ITC Legacy Condensed & Pro
True to its name, ITC Legacy is a design that’s been many years in the making. The process began when its designer, Ronald Arnholm, was in a graduate design program at Yale University. There, Arnholm was able to study, first hand, a copy of the 1470 Eusebius set in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson.
Typographically speaking, Arnholm’s encounter with Jenson was love at first sight. Arnholm decided that a revival design of Jenson’s work would be an exciting and worthwhile challenge — as well as the perfect subject for his master’s thesis.
Years later, in 1982, Arnholm decided that his thesis design had not captured all the qualities of Jenson’s original. He also felt a companion italic was needed to complete the family. Arnholm went back to work, again using the 1470 Eusebius for his model (this time access was provided by Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia).
Arnholm was able to photograph the book at very close range, and made hundreds of trial drawings to get a proper “feel” for the type. Next came more drawings, test fonts, revisions, and still more test fonts. The final result, after countless hours of labor, was ITC Legacy.
Adding a sans
Many designers might be satisfied with a successful design revival of a classic type style, but not Arnholm. Even while he was working on the revival of the Jenson type, he became intrigued by the idea of a companion series of sans serif faces; these would have the same essential skeletal structure as the old style serif types in his revival.
A pad of tracing paper and a day’s worth of trial renderings later, Arnholm was satisfied that his idea was sound. It wasn’t until he was in the final stages of developing the serif design, however, that he began to work in earnest on the sans serif design.
Although they are based on the same design model, ITC Legacy Serif would be classified as an exceptionally sensitive interpretation of an earlier style, while ITC Legacy Sans could only be called an original design statement.
Years later, the family grows
More than a decade after ITC Legacy’s initial release, Arnholm has made another addition to the family. “I decided to design a condensed version of ITC Legacy Sans,” Arnholm writes, “because I kept seeing graphic designers condense the original by electronic scaling. The problem in doing this is that the vertical elements become condensed while the horizontal elements remain the same. The diagonals also become distorted, making it obvious that the letters have been just been electronically modified.”
Arnholm began by producing rough sketches at a range of character widths. After reviewing the sketches with ITC, it was agreed that a design just over 80 percent of the width of the original Legacy would be ideal.
Only after Arnholm began working on the book weights did it become clear what a fine balancing act the project would require. “An across-the-board character width reduction was not going to work,” he recalls. “Many characters needed to be redesigned; shapes had to be modified or counter sizes adjusted. The heavier weights also required more condensing than the lighter designs.”
After many months of work, Arnholm is happy with the way the condensed designs turned out. In the letter that accompanied the final shipment to ITC, he wrote, “I’m particularly pleased with how legible the design is.”
A big, OpenType family
With the completion of the suite of condensed sans serif designs, the entire Legacy family has been newly released as OpenType Pro fonts. Graphic communicators can now work with this versatile collection of designs while taking advantage of OpenType's capabilities, including the automatic insertion of old style figures, ligatures and small caps.
In addition, the new Legacy Pro fonts offer an extended character set supporting English, most Central European, many Eastern European and the Romance languages.