ITC Stone Pro

ITC Stone® is more than a simple type family. It’s an extended family that provides solutions for a multitude of graphic problems. Sumner Stone’s initial intent in designing the family was to assist the neophyte, but early in the design process he realized that he was creating a suite of fonts that would also appeal to the most sophisticated of graphic designers.

The mission Stone set for himself was more extensive than simply designing a new and original typeface and more laborious than creating four individual type families. His task was a combination of these - and then some. To be successful, the sub-families within the ITC Stone series would need to interrelate perfectly. They would need a common and obvious design bond, yet each would still need to be able to stand on its own as a distinct typestyle. The Stone faces successfully achieve these goals. They are based on a common underlying model; they have the same cap height, the same lowercase x-height and the same stem weights.

Serif ITC Stone Serif was conceived as a typeface with a blend of written and sculptural forms, slightly condensed, with a large x-height. Stone's intention was to develop a design that would be appropriate for continuous text but would also have enough personality to be useful in a wide variety of display applications.
Sans Serif ITC Stone Sans combines sans serif letterforms with the proportions of the Stone Serif design. Faces such as Gill Sans® and Hans Meyer’s Syntax™ were also strong influences on the design. There is a moderate, but obvious, contrast in stroke weight in the Stone Sans characters. Terminals are clipped at right angles to the stroke as in designs like Syntax.
Informal Stone’s initial goal with ITC Stone Informal was to create a typeface that could be used for business communication. Its characters have an obvious link to handwritten forms, but this is clearly a typographic font, not a copy of any calligraphic hand. The letterforms of ITC Stone Informal have minimal stroke contrast and slightly rounded shapes and stroke endings.
Humanistic ITC Stone Humanist grew out of an experiment with the medium weight of Stone Sans. The forms of the ‘g,’ ‘l,’ ‘M,’ ‘W,’ and, more subtly, the ‘a’ and ‘e’ show the alterations most clearly. The top endings of vertical lower case strokes have been cropped at an angle, as have the ascender and descender stroke endings.

There is virtually no limit to the range of applications for the ITC Stone family. Fine books, annual reports, restaurant menus, business correspondence, corporate identity programs, movie credits and advertising campaigns have all been set using various faces from the family.

Now the ITC Stone family is available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts. Graphic communicators can now work with this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType’s capabilities, including the automatic insertion of old style figures, ligatures and small caps. The new ITC Stone Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.