Creativity is unconventional insight. It is the rare ability of certain individuals to perceive, integrate, and turn problems into brilliant unique solutions. In five hundred and fifty years of typographic history only a few dozen innovations truly deserve the creative label. Typography is an art and a craft based on tradition. Combined with good judgment, typography becomes the visual tool for precise and permanent communication. The people at Ares created reasonably priced products which helped users, were easy to use and stimulated typographic creativity. This in turn opened up design choices and opportunities for typographers, undreamed of in previous times. The software Ares created, specially FontChameleon, had empowered people to reach for typographic excellence. That is their legacy to history.

The late 1980s downsizing at System Integrators Inc. had some unforseen consequences in the field of typography. In 1988, Larry Applegate, Ernie Brock and Robin Henson, three members of the pagination software research and development team, left the troubled company voluntarily even before their pink slips were handed out. After leaving SII, they wrote a font manipulation package for the Mac called “FontStudio” which was marketed by Letraset, under the Letraset label. It is astonishing that in 436 pages of user manual no mention is made of the real authors, not even a techno-historical footnote. Then, in August, 1990 the creative trio started Ares Software Corp., which initially developed and sold the font manipulation programs FontMonger and Font Chameleon which were followed by FontMinder, FontFiddler and FontHopper in quick succession. In 1994 Rob Friedman came on board as general manager and chairman of Ares to help market the FontChameleon technology to manufacturers of printers, computers and operating systems. Rob was one of the founders of Bitstream, which he left in 1991. Up to 1994 Ares only sold to wholesalers, retailers and directly to mail order customers. With the expanded market the future of the company looked very promising.