Phil Martin, creator of over 400 typefaces from the late '60s through the '80s, designed Grad as a redesign of the classic Century Schoolbook for his personal use in the early '90s.

Changes both subtle and obvious have been made and many new features have been added such as small caps, old style figures, ligatures, and swash capitals.
For ten years, Grad was trapped inside Phil’s old DOS computer in an obsolete format. Working from laserprints provided by Phil and specimens of the original ATF Century Schoolbook, Mark Simonson has brought it into the 21st century as a family of three feature-rich OpenType fonts.

All characters, including the swashes, small caps, and alternate characters are included in the basic Grad, Grad Italic, and Grad Bold fonts. The supplementary fonts (Grad Alternate, Grad Sc Osf, etc.) are included for use with programs that do not yet support OpenType features. The supplementary fonts are not needed at all with OpenType-savvy programs such as Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress 7, and so forth.