Scene
Sebastian Lester spent several years designing for the music and games industries and dabbling in 3D animation before joining Monotype Imaging, where he creates fonts for both on-screen and print uses.
Work on Scene began after Lester had developed several corporate identity fonts for Monotype Imaging. The family is the result of two years of after-hours and weekend work. “It started off as a part-time project,” says Lester, “but ended up as virtually a second full-time job.”
Also included with the basic character set is a set of “semi-sans” characters that introduce more expressive word rhythms into headlines and blocks of copy. In addition, aligning and old style numerals were drawn for all six weights.
Rockwell
The first successful Slab, or “Square,” serif typeface was released by the London type founder, Vincent Figgins, in 1815. The face was a cap-only design called “Antique” and was offered in three sizes. About the same time, William Caslon IV brought out a single mono-weight sans serif typeface called “Egyptian.” This term, however, was soon used to label all slab-serif typefaces and is still used today.
By 1825, slab-serif typefaces were issued with lowercase characters. The popularity of these designs waned in the first three decades of the Twentieth century until geometric sans serif typefaces became popular. Soon, new slab-serif typefaces patterned after geometric shapes began to be released. The Rockwell family, first issued in 1933, is Monotype’s answer to this typographic style.