The ITC Tabula™ typeface is meant to be read. The design grew out of a study to create a font to set film subtitles. According to Julien Janiszewski, the face's Paris-based designer, “I set parameters for the design whereby the letters had to be able to hold up at very small sizes when set on film. Yet the design needed to work when enlarged 2,000 times to be read on a theater screen.”
The subtitle font was not completed, but several months later Janiszewski revisited the design and made a discovery. “I realized that the constraints I had established for the subtitling font was similar to what was needed for typographic signage. Many times, this calls for a typeface that can be used easily in very large sizes for headlines on highway billboards and quite small for text copy.” Work proceeded for two more years before Janiszewski was satisfied with the results.
The final design is a somewhat squared sans serif family of four weights with corresponding italics. Janiszewski also wanted to create what he calls a “sensitive sans - one that is not restricted to geometric shapes but has a subtle calligraphic, foundation.” ITC Tabula is not only easy to read but is also a distinctly handsome design.
The ITC Tabula family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts. Graphic communicators can work with this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType's capabilities, including the ability to automatically insert proportional and lining figures, as well as ligatures.
The ITC Tabula Pro fonts also offer an extended character set to support most Central European and many Eastern European languages.