An extension to the ITC Weber Hand™ family was announced on ITCFonts.com earlier this week. Actually, ITC Weber Hand wasn't a family until the announcement was made. It was just a single-weight display design.

Among all the other single-weight, handwriting fonts, why was ITC Weber Hand chosen for further development?

Most handwriting fonts (typeface designs drawn to look like quickly written letters or spontaneous calligraphy) are single-weight, standalone products. When Monotype Imaging introduced the FlipFont™ application that enabled switching out fonts on mobile devices, it also made a suite of fonts available to support the application. Several of these fonts were of the handwriting variety. Perhaps in defiance to the "structured" sans serif fonts that are normally part of a mobile device's operating system, the quirky, "all too human" handwriting fonts became some of the most popular fonts to "flip."

Seeing this, we realized that a handwriting font with bold and maybe condensed family members might not only prove useful in supporting mobile device operating systems, but also in a variety of other graphic communication environments.

ITC Weber Hand was chosen because it has been a consistently popular design since it was first released in 1999, and because Lisa Beth Weber, the typeface's designer, was more than agreeable to having more designs added to her original family.

Adding the new designs was a collaborative project between Weber and the type development team here at Monotype Imaging. A new bold weight and two condensed variations were drawn, based on the original typeface. Now, as a family of four designs, Weber Hand can be used in brochures, advertisements, logotypes, periodicals, package design and – perhaps – even mobile devices. Weber comments, "Thanks to Monotype Imaging's support, ITC Weber Hand has grown into a suite of warm, friendly designs that are well-suited to a wide range of applications."

Click here to learn more about ITC Weber Hand

Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.