ITC Offic­ina Dis­play und ihre Herkunft.
When we (Ben Acorn­ley and myself at Met­aLon­don) redesigned The Econ­o­mist mag­a­zine in Lon­don in 2000/2001 (the new mag­a­zine was launched in May 2001,) we picked ITC Offic­ina Sans as the “infor­ma­tion” face. All text is set in the Economist’s own type­face, which Ole Schäfer and myself redesigned for the relaunch. But all the graphs, tables, side­bars and cap­tions are set in ITC Offic­ina Sans for con­trast and clar­ity. When it came to using that face on the cover in fairly large sizes, the client deemed it a lit­tle too “goofy”. Officina’s blunt edges, its explicit pseudo-serifs and oblique ter­mi­nals were indeed very notice­able in the Bold and Black weights they were using for the cover.

The dis­play ver­sion I sketched out had sharp cor­ners, the ter­mi­nals are not as oblique, and the swings at the top left of the char­ac­ters have all but gone. This allows the face to be set much more tightly and doesn’t draw too much atten­tion to indi­vid­ual let­ters. Ole Schäfer had already expanded the orig­i­nal fam­ily of Book and Bold while at col­lege and pre­sented me his designs for com­ments and cor­rec­tions. Out of or col­lab­o­ra­tion came the extended fam­ily with Medium, Extra­Bold and Black weights, plus Small Caps and Ital­ics, Old Style fig­ures – the works.
Ole also did the ini­tial dig­i­tal work on the new Offic­ina Dis­play for The Econ­o­mist. After two years’ exclu­sive use by that mag­a­zine, I decided to update the dis­play fam­ily to include a Light ver­sion. The dig­i­tal work was car­ried out by Chris­t­ian Schwartz who used an extrap­o­lated ver­sion that Font­Bu­reau had pre­vi­ously done for a client. Chris­t­ian then improved the over­all appear­ance of the Reg­u­lar, Bold and Black weights and added a new Ding­bat font. Offic­ina Dis­play now has the same x-height across all 4 weights. Ascen­ders, descen­ders and cap height have also been har­mo­nized. In text faces, that would con­sti­tute a car­di­nal sin, as bolder weights tend to look smaller because of their reduced counter spaces. In dis­play use, how­ever, it is impor­tant to be able to com­pose word-sets and head­lines with mixed weights. Noth­ing would be sil­lier than hav­ing to fix indi­vid­ual sizes in order to achieve max­i­mum impact.