16 Nov 2009, Posted by Dan in Highlighted Type, 0 Comments

ITC Chino

New from the Linotype peeps is ITC Chino! This family includes display fonts and text fonts which are great for big, bold headlines or bodies of text and really has a nice brush-like feel (to steal a line from their website). A good combination of curves and straight lines give it a structured but soft feel.

A very nice feature of ITC Chino is the variety of ligatures, alternates, and fractions. While most people using fonts tend not to care about this kind of thing, I think it’s really important to point out. When I work with design interns and their typography (after switching them from Arial to Helvetica), I like to point out that words flow much easier when you can turn to a ligature, or that some letters in a word pair better with either a single story ‘a’ or a double-story ‘a’ for example (more on that in a later post!) A good font like ITC Chino will always offer a good selection, unlike many free fonts out there.

I was hit up the free ITC Chino Black Italic offer and really haven’t had the opportunity (or money) to try the rest of the fonts out in this family. But I have had a bit of fun over the past few weeks experimenting and tossing the Black Italic font into some concepts and proposals. This font definitely has a unique character to it that no other font on my system has, which has made it a very welcome addition to my font folder.

If you haven’t already, go ahead and check out the freebie and give it a shot in your next project– you might find how nice it is to work with, opposed to some of the usual fonts you might work with. It’s a great way to mix up the usual and go for something a bit more unique. And as always, I love hearing your comments– what do you think of ITC Chino? And if you’ve had a chance to use it, how did the project or design turn out?