1960's - Letraset
From 1964 under the leadership of design director Colin Brignall, Letraset built a distinctive library of display typefaces, the Letraset company manufactured sheets of artwork elements for designers, which can be transferred directly to the artwork being prepared. The technique was very popular worldwide for lettering and the other style elements before the advent of the computer techniques of word processing and desktop publishing. The letraset sheets were available in a huge range of typefaces, symbols and sizes. Letters would be transfered to the artwork one by one, which was not an easy or quick job and it required graphic artist skills to complete it to a professional standard.
Letraset was also involved in the production and marketing of the Pantone colour markers and the Pantone system they were co-ordinated with.
The popularity of the Apple Macintosh computer and the wide availability of digital fonts brought about the inevitable decline of transfer lettering. At this stage Letraset quickly converted the best of it's library into digital format in the 80's and continues to this day to develop typefaces under the Fontek brand.
ITC - International Typeface Corporation
Herb Lubalin created U&lc Magazine (named after the shorthand for Upper and lower case) to promote the ITC's type collection. He spent the last 10 years of his life (from 1971) working on a variety of projects, the most popular being the U&lc Magazine and the newly founded ITC. The U&lc was more of a typographic journal and worked as both an ad for Lubalin's designs and a plane for typographic experimentation, he often tested just how distorted and expressive lettering might get.
The first digital photo systems all appeared, as did the first optical character recognition technologies, which offered new possibilities to designers. ITC was one of the worlds 1st type foundries to have no production of metal type, it was purely founded to design, licence and market typefaces for film setting, computer set and transferable types internationally.
ITC would re-cut the classic typefaces to make them suitable for digital use, as well as encourage new styles. Usually the type designs had overall increased x-height, multiple weights, multiple widths and unusual ligature combinations and occasionally alternate characters. A few of the first in the ITC collection are ITC Benguiat by Ed Benguiat, ITC Eras by Albert Bolton and ITC Avant Garde by Herb Lubalin, they were all successful. Frutiger created Ocr-B and Wim Crouwell conceived a monoalphabet and typefaces evoking the bitmap. Ladislas Mandal in Europe at the time, created Galfra in 1975, Mathew Carter in the USA created Bell Centennial in 1978 using digital bitmap technology to create characters adapted to the very small point sizes in the Telephone books.
Good One Robyn Rand :)
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