Ascender Corporation

Ascender Corporation is a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers and font-industry veterans who had previously been involved in developing fonts used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones and other digital technology devices. On December 8, 2010 Ascender Corp. was acquired by Monotype Imaging.

Currently Ascender Corporation markets both directly to consumers with font packs and individual fonts, and to original equipment manufacturers and software developers with custom font-design and implementation services. A portion of the company’s work since its founding has been in extending font glyphs for international use and in the process of “hinting,” whereby characters are optimized for screen viewing.

Steve Matteson, one of Ascender’s founding partners and lead type designer, worked on the Arial and Times New Roman typefaces that Microsoft Corporation introduced in Windows 3.1 in 1992. These same fonts have been distributed in all subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows and recent versions of Mac OS. Since then Matteson has designed other fonts including Segoe, Microsoft’s current corporate branding font, Convection for the Xbox 360, and the Liberation fonts for Red Hat’s Linux Distribution. Some of Matteson’s other font designs include Andale Mono, Andy, Curlz and Endurance.

Another founding partner of Ascender, Tom Rickner, specializes in the technical nuances of digital typography, the production of non-Latin scripts and TrueType font hinting. Rickner oversaw the development of the first TrueType fonts delivered in Apple Computer’s System 7 in 1991. Most recently Rickner was involved in the development of Microsoft’s ClearType font collection. He has also been involved in the design and production of many typefaces created for the digital environment including Georgia, Graphite, Meiryo, Nina, Tahoma, Tekton and Verdana.

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