Webtype is thrilled to announce the addition of a new star to our lineup: Roster, by Matthew Carter, the latest release from Font Bureau and Carter & Cone. And it’s a really big deal.

Dubbed a square-shouldered powerhouse by its handlers, Roster is a slab serif with a difference. Squared-off counters punch into the interiors of letterforms, pushing the white space beyond normal boundaries. This chiseled effect lends a quirky constructive element to the family; a sort of visual push-pull that’s most evident in the lighter, narrower styles.

Roster exudes a flexible, athletic confidence, and it’s little wonder: the family evolved from custom type Carter created for Sports Illustrated in the 1990s. Bearing the moniker Wrigley, Roster’s predecessor was “intended to express the bold graphics of American sports,” said Steve Hoffman, who commissioned the design. Then seven styles, Wrigley worked hand in glove with Carter’s Fenway, a fine serif crafted to complement the SI staff’s considerable literary prowess.

“When we were close to the point of presentation to the editors of the new fonts, I suggested the names Wrigley and Fenway,” Hoffman said. “I detected a somewhat puzzled expression on Matthew’s English face. I explained that these were the names of two of America’s oldest and most beloved baseball venues, and it would be a delight for Sports Illustrated’s editors to have their new typefaces named for theses venerable ballparks.”

In preparing this family for general release, the name Wrigley was dropped, since the design drew no inspiration from the Chicago Cubs or its namesake stadium. Jesse Ragan was enlisted to assist with the expansion effort, and Roster now weighs in at a hefty 60 members. This high-impact superfamily boasts six weights (Extra Light, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Black) in five widths (Expanded, Normal, Narrow, Condensed, and Compressed), plus companion italics.

One of the things that makes Roster so special is its chameleon-like ability to convey vastly different moods depending on the weights and widths chosen. From the lean, lanky compressed extra light to the in-your-face brawn of the extra heavy expanded black, Roster’s broad range of emotions is suited to a multitude of display situations.
Roster’s character set is Font Bureau’s Extended Latin; OpenType layout features include case-sensitive punctuation, basic fractions, and standard ligatures, along with special ligatures like ‘Tu’ and ‘Ty’ in the bold and black weights.

Carter cautions that this personality-packed family is not meant for text, but should be used generously at display sizes. He recommends setting it no smaller than 30 pixels, with the heavier and compressed styles calling for larger sizes.

As with all Webtype offerings, Roster may be tested for free for up to 30 days. Put Roster to work on your site—it’s sure to become a fan favorite.

Today, Webtype is proud to release Marcia, Font Bureau’s newest type family. What is Marcia? “Marcia started as a project in Cyrus’s undergrad class at RISD three years ago.…It was my first attempt at drawing a whole alphabet,” says designer Victoria Rushton. On paper the Roman is like a 19th-century Modern, with its high contrast, vertical stress, and ball terminals. But when you look closely, it doesn’t really resemble a Modern — some serifs are omitted, some are half-there. These departures are a lettering artist’s whimsical experiments with the Modern genre. Furthermore, the Italic is both sturdier and simpler than most moderns. And, according to Rushton, that’s part of Marcia’s charm as these “remnants of naïveté” give it a unique character.

Marcia’s quirkiness and exuberance can be seen in its details: the legs of the cap K and R hint at a courtier taking a bow and in Italic, the legs snap into a kick. Add swashes alternates and they become the envy of any mustache. In the lowercase, many have serifs on the left like calligraphic entry strokes, even in unexpected places (d, b, u, w). While other serifs offer sinuous semi-serifs ball terminals (a, c, f) sustaining Marcia’s quirky, hybrid flavor.

The numerals are lively and legible, in both lining (uppercase) and oldstyle (lowercase) forms. Here we can see more unorthodox serif forms (2, 5, 7). Fractions, superior, and inferior forms are also included in Marcia’s figures.

Victoria Rushton designed Marcia with playful packaging and swashy subheads in mind, all on display on the typeface’s minisite. Marcia’s discretionary ligatures and alternate characters can fill any text-setting with surprising, elegant forms.

Give Marcia a try for free — all fonts on Webtype can be tested on your own sites at no charge for 30 days.

Many of today’s most familiar typefaces had their origins in a company known as American Type Founders (ATF), the United States’ most prominent type company of the metal era. Formed in 1892 as a consolidation of 23 independent foundries, ATF dominated hand-set type in the United States by the early part of the 20th century, and was at the forefront of technical developments in designing and producing type. Given this prominence, ATF typefaces are well known and loved still today — the essence of American typography and design.

Since the advent of digital type, there have been many attempts to revive faces from the ATF library, but many are feeble shadows of the originals. Backed by the expertise of designers like Mark van Bronkhorst, Alan Dague-Greene, David Sudweeks, and Ben Kiel, the American Type Founders® Collection builds on the company’s legacy, introducing new interpretations of classic ATF typefaces. Fonts in the ATF Collection are developed with the needs of contemporary type users in mind. ATF designer font families build on their predecessors, offering more weights and widths, and the robust character sets and typographic features made possible by today’s font technology.

Webtype is thrilled to offer these useful and respectful interpretations, in parallel with their desktop release, bringing the same visual richness to the screen that handset type once brought to the printed page.

ATF Alternate Gothic is a new, significant digital expansion of Morris Fuller Benton’s classic 1903 design. Originally available in one bold weight, the typeface came in three widths for flexibility in copy-fitting layouts. ATF Alternate Gothic provides a wider range: ten weights, with four widths of each weight (40 fonts total). This extensive family can be used to pack a lot into a narrow space, and the breadth of the family makes it easy to create variations for different formats and media.

ATF Poster Gothic is an expansion of a typeface designed in 1934 by Morris Fuller Benton. The one-weight design was a slightly condensed display companion to Benton’s popular Bank Gothic® family. This new family of aggressively rectilinear headline types features 15 fonts, greatly expanding the design’s possibilities. The all-caps design sports square corners in the counters, creating tension between angular and curved details; this feature, and the generally rectangular shape of the whole alphabet, makes ATF Poster Gothic distinctive on the page or screen, while its relationship to Bank Gothic makes it somehow familiar. Certain weights also recall the style of lettering used on athletic team jerseys, television crime dramas, action & adventure movie titles, and engraved stationery.

The Garamond family tree has many branches. There are probably more typefaces bearing the name Garamond than the name of any other type designer. When ATF Garamond was designed in 1917, it was one of the first revivals of this classic. The new ATF Garamond expands upon a legacy of quality and craftsmanship, bringing back some of the robustness of metal type and letterpress printing often lost in digital adaptations of historic faces. Eighteen fonts comprise three optical sizes — Subhead, Text, and Micro (available by request) — and three weights, including a new Medium that did not exist in metal. ATF Garamond also includes the alternates and swash characters from the original face.

Oh, Brush … beloved script emblem of plumbers, mechanics, bodegas, lunch counters, and other low-rent concerns. Since 1942, you have given faceless apartment buildings a name, brought life to the badges and banners of otherwise tedious trade conventions, and lent excitement to the postcards of middle America’s unsung travel destinations. We have seen so much of you … but not enough! We need more weights: how about five, extending beyond humdrum Medium? We want swash alternates, too, plus lively ligatures and sporty underline tails! Give us cleaner curves and smoother connections, but stay true to your frisky self! Like a nail salon that offers cucumber water, the new ATF Brush is one step classier than the rest.

ATF Headline Gothic cries out to be used in headlines, and that is exactly how it was used after it was first created by ATF in 1936 with newspapers in mind. The style of ATF Headline Gothic recalls the bold, condensed gothic display faces of the 19th century, but with more refinement in its details than many large types of the time (typically wood type). The digital ATF Headline Gothic, like its predecessor, comes in a single weight, all caps, but offers two styles: one crisply drawn, and a “Round” version with softer corners, to suggest a more “printed” feel, reminiscent of wood type. Of course, in either style it features a full modern character set, including necessary symbols, such as the Euro, that didn’t exist in 1936.

Sporting broad, unadorned caps and just a dash of flair, ATF Wedding Gothic is like an engravers gothic at a black tie affair. It comes from the same tradition as other social gothics from the turn of the twentieth century, such as Engravers Gothic and Copperplate. But where these are the faces of business cards and common announcements, ATF Wedding Gothic is a special occasion. Its swaying ‘R’ and ‘Q’, its characterful figures, and spritely-yet-sturdy insouciance make ATF Wedding Gothic well suited for tasteful engagements of all sorts. Originally offered in a single, wide weight, this version expands what was once a novelty design into a surprisingly versatile family of nine weights. An additional, narrower, standard width brings the count to 18 fonts.

Today we add all the weights and widths to Webtype’s arsenal of Benton Sans. This brings our range of the expansive family in parity with the desktop version. The 80 styles include five widths (Extra Compressed, Compressed, Condensed, normal, Wide) and eight weights (Thin, Extra Light, Light, Book, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black), each with an italic.

Taking it to the Extreme

Eighty is a lot of styles. We don’t expect many customers to license and use the entire Benton Sans range. What makes a mega-family valuable is the versatility it provides for fine-tuning hierarchies, getting just the right dimensions, or achieving maximum contrast. For example, the extremes in Benton Sans’ weight spectrum give web designers new flexibility, especially when it comes to display type. As letters get larger, bolds can be bolder and lights can be lighter — and sometimes they need to be that way to get the same impact that less extreme weights would have at smaller sizes. Benton Sans Thin and Extra Light offer an elegant counterpart to the steadfast text of the standard weights. And the Black packs a heavy punch without straying from the no-nonsense character at the design’s core.

Benton Sans Thin with Benton Sans RE. The Thin and Extra Light weights let you maintain a hairline appearance, even when the type is large. They also provide opportunities for optically echoing the stroke weight of much smaller type, like the text shown here.

Benton Sans Condensed Black and Thin with Benton Sans Black and Benton Modern. Big differences in font weight allow for overlapping headline effects, eye-grabbing contrast, and strong emphasis within text.

As always, the Webtype free trial applies: you can put all these new weights to the test at no charge for up to 30 days.