Ascender Corporation was a digital

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of

Elk Grove Village, Illinois Elk Grove Village is a village in Cook and DuPage counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. Per the 2020 census, the population was 32,812. Located northwest of Chicago along the Golden Corridor, the Village of Elk Grove Village was incorpor ...

in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and font-industry veterans who had previously been involved in developing fonts used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones, and other digital technology devices. On December 8, 2010, Ascender Corp. was acquired by

Monotype Imaging Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with ...

. Currently Ascender Corporation markets both directly to consumers with font packs and individual fonts, and to original equipment manufacturers and software developers with custom font-design and implementation services. A portion of the company’s work since its founding has been in extending font glyphs for international use and in the process of “

hinting Font hinting (also known as instructing) is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible tex ...

,” whereby characters are optimized for screen viewing.

Subsidiaries

*Webtype.com: It is a joint venture by The Font Bureau, Inc. and Ascender Corporation. On August 17, 2010, The Font Bureau, Inc. and Ascender Corporation announced Webtype.com, a new venture to serve web designers and developers with publication-quality fonts to improve the typography and readability of websites.

Type Designers

Steve Matteson, one of Ascender’s founding partners and lead type designer, worked on the

Arial Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software ap ...

and

Times New Roman Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration w ...

typefaces that

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

introduced in Windows 3.1 in 1992. These same fonts have been distributed in all subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows and recent versions of Mac OS. Since then Matteson has designed other fonts including

Segoe Segoe ( ) is a typeface, or family of fonts, that is best known for its use by Microsoft. The company uses Segoe in its online and printed marketing materials, including recent logos for a number of products. Additionally, the Segoe UI font su ...

, Microsoft’s current corporate branding font, Convection for the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generati ...

, and the

Liberation fonts Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: ''Liberation Sans'', ''Liberation Sans Narrow'', ''Liberation Serif'', and ''Liberation Mono''. These fonts are metrically compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsof ...

for Red Hat’s

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

Distribution. Some of Matteson’s other font designs include Andalé Mono, Andy, Curlz, and Endurance. Another founding partner of Ascender,

Tom Rickner Thomas Rickner (born October 8, 1966, Rochester, New York) is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at Apple Inc., supervised the production of the first TrueType fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s System 7 operating syst ...

, specializes in the technical nuances of digital typography, the production of non-Latin scripts and

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...

font hinting. Rickner oversaw the development of the first TrueType fonts delivered in Apple Computer’s

System 7 System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple C ...

in 1991. Most recently Rickner was involved in the development of Microsoft’s

ClearType ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for addit ...

font collection. He has also been involved in the design and production of many typefaces created for the digital environment including

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

, Graphite,

Meiryo is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems. Meiryo was created out of a growing ...

, Nina, Tahoma, Tekton, and

Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typograph ...

Products

In the year Ascender was formed it released its first typeface, Endurance, with the design goal of high readability in both print and on screen. Endurance's design follows the Swiss model of Grotesque sans serifs. Capital letters are less constricted in proportion than other popular Grotesques (Arial and

Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

for instance). Terminals are shorter and counters are generally more open. The italics are designed and not algorithmically slanted. In 2005, Ascender announced that it entered into an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft in its software products and operating systems. In that same year Ascender announced that it had a distribution agreement with IBM to provide a range of Japanese fonts as well as a distribution agreement with Bigelow & Holmes Type Foundry to distribute the

Lucida Lucida (pronunciation: ) is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resol ...

family of fonts. Also in 2005, Steve Matteson designed the fonts for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Ascender’s type designers and font software engineers created custom fonts tuned specifically for high-quality display on-screen in the Xbox

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

, as well as multilingual fonts to support the Xbox 360 branding and marketing around the world. At the end of 2005 Ascender announced its first

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

Pro font, Pericles Pro. Pericles Pro is based on the work of Robert Foster who created the original designs for

American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typography,'' Century Com ...

in 1934. Each Pericles Pro font includes 433 glyphs. This includes 12 stylistic alternates and 17

ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...

s to mix and match with a full set of capitals, small capitals, superscript, subscript, and petite small capital letters. In 2006 Ascender released numerous products for hardware and software developers including a font set that meets the

EIA-708 CTA-708 (formerly EIA-708 and CEA-708) is the standard for closed captioning for ATSC digital television (DTV) streams in the United States and Canada. It was developed by the Consumer Electronics sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance, wh ...

-B standard for Digital TV Closed Captioning (DTVCC), large

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

compliant fonts and fonts for

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Definition Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video. Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the ...

authors and publishers designed to enhance the on-screen experience that is part of an HD DVD's Advanced Content. Also in 2006 Ascender introduced a software product for mobile phones – the Ascender Personality Kit. This software combined

ring tones A ringtone, ring tone or ring is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. Originally referring to and made by the electromechanical striking of bells, the term now refers to any sound on any device alerting of a new incoming ...

wallpaper Wallpaper is a material used in interior decoration to decorate the interior walls of domestic and public buildings. It is usually sold in rolls and is applied onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain as "lining paper" (so ...

backgrounds, themes, and fonts into packaged sets that automated the process of acquiring and applying multiple components for users to personalize their

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants. Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...

phone. In November, 2007 Ascender announced it had created the Droid font family for the Android handset platform. In 2007 Ascender executed a license to distribute the Microsoft scalable font engine that supports hinting technology to enhance on-screen legibility. Ascender also created the

distributed by Red Hat. In the same year Ascender made the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection available to end users looking to utilize the fonts from the Microsoft Vista operating system on other platforms (including Mac, Unix and previous Windows versions).

Research

Ascender conducted numerous typographic-related research projects including a study on the typefaces that appear on the front pages of America's top daily newspapers. This study identified the most popular typefaces, sources, and the pervasive use of custom fonts in newspaper design. Another Ascender study researched the free and shareware fonts that can be found on the most-popular Websites. The study analyzed more than 4500

fonts that can be downloaded by

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

, Windows, and

users to determine their viability for use in linking downloadable fonts to web pages as part of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification proposed by the W3C. The study found that out of the 4572 fonts tested, 4385 fonts (95.9%) failed one or more of six tests that were performed.

References

External links