Stellar
Robert Hunter Middleton’s drew the original design of Stellar for the Ludlow Typograph Company in Chicago. Work began in the late 1920s, when Middleton was asked to create a sans serif type family to compete with European imports of Futura and Kabel. Stellar was Middleton’s attempt to raise the ante. Where Futura and Kabel were geometric in design and monotone in weight, Stellar was based on roman character proportions and stroke weighs were stressed.
In the late 1990s, Dave Farey took on the task of reviving the Stellar design. While Ludlow cut Stellar in a full range of point sizes, the family was limited to just a roman and bold design. Farey’s revival is twice as large a family. It ranges from a very light called Stellar Nova to a very bold called Zeta In between are Lyra and Epsilon.
Truesdell
Frederic Goudy drew Truesdell in 1930 and first used it for an article in a quarterly journal for book collectors. Since it was a small family and not promoted, Goudy received few orders for fonts. The original drawings and matrices for the face were lost in the fire that destroyed Goudy’s studio in 1939.
The only known examples of Truesdell fonts reside in the extensive collection of typographic material at the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Printing. It was proofs from these fonts that served as the basis for Monotype’s digital revival of the family. Monotype Truesdell was released in March of 1994, just slightly over fifty-five years after fire destroyed Goudy’s original work.
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