Ascender Corporation
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Digital typography, software |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Founder | Steve Matteson |
| Defunct | December 8, 2010 |
| Fate | Acquired by Monotype Imaging |
| Headquarters | Elk Grove Village, Illinois , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Steve Matteson (Founder, principal type designer), Tom Rickner (Co-founder) |
| Products | Digital fonts, font packages, custom font creation and integration services |
| Parent | Monotype Imaging (from 2010) |
Ascender Corporation operated as a digital typeface foundry and software enterprise headquartered in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Established in 2004 by a group of software engineers and typographers, including founder Steve Matteson, Ascender focused on creating fonts for use in computers, printers, mobile phones, and various digital devices. On December 8, 2010, the company was acquired by Monotype Imaging.
The firm served both end consumers by offering font packages and individual typefaces, as well as original equipment manufacturers and software developers through custom font creation and integration services. Ascender also refined font glyph designs for global markets and applied specialized "hinting" techniques to enhance character rendering on screens.
Subsidiaries
Webtype.com was established as a collaborative initiative on August 17, 2010, between The Font Bureau and Ascender Corporation. This platform aimed to supply web designers and developers with premium fonts that elevate website typography quality and readability.
Type designers
Steve Matteson, who founded Ascender and served as its principal type designer, played a key role in developing prominent fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman, which have been included with Microsoft Windows since 1992. He also designed Microsoft's corporate typeface Segoe, the Convection font for the Xbox 360, and the Liberation fonts for Red Hat’s Linux distribution. His portfolio further includes notable designs like Andalé Mono, Andy, Curlz, and Endurance.
Co-founder Tom Rickner specialized in the technical dimensions of digital typography, focusing on non-Latin scripts and TrueType font hinting. He spearheaded the creation of the first TrueType fonts for Apple Computer’s System 7 in 1991 and contributed to Microsoft's ClearType font collection. Rickner’s work encompasses significant typefaces such as Georgia, Graphite, Meiryo, Nina, Tahoma, Tekton, and Verdana.
Products
Ascender introduced its inaugural typeface Endurance in its founding year. Designed following the Swiss grotesque sans serif tradition, it offers exceptional legibility both in print and on screen. Compared to widely used grotesques like Arial and Helvetica, Endurance features less compressed capital letters, shorter terminals, and more open counters. Its italics are uniquely crafted rather than mechanically slanted.
In 2005, Ascender secured licensing agreements with Microsoft to distribute Microsoft fonts including the Windows Core Fonts suite along with multilingual fonts from Microsoft’s software products and operating systems. The company also collaborated with IBM to provide Japanese fonts and partnered with Bigelow & Holmes Type Foundry to distribute the Lucida font family.
That same year, Steve Matteson designed custom fonts for Microsoft's Xbox 360 platform. These typefaces were optimized for superior on-screen clarity and supported multiple languages in alignment with Xbox branding requirements.
By late 2005, Ascender released its first OpenType Pro font called Pericles Pro, inspired by Robert Foster’s 1934 American Type Founders design. Pericles Pro features an extensive set of 433 glyphs including stylistic alternates, ligatures, uppercase letters, small capitals, superscript, and subscript characters.
In 2006, Ascender broadened its offerings to include fonts compliant with the EIA-708-B standard for Digital TV Closed Captioning (DTVCC), large-scale Unicode-supporting fonts, and typefaces designed specifically for the HD DVD Advanced Content platform to improve on-screen presentation.
Additionally, the company launched the Ascender Personality Kit targeting mobile phones—a comprehensive package combining ringtones, wallpapers, themes, and fonts intended to simplify customization of Windows Mobile devices.
In November 2007, Ascender developed the Droid font family tailored for the Android smartphone ecosystem, thereby expanding its footprint within mobile device markets.
During that year, Ascender licensed Microsoft’s scalable font engine technology incorporating hinting capabilities to enhance text clarity on screens. The company also created the Liberation fonts, distributed by Red Hat, while making Microsoft’s ClearType Font Collection accessible across Mac OS, Unix systems, and earlier Windows versions beyond Vista.
Research
Ascender undertook pivotal typographic investigations, including an examination of typefaces featured on the front pages of major American daily newspapers, revealing commonly used fonts alongside the frequent implementation of bespoke type designs.
In another notable analysis, more than 4,500 TrueType fonts—available as free or shareware downloads across Macintosh, Windows, and Linux systems—were evaluated. This study measured their compatibility for web deployment according to the CSS standards proposed by the W3C, discovering that 95.9% of the 4,572 fonts tested did not pass one or more of six established quality criteria.
See also
External links
- Ascender Corporation (archived 5 February 2011)
- Microsoft Typography
- Webtype.com (archived 18 March 2021)