HAVERHILL - Lance Hidy and his artist wife, Cindia Sanford, were at the movies last winter when Hidy noticed a poster advertising "The Da Vinci Code," a major motion picture based on the best-selling novel by Dan Brown.

Hidy barely noticed the actors on the poster. Instead, his eyes were riveted on his own handiwork.

The lettering on the poster was in a typeface he created years ago and named Penumbra.

"It was a little bit of a thrill for me," Hidy said. "They chose my typeface out of thousands that are available."

For Hidy, a renowned graphic designer and faculty member at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, seeing Penumbra used so publicly, even to advertise a motion picture, was nothing new.

Although, up to that time, Hidy had no idea the movie producers planned on using it.

Penumbra was made available to the world in 1994 by Adobe Systems, a company that contracted with Hidy to create the new font style. Since its release, it has been used in title logos and posters for three major movies: "The Thin Red Line" in 1998, as well as "The Da Vinci Code" and "World Trade Center," both of which were released this year.

Hidy receives royalty payments from Adobe, though he doesn't necessarily know who's paying to use the typeface.

"They only tell me the number of units sold per quarter in Europe, Asia and North America," he said. "I got the same royalty for 'Da Vinci' as when a design student buys the typeface. That's the way design is, sort of an invisible profession."

Hidy, 60, of Merrimac has been fascinated by the written and printed word ever since taking an after-school workshop in calligraphy when he was in the seventh grade in Portland, Ore.

Hidy says the designers at the forefront of creating typography are probably trained in calligraphy - the art of handwriting - where skills such as spacing and understanding letter form are perfected.

Hidy has experienced many successes as a graphic designer. He's created more than 50 poster designs for such noted institutions as the Library of Congress. He has two U.S. postage stamps to his credit, one honoring mentoring children and another for the Special Olympics. He's got a third stamp in the works, and it has to do with jury duty.

He has worked with respected graphic designers and artists, such as the late landscape photographer Ansel Adams, whom he helped create a photographic book, "Yosemite and the Range of Light." He has also written extensively on graphic design for organizations such as the Boston Society of Printers, the first graphic design organization in America.

But it is the royalties from Penumbra that have brought Hidy the most financial reward, though he would not discuss the actual amount he is paid for its use.

"The royalties from this font have brought a greater income to me than I've earned teaching," he said. "It has allowed me to pursue my interest in research and writing about typography."

Penumbra came to be on a design table where Hidy worked with an India ink pen between 1977 and 1990. Hidy initially drew the letters by hand. Later, with help from his assistant at the time, Gino Lee, the drawings were scanned into a computer.

Hidy had been dabbling with ideas for this typeface for years and used earlier versions when lettering posters.

"My friend Sumner Stone, a famous type designer with Adobe Systems, admired the letters in my posters and suggested I turn this into a typeface," he said.

Anyone with the right software can design a font. If you counted all of the fonts available, Hidy said, the number could be in the tens of thousands.

But the number of well-made fonts is probably under 2,000, said Hidy, who estimates that only a few hundred serious fonts are created in any given year.

"And of those, there's a real difference between text faces and display faces," he said. "The number of fonts that you would use to compose a novel, or even a newspaper, are very few. But the number of display faces used for advertising and titles can be in the thousands. They don't have to be as readable and tend to have more style."

Hidy says Penumbra bridges the two worlds that have divided graphic design - classical design and modernism. It is available in 16 different fonts. You can choose from four serifs, or what he calls the "feet at the end of a stroke," and four weights, which range from bold to regular to light.

Penumbra has been used for wine labels and in books, including "The Joy of Cooking." It made its silver screen debut in the 1998 motion picture "The Thin Red Line." It hit the big screen again last summer with the release of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center."

But no matter how big the movie, Hidy says he gets more satisfaction from the use of his typeface by artists he knows.

"A friend of mine uses my typeface to promote her own portrait photography," he said. "To me, that tribute is ever more touching than seeing it on 'Da Vinci Code' posters or other motion picture posters."