Superfamilies have grown to become a common feature of typography in the twenty-first century. Their history and their conceptual background will be examined and examples  from Sumner Stone’s own work and the work of other designers, both historical and contemporary will be examined and discussed.

Sumner Stone is the principal of Stone Type Foundry Inc. in Rumsey, California. Founded by Mr. Stone in 1990, Stone Type Foundry designs and produces new typefaces and creates custom designs for a diverse range of clients including Mobil, General Motors, Stanford University, the San Francisco Public Library and Hallmark Cards. Sumner designed the ITC Stone superfamily, the Cycles/Stone Print/SFPL/Arepo superfamily, and the Basalt/Magma/Munc/Tuff/Numa superfamily as well as other prize-winning typeface families including the ITC Bodoni. Scripps College commissioned his revival of Scripps College Old Style, originally designed by Frederic Goudy. He is the author of On Stone: The Art and Use of Typography on the Personal Computer, Font: Sumner Stone, Calligraphy and Type Design in a Digital Age, and numerous articles on type design and typographic history. He has lectured widely on these subjects.

Sumner has conducted classes and workshops in Typography and Type Design in many places including the Type@Cooper program at Cooper Union where he has taught for the past three years. From 1984 to 1989 Mr. Stone was Director of Typography for Adobe Systems, Inc., where he conceived and implemented Adobe’s typographic program including the Adobe Originals.

Mr. Stone’s education in the graphic arts began when he studied calligraphy with Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He holds an MA degree in Mathematics.

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