Whitney: clear for signage, compact for print.

A type family originally developed for New York’s Whitney Museum, Whitney contends with two different sets of demands: those of editorial typography, and those of public signage.

Typefaces for catalogs and brochures need to be narrow enough to work in crowded environments, yet energetic enough to encourage extended reading. But typefaces designed for wayfinding programs need to be open enough to be legible at a distance, and sturdy enough to withstand a variety of fabrication techniques: fonts destined for signage need to anticipate being cast in bronze, etched in glass, cut in vinyl, and rendered in pixels.

While American “gothics” such as News Gothic (1908) have long been a mainstay of editorial settings, and European “humanists” such as Frutiger (1975) have excelled in signage applications, Whitney bridges this divide in a single design. Its compact forms and broad x-height use space efficiently, and its ample counters and open shapes make it clear under any circumstances.

New for 2010: Whitney Greek, Cyrillic, and Multiscript

In 2010, Whitney took on a third challenge: internationalization. Having outfitted the design with our Latin-X™ character set, which serves 1.4 billion speakers of more than 140 languages, H&FJ embarked on two major expansions of the character set into the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The development of Whitney Cyrillic began in 2005, with a year-long research project to survey the effects of language, culture, politics, and technology upon Cyrillic typography. Beyond including the characters needed to render the six most widely supported Balto-Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Belarusan, Bulgarian and Macedonian), a primary goal of the project was to reach large populations that remain underserved by high-quality digital fonts. The resulting design, which uses H&FJ’s new Cyrillic-X™ specification, is capable of representing 59 languages from the Slavic, Baltic, Turkic, Uralic, Tungusic, Caucasian, and Mongolic language families. Together with Whitney Greek, which serves thirteen million speakers throughout Greece and the Balkan Peninsula, these new fonts represent the primary languages of an additional 280 million people worldwide.

The Basic, Advanced, and Pro editions of Whitney are each available with the Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic character set. For designers whose projects have an international scope — such as those needing all three official scripts of the European Union (Latin, Greek, and Bulgarian Cyrillic) — the Whitney Multiscript package integrates all three character sets into a single set of designs, and is available for less than half the cost of buying all three fonts individually.