Custom Font for the New Living Translation Bible 

Tyndale House Publishers, one of the foremost Bible publishers in the United States, had a problem. In addition to rising ink, paper and other printing costs, adding study notes in the New Living Translation, Second Edition, would increase the page count. And, unlike other publishers, they could not go back to the author and ask to have text cut. Deleting even one word from the Bible was out of the question!

How a custom typeface design makes the Bible more readable

I was especially jazzed with the way the new One Year Bible turned out — a 10% longer text in a stronger typeface — yielding the same page count! To think we competed with Century OS and Weidemann — and I think — won.”

 Timothy Botts, Senior Art Director

The Business Case

The Challenge: Design a New Font to Make the Holy Bible More Readable

Brand Strategy:

Why did Tyndale Choose Aespire to design a new Bible typeface?

After Tyndale originally approached Robert Slimbach (of Adobe), who was not available due to commitments to existing projects, Brian Sooy of Aespire was Tyndale's next choice. 

In 1995, Altered Ego Fonts released Veritas ( Latin for Truth ), a font designed with Bibles and publications in mind, as the narrow columns don't lend themselves to readability due to the small number of words per line. Veritas was designed as a narrow-width font, (not condensed) to aid legibility.

Many years ago, Brian Sooy was introduced to Timothy R. Botts, a world-renowned calligrapher. Tim was also Sr. Art Director at Tyndale, so after some time we discussed the Bible font Veritas, suggesting that it would be useful for making the Bible more readable. Eventually, Tyndale used Veritas in two editions of the New Living Translation.

During the course of many conversations, Brian mentioned to Tim a number of times that it would make sense for Tyndale to have a custom font for their New Living Translation (The first edition was completed in 1996). This version was translated with the goal of making it easy to read and understand while being faithful and accurate to the original biblical texts.

In August 2002, one of Tim’s associates contacted me to explore whether we had an existing font that could be used for their technical requirements. Other options we discussed were customizing a font or starting from scratch.

The most practical solution was to start with an existing font, and Veritas was the choice. The final font bears little similarity to Veritas, but the groundwork had been laid.

Outcomes:

The Typographic Solution to Design and Branding Challenges

Like any design project, this one had a brief with some technical criteria, to help define and solve the design problem.

• Achieve a better character count (to maximize space and ultimately save paper).
• Eliminate artificial condensing of standard fonts (such as ITC Giovanni).
• Have visual similarities to ITC Giovanni, by Robert Slimbach.
• Make the font “stronger.”
• Achieve as good as or better character count than ITC Weidemann or Century Old Style.
• Achieve better character count while maintaining readability.

“The Lucerna Bible typeface is beautiful in the NLT Study Bible.”

“Much of any review will be subjective. Perhaps that is especially so regarding typeface. The typeface used is Lucerna which was ‘designed by Aespire exclusively for Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.’ The Lucerna typeface is beautiful in the NLT Study Bible. It looks nice in my Slimline Reference Edition but with the larger font size in the Study Bible the typeface becomes all the more beautiful. The combination of typeface and size makes for a reading experience that is comfortable to my eyes.” – Stan McCullars