ITC Officina Sans
The concept for ITC Officina was presented by Erik Spiekermann, the Berlin type and graphic designer, at one of ITC’s Review Board meetings in the mid 1980s. At the time, desktop publishing was only a couple of years old and the Review Board thought that office users might need a little help in being weaned from typewriter fonts to the variety of typeface designs that would be made available to them.
Unfortunately, ITC Officina took a little longer than planned to be released, and by the time it was, office workers no longer needed coaxing to use typographic fonts in their documents. In fact, when ITC Officina was announced in 1990, they tended to use too many fonts (often called “ransom note typography”) rather than too few.
ITC Stone Serif
Sumner Stone’s goal was to design more than a simple family of type. His imposed challenge was to develop an “extended” family to satisfy a broad range of users, needs, and address a multitude of graphic problems. An additional challenge was to design this series of faces so that each could be used in combination with any other. The final design was to be sort of a “plug and play” mini typeface library.
Stone’s initial intent was to aid the neophyte: the new graphic communicator recently introduced to type and typography through desktop publishing. Early on in the design process, however, he realized that he was creating a family of type that would also appeal to the most sophisticated of graphic designers.