Ano Alternatives

FF Super Grotesk draws from a 1930s design by Arno Drescher, easily the most popular sans serif in use in East Germany – the GDR’s... Read More

FF Mark is one of the most iconic geometric sans serif typefaces of our time. Created by German type designers Hannes von Döhren,... Read More

The Slate typeface family melds superb functionality and aesthetic elegance into a remarkable communications tool. Few typefaces possess the beauty and power of this design.Slate is the work of Rod McDonald, an award-winning typeface designer and lettering artist. At one point in his forty-year career, McDonald participated in a typeface legibility and readability research project conducted by... Read More

FF Dagny is a spare sans serif drawn in the “grotesk” style. In 2002, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) changed from... Read More

Sumner Stone worked together with Bob Ishi of Adobe to create the Stone family fonts, which appeared in 1987. Coincidentally, ishi is the Japanese word for stone, which precluded any squabbling about whose name the font would carry. The family consists of three types of fonts, a serif, a sans-serif and an informal style. The Stone fonts are very legible and make a modern, dynamic impression.

Myriad® was designed in 1992 by Robert Slimbach, Carol Twombly, and the design staff at Adobe Systems. It's a humanist sans serif... Read More

Compatil is the first comprehensive type system which enables all typographical elements to be used to full effect in order to reproduce the message conveyed by text information. Four different type styles with a total of 16 weights including italics have been merged into a unique typographical network. There are now no limits to the font user's creativity. The system is a product of technical... Read More

Tim Ahrens on the design of his typeface, Linotype Aroma: "I started designing Linotype Aroma about six months after discovering that Frutiger is not a brand of candy and Garamond not the name of a perfume. I didn't want it to be one of these bland, faceless fonts that sacrifice the natural, independent character of their figures to neutrality. I believe that beauty is often created... Read More

The design of the Jeunesse font family derives from a study of primers which the designer undertook earlier in his career. Jeunesse was... Read More

Matthew Carter’s Verdana was made for screen reading and works brilliantly within that medium. FF Basic Gothic is a response to Verdana... Read More

FF Celeste Sans is something of a hybrid, like its serif companion FF Celeste. Its designer Chris Burke describes it like this: “The serif version is a deliberate attempt to temper the modern face (Didone) type model with old face (Garalde) elements; to mix what Swiss letterform theorists have called the static and the dynamic principles of letter construction. Allowing for historical fancy,... Read More

Twentieth Century was designed and drawn by Sol Hess in the Lanston Monotype drawing office between 1936 and 1947. The first weights were added to the Monotype typeface library in 1959. Twentieth Century is based on geometric shapes which originated in Germany in the early 1920's and became an integral part of the Bauhaus movement of that time. Form and function became the key words,... Read More

“Legato” is a musical term, meaning that the notes are played in a “connected” manner. This idea of connecting discrete units to enhance overall expression can be applied to the letters setting a text in precisely the same way. In designing FF Legato, Evert Bloemsma studied the extent to which the characters of the alphabet visually connect and build proper word and line images, then setting... Read More

Syntax was designed by Swiss typographer Hans Eduard Meier, and issued in 1968 by the D. Stempel AG type foundry as their last hot metal... Read More

The ideal typeface for cartographyThe Swiss designer/typographer Felix Arnold designed Cisalpin during the late 1990s, after he had challenged himself to create a contemporary typeface that could be used for cartographic uses. Arnold came to the subject of cartographic typefaces after analyzing many maps and atlases, and discovering that there was no standard typeface for these types of... Read More

FF Sero combines the familiar forms of an American Grotesque with the legibility of a Humanist sans. It has open counters, a relatively... Read More

Xavier Dupré’s FF Absara is a work of French proportions, but its shapes take influence from the Dutch style: less polished, and more direct. Its casualness refers to humanist written forms. FF Absara’s rough cut makes it interesting at display sizes, but thanks to its generous x-height and firm serifs, FF Absara works equally well setting text. The typeface’s idiosyncratic italic creates a... Read More

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool... Read More

Linex Sweet was designed by Albert Boton in the late 1990s. It's a smallish family of three weights; the middle weight has an italic companion face. With its soft corners and slightly quirky head-serifs, Linex Sweet is a friendly design that sees much use. Several years later, Boton began sketching a new design, based on the original Linex Sweet but with a little more authority and grace.Linex... Read More

Created by German designer Jürgen Weltin, Linotype's Agilita is a contemporary humanist sans serif family with a wide variety of weights, including both ultra thin hairline options and heavier, dark type. Agilita has rather classical proportions; its clear ascenders and descenders lend more distinct word shapes. Weltin's design has a dynamic, yet strong and very functional appearance with a... Read More