Scene Pro Font Family

Clean. Calm. Highly legible. This is the design brief Sebastian Lester set for himself when he began to create the Scene typeface family.

Work on Scene began after Lester had developed several corporate identity fonts for Monotype Imaging. He wanted to provide graphic designers and creative directors with a suite of fonts that would serve as a strong foundation for identity projects. He also wanted to incorporate what he’d learned about achieving best on-screen and print legibility. Much of the Scene family’s clarity lies in an x-height that sits comfortably between that of Helvetica and Verdana. Full-bodied counters, long ascenders and descenders, and exceptionally well-drawn letters also play their parts. Lester took special care with letter spacing and kerning to ensure optimal typographic color at any size.

Scene is the result of two years of after-hours and weekend work. “It started off as a part-time project,” says Lester, “but ended up as virtually a second full-time job.” The completed family is six weights with complementary italic designs. In addition are included a set of “semi-sans” characters that introduce more expressive word rhythms into headlines and blocks of copy. In addition, aligning and old style numerals were drawn for all six weights.

Newly released is Scene Pro, in OpenType format. Now graphic communicators can work with this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType’s capabilities, including the automatic insertion of old style figures, ligatures and small caps.

The new Scene Pro fonts offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages, in addition to English.