The industrial corporation Gardena, situated in Germany, contacted us when they needed to obtain a typeface license for global use. Through a dialogue with employees in charge of various fields within the company, we worked together in establishing a requirement specification.

It was made clear that the typeface should not deviate design-wise from their previous CID typeface, and the typeface had to support not only standard Western European languages, but also Central and Eastern European languages based on the Latin as well as the Greek and Cyrillic (Russian) alphabets.

There was also a need for several different weights and widths, and the typeface had to be available for both print and for web, with the best possible screen rendering qualities. Furthermore it was important to make it clear to all users that this typeface is the new company CID typeface, hence it had to be renamed to include Gardena in the name.

In this case there was not enough time for developing a brand new CID typeface with such an extensive requirement list, so it had to be a commercial typeface. We gathered quotes from different foundries that could match these specifications, and the foundry that offered the best pricing and was most flexible was URW, whose typeface met with all set conditions, could be optimised with manual ClearType hinting for maximum screen rendering quality, and also was allowed to be renamed Gardena Sans.

In co-operation with the foundry we customised the license agreement to allow for a time-unlimited global use of the typeface for print, including free distribution rights to the client’s contracted third parties, along with a three year time-limited license for global use of the typeface for the web.

The whole project with analytic work, evaluation process, gathering and comparing quotes, ordering and final delivery went very smooth and resulted in a satisfied client.