The Excellent font family is based on a single-weight typewriter font of the same name, which was first offered by Triumph-Adler for their range of daisy wheel typewriters following 1984.

Triumph (Nuremberg) and Adler (Frankfurt/M.) both started as traditional industrial companies. Founded as bicycle manufacturers in the 1890s, they quickly expanded to the production of mechanical typewriters, motorbikes, cars – and, during war times, tanks. Both companies reengaged with their typewriter production soon after the Second World War. In 1958 Dresdner Bank and Grundig merged the two companies, creating Triumph-Adler, which would later be passed in quick succession from US conglomerate Litton (1969), to Volkswagen (1979) and, finally, to Olivetti (1986). All the while Triumph-Adler pursued numerous technological innovations in the fields of electric typewriters, office computers as well as micro computers that made them a leading international competitor to IBM.

Triumph-Adler introduced the printwheel technology with the model SE 1010 in 1980, at a time when typewriters were still the primary tool for office communication. The Excellent typeface was created with the aim to provide stylistic variety and typographic sophistication for a wide array of uses. Triumph-Adler commissioned the Stempel type foundry to create a new, decidedly contemporary typeface for their range of typewriters and printers.

The typeface was drawn by Lothar Kloth und Willy Deege at Stempel’s design studio in the spring of 1983. While the overall formal concept references stylistic details of Aldo Novarese’s Eurostile (1962), it is clearly an original design in its own right with a distinctive, unique aesthetic. In 1984, Stempel’s parent company, Linotype, also published a single-weight version of this design for use on their Linotronic phototype systems. However, the typeface never made the transition into PostScript™ digital fonts and was dropped from the Lintotype catalogue.

Stephan Müller’s faithful rendering offers an additional bold weight, as well as italic cuts to make up a fully functional suite of sophisticated typewriter fonts for a wide range of uses. When they were first released on Lineto, in 2008, Triumph-Adler had begun a close partnership with Kyocera Mita Corporation from Japan. Eventually Kyocera Mita fully acquired Triumph-Adler and the company underwent yet another transformation, becoming a provider of service document management solutions, which today operates offices in 60 countries. Meanwhile, daisy wheel cartridges with the original Excellent font are still manufactured today and are availble from specialist outlets.