Adrian Frutiger designed Méridien for the Deberny & Peignot foundry, Paris, in the mid 1950s. The basis for the design was Nicholas Jenson's Renaissance type, with detailed characteristics of the French latin faces from earlier centuries. Frutiger followed this classic roman model with a particular regard for the principles of legibility.

Frutiger's primary objective when developing the Méridien text face was the avoidance of reader fatigue. He felt that taking the stiffness out of characters and giving them an appearance of natural growth would contribute to ease of reading. He also found that achieving a unified appearance for all the white spaces in the alphabet is an important factor in text legibility.

The designer used slightly concave lines to achieve his more natural stems and considerable attention to each counter shape produced the standardization of white shapes he sought. Using pointed serifs of almost triangular construction, similar to those of the latin faces, also helped to simplify the counters.

Frutiger has shown concern that insufficient attention is paid to the fact that the last five letters of the alphabet, together with j and k are only scaled down capitals without a true miniscule form. To compensate for this in Méridien he used a uniform construction of upper and lower serifs and avoided singular designs for character terminals where a ball or a hook might be found in classic roman typefaces.

Aldo Novarese is one of the most prolific type designers of modern times. He has created 76 typefaces which have 218 separate weights between them. He attended the School of Printing in Turin where he studied wood carving, etching and lithography. After a period of teaching graphic art at a typographic school he joined the Nebiolo Typefoundry, where he rose to become its art director. Since 1975 he has worked as a freelance type designer and painter. Among his most famous type designs are Egizio, Garaldus, Recta, Eurostile, Forma, Fenice, Mixage and ITC Novarese.

ITC Novarese is a conscious attempt by the designer to synthesize what he regards as the best features of each of his classifications. Accordingly, the capitals are designed to represent a Lapidario, latin lettering from the second century B.C. The lower case "pretends" to be one created by a stone carver of 2000 years ago. The italics return to chancery origins with strong cursive forms.

Robert Slimbach designed Utopia (for Adobe Systems) in 1989 with the stated intention of creating a typeface to solve a wide range of typographic problems. This desire for a truly flexible typeface is a natural one in Adobe's world where the desktop publisher seeks to produce an even wider variety of documents from his application software.

Slimbach addresses the problem through the creation of three basic text weights in roman and italic: regular, semi bold and bold complemented by a headline-black weight and an all capitals titling font. The addition of small capitals, old style figures, fractions, a wide range of ligatures, superior and inferior characters creates a total font capable of meeting most typesetting requirements.

Although Slimbach refers to eighteenth century type as his starting point, the structure of the typefaces themselves show a contemporary approach. The uniformity of the character widths in both capitals and lower case and especially, the large x-height are features popularized by ITC in their reworking of old style designs.