Letraset

Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements that can be transferred to artwork being prepared. Letraset has been acquired by the ColArt group and become part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton.

The Letraset business was founded in London in 1959, introducing innovative media for commercial artists and designers.

Their original product was the Letraset Type Lettering System. By 1961 Letraset's dry rub-down Instant Lettering was perfected. This was to be their core product for many years to come.

Starting in 1964, Letraset also applied the dry rub-down transfer technique to create a children's game called Action Transfers, which would later develop into Kalkitos (marketed by Gillette) and many other series of transferable figures that were very popular up to the 1980s.

Letraset saw a decline in the sales of their materials in the early 1990s so moved into the desktop publishing industry, releasing software packages for the Macintosh such as ImageStudio and ColorStudio. These never saw widespread success. However, as Letraset held the rights to their fonts that had been popular on the dry transfer sheets, it made sense to enter the digital font market (see, for example, Charlotte Sans). Letraset thus began releasing many fonts in formats such as PostScript.

Fonts from designers such as Alan Meeks, Martin Wait, Tim Donaldson and David Quay were released, and many can be found on online retailers such as Fontshop. Some fonts retain 'Letraset' in their title whereas others have been renamed by their new vendors such as ITC.

A selection of fonts is still sold from their web site, separated into fonts from Fontek and Red Rooster. Software include Manga Studio EX and Envelopes, a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator.

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