Claire's Design Ideas: October 2011

The first typographer to refine numeral design was the sixteenth-century French type designer Claude Garamond. Garamond is credited for developing the first set of figures that specifically complemented a font type.

Garamond’s numbers were intended for use in text, and therefore had ascenders and descenders, as well as similar proportions to the lower case letters. This style, known today as text figures are drawn slightly taller than the x-height to avoid confusion between letters and figures of the same shape (such as the zero and the lower case o, for example). Similarly, the descenders of the text figures are usually shorter than those on the letters. In most fonts, the 0, 1 and 2 are medial forms; the 3,4,5,7 and 9 descend, and the 6 and 8 ascend. However, these alignments were not always standard. In the most common variation the 3 and 5 are also ascending figures.

Claude Garamond

Garamond’s historical significance changed when it emerged in the 1920s that the typefaces that had borne his name for some time were, in fact, the result of the work of the French punch cutter and printer Jean Jannon. Garamond’s type is, however, the basis for the roman forms of Linotype Granjon, Berthold Garamond and Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond.

Garamond is credited with developing the sloped capital forms of the italic letterm a genre previously limited to lowercase, and thus creating the conditions for the concept of the companion italic, which is widely attributed to his younger colleague Robert Granjon. Many revivals of Garamond’s roman types partner these with italics based upon those of Granjon.

Claude Garamond (above) was a highly influential type founder, publisher and punchcutter, whose types have been widely copied and are still un use today. His work links Francesco Griffo’s letters cut for Aldus Manutius with the wider development of the Old-Style letter across Europe.

Robert Slimbach 1989, 2004

The types of Claude Garamond have been adapted very freely to successive technologies, and even ‘true Garamonds’ from the 20^th century show considerable variations in form and x-height. Garamond was among the first type designers to design companion italic. His letters show fairly low contrast and, as with many letterpress faces, they can look light on the page. Slimbach’s adobe Garamond is a characteristically efficient and pragmatic revival in a genre that has been the subject of misattribution and varied interpretations.

These distinctive old-style design—inspired by the types cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldus Manutius in Venice—were used to print exquisite books now regarded as some of the finest examples of French typography. Garamond and Granjon produced the majority of their work during the 16^th century, a time considered by many to be the golden age of French typography. Their designs, now available in digital form, are among the most notable typographic achievements of the era.

These original Garamond letterforms, as well as many other roman types of the 16^th century are classified as Garalde or old style. A horizontal bar on the e, bracketed serifs, axis curves that are inclined to the left, and notable contrast between thick and thin strokes are all typical features of this style. Traits particular to Garamond included the small bowl of the a and the small eye of the e, a the downward slope of most stop serifs, and the long extenders. These attributes are fairly consistent among all variations.

When Garamond died in 1561, his punches and matrices were sold to the printer Christopher Plantin, whose independent press was located in Antwerp. Curiously, the types soon appeared on a broadside (Fig. 3) printed by the type foundry Egenolff-Berner. The broadside, which is often used as a reference for contemporary renditions, has several Garamond faces paired with italics designed by Robert Granjon. The specimens printed by this foundry established a high standard in typography, and subsequently Garamond fonts came to influence a huge number of type designs. This font has been expanded to include small caps, titling caps, expert fonts, and swash caps, which were typical in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In 1989, Adobe introduced Adobe Garamond, whose designer, Robert Slimbach, deftly embraced the beauty of Garamond’s romans and Granjon’s italics. Actually, his decision to combine Granjon and Garamond tupes seems to have been an inevitable marriage. Slimbach reflects that the types “are such beautiful models-canons, really—of mondern letter design. Granjon was the master of French old-style italics. Garamond’s masterpieces were the roman letterforms. They took those forms further than anyone had previously taken tthem, in a sense drawing them to their logical conclusions.

He was compelled to select this particular example because the forms successfully merged a calligraphic quality with the refined roman letter.

Beause Claude Garamond cut punches at diminutive sizes, the letterforms have a sculptural quality and a natural inconsistency. The oragainc aspects of the original types are retained in Slimbach’s refiened letterforms, yet the digital precision of the forms also meets the myriad demands of contemporary useage. Adobe Garamond is an exquisite reinterpretation of its prototype. The extensive family consists of three weights, italics, and an expert collection.

Adobe Garamond’s calligraphic form shines through its increased modularity and contrast in storke weight, unlike Stempel Garamond, which relies heavily on angular forms. The fluid strokes of Adobe Garamond create a soft and harmonious string of characters, while embracing the calligraphic nuances inherent in the original Garamond.

All of the American editions of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are set in twelve-point Adobe Garamond, except Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is set in 11.5-point Adobe Garamond[7][8] because it is longer.

A variation on the Garamond typeface was adopted by Apple in 1984 upon the release of the Macintosh. For branding and marketing the new Macintosh family of products, Apple's designers used the ITC Garamond Light and Book weights and digitally condensed them twenty percent. The result was not as compressed as ITC Garamond Light Condensed or ITC Garamond Book Condensed. Not being a multiple master font, stroke contrast in some characters was too light, and some of the interior counters appeared awkward. To address these problems, Apple commissioned ITC and Bitstream to develop a variant for their proprietary use that was similar in width and feeling, but addressed the digitally condensed version’s shortcomings. Designers at Bitstream produced a unique digital variant, condensed approximately twenty percent, and worked with Apple to make the face more distinct. Following this, Chuck Rowe hinted the TrueTypes. The fonts delivered to Apple were known as Apple Garamond.[9]

The logo of clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch uses a variation of the Garamond typeface.

Also the Garamond text is used on the 1985 Nintendo's video game consoles in italic form (after the text "Nintendo Entertainment System" or NES) to describe the various version of the consoles.

Typeface Designer (Research)

Claude Garamond (1480–1561)  Garamond began his career apprenticing and working for printers Simone de Colines and Henri Estienne. When Estienne the elder died Garamond worked independently —the first punchcutter to design and produce type faces for sale to other printers. His type designs, while still classified as Old Style, moved further from the characteristics of calligraphy and are categorized in a subdivision of Old Style named Garalde, (Aldus + Garamond). .. According to Alexander Lawson it is generally believed that Garamond based his types upon the work of Griffo.   The type design sold today under the name of Garamond was not his, but the work of Jean Jannon, who modeled his later type design on Garamond's work. ( See item #12)

"The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. He trained as punch-cutter in Paris. He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman typeface and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that typeface at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms." Excerpt from Storm Type Foundry

Robert Slimbach was born in 1956 in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

Shortly after, he arrived in South California where he spent his childhood and his youth.

After leaving college he developed an interest in graphic design and typefaces while running a small screen printshop for manufacturing posters and greeting cards. This work brought him into contact with "Autologic Incorporation" in Newbury Park, CA.

After training from 1983 to 1985, Robert Slimbach worked as a font designer with "Autologic Incorporation", where Sumner Stone also worked for a short time. There he received further training, not just as a font designer but also as a calligrapher.

Robert Slimbach was then self-employed for two years and developed the two fonts "ITC Slimbach®" and "ITC Giovanni®" for the International Typeface Corporation in New York.

In 1987 he joined "Adobe Systems". Ever since, he has been involved in developing new fonts for the Adobe Originals program. His time at "Adobe Systems Incorporation" in Mountain View, CA, has seen the production of the Utopia®, Adobe Garamond™ and Minion® font families by 1991 and Poetica™ by 1992.

In 1991, he received the Charles Peignot Award from the Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design. More recently, Slimbach’s own roman script calligraphy formed the basis for his Brioso.

Since 2000, the rate of Slimbach's new typefaces has slowed, as he has taken advantage of the new linguistic and typographic capabilities offered by the OpenType format. Where in the 1990s a given typeface design might be instantiated in one or two fonts, with 200-500 glyphs, a typical new Slimbach work post-2000 has 1500-3000 glyphs.

In 2004, Adobe released Garamond Premier Pro, a new take on the Garamond designs, which Slimbach had been working on for 15 years, since he first completed Adobe Garamond in 1989.

Slimbach has notable skills in several fields other than type design: he went to college on a gymnastics scholarship, and he is an accomplished calligrapher and photographer. His photographic work uses black & white film, and is mainly portraits that examine human foibles and idiosyncrasies.