St Petersburg, a US distributor and a first Windows release.

FontLab began as software written in one city and sold from another. The company’s own history says its predecessor, Pyrus North America Ltd., was established in 1992 to market and distribute internationally the software produced by SoftUnion Ltd. of St Petersburg. English Wikipedia says the program was first developed at SoftUnion under the lead programmer Yuri Yarmola, and that Pyrus was formed in the United States to distribute it.

The first product followed a year later. The company says FontLab 2.0 for Windows was released in 1993, and that in 1994 SoftUnion developed and Pyrus released version 2.5, which added TrueType font editing. Two utilities arrived the same year and were bundled with it: ScanFont, for turning scanned images into fonts, and FindFont, for locating fonts with particular characteristics on a hard disk.

Ownership then moved in two steps. The company history says that in 1995 SoftUnion decided to divest its software business to concentrate on hardware, and that all the rights to FontLab were sold to Pyrus and the SoftUnion programming team. Pyrus retained Yarmola, head of the original programming group, to continue development. In January 2000, the history says, a new company, Fontlab Ltd., bought all the assets of Pyrus NA with the aim of expanding international sales. Wikipedia describes the same sequence as Pyrus buying the rights, hiring Yarmola and restructuring as Fontlab Ltd.

The company names its founders as Yuri Yarmola, whom it describes as vice president and lead developer, and Ted Harrison, whom it describes as president, and it names Adam Twardoch as director of products. Its history page includes photographs captioned with Yarmola and Harrison in 1998, Yarmola and Twardoch with Emil Yakupov in 1998, and the FontLab St Petersburg team in 2001.

The name works on two levels. The company spells itself Fontlab Ltd., with a lower-case l, while the product is written FontLab, and the company says FontLab is also the name of its font editor, citing FontLab 7 and its predecessor FontLab Studio 5.

A product line built one release at a time.

Much of FontLab’s public record is a dated list of products. The company says that in 1996 Pyrus released FontLab Composer, a multilingual editor for Windows and OS/2 that could handle CID-keyed fonts with the very large Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets, and SigMaker, a utility that added a signature or other image to a TrueType font. In 1997 came TypeTool, a basic editor that converted between TrueType and Type 1 formats, and ScanFont 3.0.

The company says FontLab 3.0 for Windows was released in June 1998 after a complete rewrite, adding custom TrueType hinting and native TrueType outline editing. Late in 1998 a port of Composer became its opening product for the Macintosh. In early 1999 it added TransType, for converting fonts between Windows and Mac formats, and FONmaker, a bitmap font editor, and in March 1999, at the Seybold Spring Seminar in Boston, it announced the port of FontLab 3.0 to the Mac.

Under the Fontlab Ltd. name the list continued. The company says it released TransType 2 and BitFonter, a bitmap font editor, in 2001; announced Photofont, an XML-based specification for bitmap fonts, in October 2001; released FontLab 4 for Windows in December 2001 with OpenType editing; and released AsiaFont Studio in March 2002, combining FontLab 4 and Composer for CJKV fonts.

Wikipedia’s release list gives the later dates: FontLab Studio 5 on 12 December 2005 for the Mac, TypeTool 3 on 28 March 2007, FontLab VI on 8 December 2017, FontLab 7 on 30 November 2019 and FontLab 8 on 26 June 2022. It says Windows versions at first came out ahead of the Mac ones, and that both have been released at the same time since FontLab VI. The naming itself shifted along the way, from plain numbers to “Studio 5”, to the Roman numeral VI, and back to Arabic numerals with 7 and 8.

Independent coverage set the program beside newer tools. Writing in Creative Bloq on 31 July 2014, in a piece first published in Computer Arts issue 229, Béla Frank of the foundry Fontsmith said the first font editor he opened, in 2007, was FontLab Studio, and that its workflow could be automated with Python scripting that reached the program’s internal objects.

Icons, file formats and version numbers.

Design software carries its identity on surfaces that most brands never have to think about. The first is the app icon: a square of a few hundred pixels that sits in a dock, a taskbar or a launcher beside dozens of others, and that has to be recognisable at a size smaller than a fingernail. Icons for creative tools are often redrawn when an operating system changes its visual language, so a single program can accumulate several generations of icon over its life.

The second surface is the splash screen or start window, the image that appears while the program loads. For many users it is the moment they see the product name at full size, and it is frequently refreshed with each major release.

A third surface is the file format. A document extension appears in file names, in email attachments and in folder listings, and a distinct document icon lets a user spot a working file among exports. The extension often outlives the interface around it.

Finally, release names and version numbers act as a kind of sub-brand. A numbered release, a year-based name or a renamed edition tells users which generation of the tool they have, and the way a developer numbers its versions becomes part of how the product is talked about.

Fontographer joins the family.

In 2005 FontLab took over a second font editor with its own name and history. English Wikipedia says Fontographer was developed by James R. Von Ehr II, who founded the Altsys Corporation in December 1984, and that it was released for the Mac in January 1986. It says Altsys was acquired by Macromedia in January 1995, and that Fontographer and the illustration program FreeHand joined the Macromedia line-up.

Wikipedia says that in May 2005 Fontlab Ltd. announced it had licensed distribution rights to Fontographer from Macromedia and resumed development, that in December 2005 it shipped a new version for the Mac running natively on OS X, and that it later bought the rights to the program outright. Its FontLab article says Macromedia sold Fontographer’s rights and code to FontLab during Macromedia’s acquisition by Adobe in 2005. Fontographer 5.0 followed in June 2010. FontLab also made a converter called FogLamp for the native Fontographer .fog files, and Wikipedia says later FontLab editors can open recent Fontographer files directly.

In 2014 Creative Bloq discussed the two programs together. The company today lists FontLab, Fontographer, TypeTool, TransType, BitFonter and FontLab Pad among its apps, and gives 1992 as its starting year.

For a design guide, FontLab shows how a software maker can carry one name through more than three decades of releases, with the version number, Arabic or Roman, doing much of the identity work. Compare Glyphs, a newer font editor that built its version number into its icon, and the type studio Dalton Maag. For this guide we use node red, outline blue and proof grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep FontLab’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.