It feels timely to celebrate our partnership with Lippincott to help reimagine the brand identity for NYC Pride, the trademark event of Heritage of Pride, with a recognized legacy of unity, protest, advocacy, and fun. Our parent company, Monotype, provided two typefaces, Knockout and Gotham, from the Hoefler&Co library. Knockout and Gotham lend a bold and direct yet warm appearance to the new visual identity, aligning with the group’s new brand purpose: “To inspire and empower every LGBTQIA person to proudly love and live their truth.” We’re thrilled to see these two expressive typefaces w ..read more

It’s been thirty-two years, four months, and fourteen days since I hung out a shingle to announce that The Hoefler Type Foundry was open for business. What started as a sole proprietorship grew into the Hoefler&Co of today, a diversified design and technology practice with an international reach, still dedicated to the invention of original, thoughtful, and hard-working typefaces. Today, millions of designers use our typefaces in their work, and with the addition of Monotype’s experience, resources, and expertise, we look forward to the next million who will make our work a part of their o ..read more

Typeface designers spend a lot of time chasing down strange valences. We try to figure out what’s producing that whiff of Art Deco, or that vaguely militaristic air, or what’s making a once solemn typeface suddenly feel tongue-in-cheek. If we can identify the source of these qualities, we can cultivate them, and change the direction of the design; more often, we just extinguish them without mercy. Sometimes, we get the chance to follow a third path, which is how we arrived at our newest typeface, Sagittarius. During the development of Peristyle, our family of compact, high-contrast sans serifs ..read more

And the second best news is getting to see the logo I created for the ticket, a collaboration with Senior Creative Advisor to the campaign Robyn Kanner, which evolves the earlier mark by Aimee Brodbeck at Mekanism. What a wonderful and uplifting announcement this piece of typography gets to accompany: that the formidable Senator Kamala Harris will join the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in a bid for the White House. I can’t remember an election in which so much attention (and speculation) has surrounded the choice of a running mate, nor having such a large field of eminently quali ..read more

I’m thrilled to discover that my episode of the Netflix original documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design has been nominated for a 2020 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Design. If ever there was a meaningful category for a typographer, this is it! Designers know that typography plays a critical role in filmmaking, never more so than in a series like Abstract, and most especially in an episode devoted to typeface design. This is a documentary in which the visible typography of the city is overlaid with typographic annotations, seamlessly segueing into an opening credit sequ ..read more

I’m delighted to introduce today’s expansion of our Sentinel family. Everything from ‘Fonts by Hoefler&Co’ to the headline above is set in Sentinel, making it one of the typefaces on which I depend the most — a distinction I share with the thousands of designers who’ve made Sentinel a part of their work. Today’s new Sentinel Pro includes a number of new features, including one that’s occasioned by our recent working-from-home, and another that’s been on the drawing board for nearly thirty years, a new personal record for the slow simmer. What’s New The new Sentinel Pro adds small caps, tab ..read more

On Independence Day, Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign began rolling out a new visual identity built on two typefaces by Hoefler&Co: the sans serif Decimal, and the seriffed Mercury Text. We could not be more proud to see our work support a campaign of nuanced thinking and decisive action, in the critical election before us. When I was approached by Robyn Kanner, Senior Creative Advisor to Biden For President, she shared with me one of the campaign’s most interesting communications challenges: its reliance on sophisticated and irreducible messages, which would need the clari ..read more

Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Some time in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and ge ..read more

I always felt that our Vitesse typeface, an unusual species of slab serif, would take well to an inline. Vitesse is based not on the circle or the ellipse, but on a less familiar shape that has no common name, a variation on the ‘stadium’ that has two opposing flat edges, and two gently rounded sides. In place of sharp corners, Vitesse uses a continuously flowing stroke to manage the transition between upright and diagonal lines, most apparent on letters like M and N. A year of making this gesture with my wrist, both when drawing letterforms and miming their intentions during design critiques ..read more

I suspect I’m not alone in my current appetite for reading: right now I’m craving things that are written with clarity, wit, honesty, and heart, and I very much need to hear from good-natured people of extraordinary ability who love what they do. Below are some of the books I’ve most enjoyed reading of late, three connected only tangentially with typography because their subjects are words, and two that are more expressly about design. All five share a sincerity, an attention to detail, and a sense of humor that has kept me smiling for weeks. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have. Word by ..read more