Ascender Corporation

» see ascendercorp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ascender Corporation was a type foundry in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, which is an industrial suburb northwest of Chicago and not a place anyone associates with typography. It was founded by people who had already drawn typefaces that shipped inside Windows and the Mac operating system. The encyclopedia entry dates the founding to 2004 and Monotype's own announcement of the purchase says 2003, so take the year loosely; the first typeface, a grotesque sans called Endurance, came out in the year the company was formed.

The business had two sides. One sold fonts directly, through AscenderFonts.com for professionals and FontMarketplace.com for people who just wanted something better in Microsoft Office. There was a web font subscription called FontsLive as well. The other side did contract work for manufacturers: custom faces for brand identities, and hinting, which is the slow business of making a letter hold its shape at small sizes on a screen. It also extended glyph sets into languages an original design had never covered.

That second side is where the famous work came from. In 2007 Ascender drew the Droid family that Google shipped as the user interface fonts of the Android platform. It also drew the Liberation fonts that Red Hat released for Linux, metrically matched to Arial and Times New Roman so that a document laid out on Windows would not reflow on a machine that could not license them. The Segoe WP faces that Microsoft made core to Windows Phone 7 came out of the same office.

In August 2010 it announced Webtype.com with The Font Bureau, a joint venture aimed at web designers. Four months later it was sold.

~ the case file ~

~ the two founding hands ~

Steve Matteson, the lead designer, had worked on the Arial and Times New Roman that Microsoft introduced with Windows 3.1 in 1992 and then shipped in every version after it. He also drew Segoe, Microsoft's corporate face, and Convection for the Xbox 360. Tom Rickner, the other founding partner, oversaw the development of the first TrueType fonts ever delivered in an operating system, in Apple's System 7 in 1991, and later had a hand in Georgia and Verdana. Ira Mirochnick was president.

~ what ten point two million bought ~

Monotype Imaging announced the acquisition on 8 December 2010. The price was $10.2 million net of acquired assets, made up of $7.0 million in cash and $3.2 million in restricted stock. All twelve Ascender employees went with it, most of them staying at the Chicago office. Monotype's chief executive Doug Shaw described the point of the deal as broadening the company's font intellectual property.

The Ascender Originals library was folded in beside the Linotype and ITC collections Monotype already owned. That is where a foundry name goes to stop being a company: it becomes a shelf label inside a larger catalog. Monotype went on to buy FontShop in 2014 and was itself taken private in 2019.

~ where the letters went ~

I have never bought a typeface in my life and I have been reading Ascender's work almost every day since about 2010. Droid was on the first Android phones sold here, before Roboto replaced it in 2011. Liberation is what a Linux desktop quietly substitutes when a document asks for Arial, which happens constantly and invisibly. The company that drew both was smaller than most startup teams I have worked on.

ascendercorp.com now redirects to monotype.com. ascenderfonts.com, the store, redirects to fonts.com. Neither one serves a notice explaining what happened, because from the acquirer's point of view nothing did: the files are still for sale, under a different brand, at a different address.

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