Perpetua has certain similarities to Sterling. Indeed, Sterling may have used Perpetua as an inspiration. Sterling looks more 'refined' than Perpetua IMO. It is gorgeous.

Nick Cooke

Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but I thought of Throhand.

Kent Lew is working on display variants of Whitman, due out soon....

Sterling does look like it was influenced by Perpetua. Perpetua, while older and established, is not commonly used. It would be distinctive in a magazine, though probably a little light.

Liz --

Hey, are you working with Family Fun and the Impress folks over in that round building in Northampton, by any chance? I'm just an hour west of you over here in Berkshire county.

Here are a few Whitman settings for direct comparison with the Sterling jpgs. The display is set in the Regular weight, with one line of Light at the end for comparison. (There will be seven weights and three widths total in the family.) The retail release should be ready in the next couple weeks, I hope . . .

There are also a few additions to the text family that are being prepped for retail release. Bold Italic, Semibold and Semibold Italic fonts will soon be available.

This image shows the three weights.

I pulled these together pretty quickly, so the lo-res rasterization leaves a bit to be desired. If you want to see Whitman in a context more comparable to what you're doing, look for a copy of Brides magazine. They use Whitman for feature text (granted, it can be a little tricky to find amid all the ads and all the Relay sans serif). They also have original versions of some of the Display weights that they use here and there.

Let me know if I can answer any questions about Whitman to help in your consideration.

-- K.

I love Perpetua but I have to caution you against it if you're using InDesign. The optical and metric kerning pairs are pretty dodgy, especially in the Italic. Since InD doesn't have the kerning tables option (grrrr!) you'd have to go in and tweak the font itself. I just used it for a book and had to do a lot of manual kerning, quite time consuming.

I have the Adobe Perpetua from 1998 - it's possible the Linotype version is better - unless they're the same.

Sterling is pretty - it's reminding me of something else - tip of my tongue...
Whitman's great too.

Scaling is an issue for Perpetua.
It gets a bit thin at small sizes.
So it may be worthwhile, if you're after the effect of finesse, to opt for a typeface that has some size-specific variants.
That gives you more flexibility in your layouts.

Chronicle (H&FJ)
http://www.typography.com/catalog/chronicle/index.html
in use in Delta's Sky magazine: http://www.typophile.com/node/32911

Leitura (DSType)
http://www.typetrust.com/fonts/font.php?id=MzYy
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/dstype/leitura-display/

Publico (Christian Schwartz)
http://christianschwartz.com/publico.shtml

Thanks everyone for your excellent suggestions.

Kent, you hit the nail on the head with our identity although we're not in that great historic building anymore. Always glad to know local designers!

And we will certainly look forward to seeing more of Whitman as well.