ITC Throhand
During the 1980s and ‘90s, Agfa Corporation’s Type Division sold fonts to design professionals. The company’s core product lines were the Adobe and ITC typeface libraries, but Agfa wanted to develop its own type offerings as well. To that end, the multinational company reached out to several world-class designers to create a collection of innovative typeface designs.
The resulting partnership was dubbed the Creative Alliance, and the first product developed under its banner was Throhand, a modern typeface family inspired by some of the earliest fonts of Roman type.
Throhand was created by David Berlow, who had been one the first type designers invited to join the Alliance. With carte blanche from Agfa, Berlow proposed to research his design at the Plantin Moretius Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, which he knew to be a storehouse of untapped design inspiration.
Once in Belgium, Berlow was particularly attracted to the work of Hendrik van de Keere, a little-known but highly influential late 16th-century punchcutter from Ghent. Berlow added a unique spin to his revival of van de Keere’s original work by drawing three distinct variations of the design, for use in both text and display applications.
The three versions of Throhand are Pen, based on the original design and suitable for large display copy; Regular, inspired by the type molds and intended for small display and large text sizes of type; and Ink, which represents the metal type printed on paper and is perfectly suited for setting small text.
“Even the best letterpress users, who never dropped, dented, chipped or filed letters accidentally, would eventually use the fonts so much that they became nearly flat,” says Berlow. “Of the things that can go wrong with a metal font, my favorite is this ‘aging under pressure.’ This is what I wanted to represent in the Throhand revival.”
The basis for Throhand’s italic designs was a set of matrices on display in one of the less-traveled public areas of the museum. Berlow recalls, “I spent a morning washing the matrices with a toothbrush and kerosene, letter by letter, until I could see what they really looked like. I had a hunch that this would be the basis of the italic, but I was not sure until the matrices were clean.”
The completed Throhand family was released in 1995, and is now available as part of the ITC typeface library.