ITC Bookman
ITC Bookman was an instant success when it was first released in 1976. The design was an interpretation of the original Bookman typeface that dates back to the late 1800s. This earliest Bookman was very popular in the early part of the 20th century. Bookman fell out of use in the middle part of the last century, only to be “re-discovered” by graphic designers in the 1970s. The problem was: there was no complete and well-organized family of Bookman. Ed Benguiat came to the rescue when he drew the ITC Bookman family for phototypesetting.
Benguiat developed a full family of four weights plus complementary cursive designs. Benguiat also drew a suite of swash and alternate characters for each of the members of the family. When digital replaced photo as a typesetting technology, however, the special alternate and swash characters that Benguiat created were left out of the fonts. While most phototype display fonts could have virtually unlimited character sets, the first digital fonts could not.
Now, OpenType technology has allowed the release of a complete version of ITC Bookman, offering the full breadth of Benguiat’s design — which means all the original swash and alternate characters.
ITC Tabula
Tabula was at first a typographic study, Julien Janiszewski undertook for subtitles in movies. His goal was to design letterforms that reproduce at small size on film but that could be multiplied 2000 times to be read on the “big screen.” The typographic answer to that problem was a font that fulfills these constraints.
The results of the study were then “filed in a drawer” for over a year. When Janiszewski later discovered his drawings he realized that the constraints he imposed on the subtitle font were not that far from those that would be put on a typeface design for signage. According to him, “In this field, people need a font that can be used easily in very large sizes for boards and quiet small sizes for reading texts.” These basic sketches became the foundation of what was to become ITC Tabula. When asked about the somewhat unusual stroke endings in some of the characters, Janiszewski’s reply was, “I wanted to keep the calligraphic ductus of letters, that's why some letter's ending strokes are beveled, as a reminder of the way the drawing pen traces the letters.”