeface's range. And the word “kahana” is more than just a namesake: in Hawaiian, “kaha” means “to mark, draw, place, turn or surf,” and “na” means “belonging to.” ITC Kahana also includes an enchanting decorated alphabet in the lowercase position that expands this typeface's usefulness to the designer.

ITC Werkstatt is a result of the combined talents of Alphabet Soup's Paul Crome and Satwinder Sehmi, along with Ilene Strizver and Colin Brignall. It is inspired by the work of Rudolph Koch, the renowned German calligrapher, punchcutter, and type designer of the first third of this century, without being based directly on any of Koch's typefaces. Werkstatt has obvious affinities with the heavy, woodcut look of Koch's popular Neuland, but also with display faces like Wallau and even the light, delicate Koch Antiqua. Brignall began by drawing formal letters with a 55mm cap height, which Sehmi reinterpreted using a pen with a broad-edge nib. “Not an easy process,” says Brignall, “since one of the features of Koch's style is that while it was calligraphic in spirit, most of the time his counter shapes did not bear any resemblance to the external shapes, as they would in normal calligraphy. This meant that Sehmi could not complete a whole character in one go, but had to create the outside and inside shapes separately and then ink in the center of the letters.” The process was repeated, only without entirely filling in the outlines, for the Engraved version. Crome handled the scanning and digitization, maintaining the hand-made feel while creating usable digital outlines. “The collaboration of artisans with particular skills,” says Brignall, “in a modern-day, computer-aided studio environment, seems very much in step with the 'workshop' ethos that Rudolph Koch encouraged and promoted so much.”