Whitman Roman

Kent Lew

Whitman

Whitman Display Regular

Whitman Display

Whitman Text Regular

Whitman Text

Whitman Text Variable Roman

Whitman Text Variable

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A former book designer and creative director, Kent Lew has been designing type since the early 2000s. His first retail font family, Whitman, was originally published by Font Bureau in 2003 and has been used extensively in books, newspapers, and magazines, including Brides, Women’s Health, Fortune, and W.Kent has provided custom typeface design for prominent publications such as Minneapolis Star Tribune, New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, and TIME magazine. He produced font specimens and marketing materials for Font Bureau for many years, has performed font engineering and production work for Carter &amp; Cone, and advised Japan’s Morisawa foundry on the design of extended Latin character sets. He also consults for book and magazine publishers on type selection, typography standards, and text production workflows.His primary interest lies in text typeface design, drawing heavily on his own experience specifying and setting type, and he is greatly influenced by the work of mid-20th century designers like Dwiggins, Ruzicka, and Blumenthal.

Kent Lew has been a designer for nearly three decades. After graduating from Willamette University with a degree in Art, he worked for many years as a graphic designer and illustrator. Coming from a family of writers and editors, it was inevitable that he would gravitate toward the design of words and text. So eventually he turned his attention to book design, later becoming the creative director at Storey Publishing. Kent now works mostly as a type designer, font engineer, and typographic consultant.He has provided design and production assistance to the Font Bureau, Carter &amp; Cone, and Morisawa. His first typeface, Whitman, was awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design by the Type Directors Club in 2002 and was published by the Font Bureau the following year. Several styles of Whitman Display and Whitman Banner were subsequently commissioned by both newspapers and magazines, among them the Minneapolis Star Tribune, New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, and Fortune. More recently, Kent designed the Haffner Text font family for TIME magazine’s 2015 redesign, followed by Haffner Display fonts for the 2021 design refresh. He also designed the Clarimo family of fonts for Morisawa Inc. of Japan.He currently lives with his wife and two pugs in a ca. 1800s tavern in a small rural town in Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

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Initially released in 2003, and inspired largely by the work of W.A. Dwiggins and Eric Gill, Whitman combines the character and design traits of classic mid–20th century book types with a contemporary, digital aesthetic. In 2004, Monica Moses commissioned Whitman Display styles for headlines in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, citing its “intelligence but not self-importance.” In the years that followed, the family was further expanded for Fortune magazine and others, yielding a versatile series ranging from light, stately charm to rich, robust authority. In 2024, the original Whitman styles were revisited and updated with extended language support and additional typographic features and re-released as Whitman Text.