Designed by Don Handel in the mid-1960s, Handel Gothic was an instant success when released to the graphic design community. Its generous lowercase x-height, full bodied counters and square proportions make the design highly readable at a wide range of sizes. Handel Gothic's slightly idiosyncratic character shapes gave the face a futuristic look 40 years ago that retains its power today.

In addition, its Uncial-like lowercase is instantly identifiable – and unique among sans serif typestyles. Award-winning type designer Rod McDonald was attracted to the simple, decisive forms of the original, but he felt the design needed to be refined and updated. One of his goals was to bring a modern typographic discipline to the 40-year old phototypesetting font.

To achieve this, McDonald re-proportioned every character and balanced the delicate relationship between the curves and the straight strokes. He also added a number of alternate characters to extend the range of the design. McDonald first enlarged the family from the single-weight original to five weights, each offer a full suite of alternate characters.

Now italic complements have been created for the roman designs and the new family is available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts, allowing graphic communicators to use this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType's capabilities. These fonts, in addition to providing for the automatic insertion of ligatures and alternate characters, also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.