The Antenna™ design is a sans serif, rounded-end font family created by Cyrus Highsmith and released by Font Bureau in 2007. places a new emphasis on the repeat and variation of counter shapes with the spaces between characters. Influenced by the Swiss school of design's use of enclosed white shapes over linear black letters, the Antenna font remains an American design at heart. With carefully balanced strokes, it has a style to it that makes it ideal for 21st century publishing and advertising.
Antenna History
Cyrus Highsmith created the Antenna typeface with, at first glance, a seemingly simplistic appearance. However, on closer inspection the family clearly has intriguing features; curves of the letters are matched across both lowercase and uppercase characters, giving this typeface a uniform feel. The family contains European/East European characters sets with a full complement of Scandinavian and ligature characters. (A ligature character is where two letters of the alphabet are joined together and are often used in Germanic and Scandinavian languages.)
Because the Antenna design does not feature any descenders or ascenders – all numerals are of even height and are the same height as the capitals. This makes the numerical characters highly suitable for spreadsheet use.
Spanning seven weights in four widths including compressed and condensed versions and matching italics, the Antenna font contains enough variety to warrant every use from the quietest text to the noisiest headline, yet each weight is designed to work seamlessly with the others. From the compressed thin weight's tall, narrow strokes through the black weight's corpulent presence, the Antenna font family is a super family at any frequency and in any language.
Antenna Usage
The Antenna font family is extensive, so it has lent itself to a wide variety of publishing applications; magazines and newspapers commonly utilize the typefaces. Because there are so many weights and styles available (currently 56), the Antenna type family has also made frequent appearances in many advertising campaigns and online media. Newspapers and magazines such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated and Kenya’s Daily Nation all use the Antenna design to great effect for both headlines and copy.