Antique Olive is a

humanist sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

typeface ("antique" being equivalent to sans-serif in French typographic conventions). Along the lines of

Gill Sans Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of London Underground. ...

, it was designed in the early 1960s by French typographer

Roger Excoffon Roger Excoffon (7 September 1910 – 30 May 1983) was a French typeface designer and graphic designer. Excoffon was born in Marseille, studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and then moved to Paris to apprentice in a print shop. ...

, an art director and former consultant to the

Marseilles Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Franc ...

based

Fonderie Olive The Fonderie Olive, in English, Olive Foundry, was a small but high-profile type foundry located in Marseille, France. It is best known for the work of the typeface designer Roger Excoffon. In 1978 the foundry was acquired by the Mergenthaler Lino ...

. In addition to a basic weight, ''Antique Olive'' was produced in medium, condensed, wide, bold, condensed bold, extra bold (known as ''Antique Olive Compact''), and ultra bold (known as ''Nord''). The key shapes, especially the letter O, resemble an olive, which is one of the characteristics which make Excoffon's typefaces unique. It was used in the

Sesame Street ''Sesame Street'' is an American educational children's television series that combines live-action, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry. It is produced by Sesame Workshop (known as the Children's Television Workshop until June 2000) a ...

ending credits from 1978-1983. Lewis Blackwell later commented on the design, "An attempt to offer a more refined sans serif than presented by Helvetica and Univers, but it was too characterful and too late to be widely adopted outside France." The face was later made available in

cold type Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing (digital typesetting). The ...

and digital versions are now offered by

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

and Linotype. A limited set of styles digitized by

URW++ URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the d ...

are available with GhostPDL (part of the

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, ...

project) under the

Aladdin Free Public License The Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter. History The license was derived from the GNU General Public License, but differs on two key points: ...

. Kontour Type designed the Utile typeface, inspired from the Antique Olive typeface. Robert Huber designed the LL Moderne typeface, which based on the Antique Olive typeface.

References

{{reflist

External links

Antique Olive on MyFonts
Humanist sans-serif typefaces Letterpress typefaces Photocomposition typefaces Digital typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1962 Typefaces designed by Roger Excoffon Fonderie Olive typefaces