LinoLetter 2009/09

Revised, expanded, and with more OpenType features – Meet Neue Swift

The Swift type first took newspapers by storm around 1985. Gerard Unger, one of the Netherland’s leading designers, created the typeface during the early 1980s for Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell in Kiel. This was the company who had created the world’s first digital typesetting machine – the Digiset &ndash back in the 1960s. Even before Linotype acquired that company in 1989, we had begun distributing the marvelous Swift family. In 1995, Gerard updated and re-released Swift on his own, naming the effort “Swift 2.0.” Recently, we worked together with Gerard to upgrade these fonts into fully featured OpenType text fonts. The result is our Neue Swift family®.
But that’s not all! Two months ago, at TypeCon 2009 in Atlanta, Gerard received the Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SoTA). Now 67 years old, Gerard continues to make significant contributions to the fields of graphic design, typeface design, design education, and legibility research. We are very pleased to be able to collaborate with him, and we congratulate Gerard for this recognition of his life’s work to date!

Looking for more newspaper fonts?

Neue Swift is an excellent choice for use in newspaper designs. Whether in text or headlines, the family offers editors and readers a clear, contemporary typeface choice. Linotype.com offers a wide array of additional selections that function aptly in newspapers, as well as in other documents that you’d like to lend a newspaper-like feel to.

We’ve dug deep inside of the Linotype archive to bring you “hidden gems”

Whether you are designing a newsletter, logo, or annual report, the right typeface is one of your work’s most important ingredients. Since the Linotype library includes thousands of fonts, remembering all of your favorite selections can be challenging, not to mention the scores of secrets our catalog holds that are available for your discovery. From time to time, we like to highlight some of the lesser-known hits in our collection; a new page on our website does just this!

Current movie fonts

Customers often ask us which fonts film studios use in the promotional materials for recent summer blockbusters. For years, our “movie fonts” page has been one of the most highly visited areas on our website. We’ve just refreshed it with a number of new examples.

Alan Meeks and Aruban Font Foundry (ArFF) – New at Linotype.com and in the FontExplorer X Store

Every month, new type foundries and their fonts join our online shops.

Optimized results in “Related Documents”

One of the best methods for finding items on our website is the “Related Documents” tab that you will find in the tabs bar above all returned search results at Linotype.com. For example, if you search for “Neue Frutiger,” you’ll find links to 17 different pages under the “Related Documents” tab of the Neue Frutiger Font Family. These links take you to features about the history of sans serif typefaces, information about Neue Frutiger Value Packs, as well as a photo gallery about Adrian Frutiger!

Linotype’s IT department goes green

In the past year, Linotype GmbH has taken a number of steps to reduce its environmental footprint. Aside from moving into a modern building that makes use of an ingenious water-cooling system in lieu of air conditioning, our electricity provider is LichtBlick, a company specializing in earth-friendly energy-production methods. This helps us reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 130 tons per year. Linotype employees are also taking a number of steps of their own, such as selecting cable-bound peripherals in order to reduce the use of batteries and the like, which are less green.