Thursday, June 27, 2013

Coming to your desktop: fonts from Adobe.



Coming to your desktop: fonts 

from Adobe

June 19, 2013


This is the eighth post in a series 
highlighting foundry partners who will 
including Dalton Maag, FontFont, Mark 
e, exljbris, and URW++.

Adobe’s first retail product, back in 1985, 
was type. Building its business around 
its PostScript page description language, 
Adobe depended on the Type 1 font 
format to give PostScript its powerful 
typographic capabilities. Soon after, the 
Adobe Originals program was conceived 
to make new typefaces specifically for 
desktop publishing. Adobe’s primary 
goal was to create full-featured, timeless 
typefaces with a high degree of technical 
care—combining thoughtful type design 
with an awareness of how best to 
engineer those fonts to perform well in 
any conditions. Now, with over 60 
typeface families available for desktop 
sync from Typekit, there is a wide range 
of Adobe type available for work 
spanning print, digital documents, and 
the web. Let’s look at a few of them.

Adobe Garamond, designed by Robert 
Slimbach, was one of the first Adobe 
Originals released (in 1989). At the time, it 
sought to revive an historic and well-
known design and adapt it for 
contemporary desktop publishing. By 
including an “expert collection” of old 
style figures, small caps, ligatures, and 
other typographic alternates, it also 
expanded the meaning of the word 
“revival” by re-introducing these 
advanced typographic features to a new 
generation of designers. Despite its 
elegant forms, the font outlines were 
carefully constructed for the best 
performance on the hardware of its day—
which, conveniently, has also made it 
excellent for screen rendering.

adobe-garamond-2

Adobe Garamond Pro
Minion, also designed by Robert 
Slimbach and first released in 1990, was 
in some ways a sequel to Adobe 
Garamond. For Slimbach, it emerged as 
an idea during the extensive research 
and development of Adobe Garamond, 
and became a distinctive, original 
typeface inspired by the old style type 
forms of the late Renaissance but 
carefully modernized for digital use. It 
eventually expanded into Cyrillic and 
Greek scripts, and is now considered one 
of the high watermarks of the first 
“golden age” of digital type. Although 
ideal for book typography, it is more 
economical in its proportions than the 
typical old styles, making it useful for 
magazines and other formats where 
space can be limited. Like almost every 
other Adobe Originals text face, today’s 
OpenType version of Minion has a 
complete range of old style figures, small 
caps, fractions, ligatures, and other 
alternates—all easily accessed in 
desktop applications like Adobe InDesign.
minion-2

Minion Pro
Another great revival for the Adobe 
Originals program, Adobe Caslon was 
carefully adapted by Carol Twombly from 
the time-honored types of William 
Caslon. 

Also released in 1990, Adobe Caslon is 
an amalgamation of what Twombly found 
in examining various specimens of 
Caslon’s original metal type from the 18th 
century. Through the design process, 
she worked to preserve its characteristic 
idiosyncracies while blending different 
examples into a single text design 
suitable for modern use.

One particularly appealing aspect of the 
Adobe Caslon typeface family is the 
ornamental quality available through its 
swash capitals and ornaments, based on 
those found in Caslon’s original 
specimens and other contemporary 
sources. They can be used to emphasize 
Caslon’s true personality through initial 
caps, energetic italic settings, and 
borders.

Distinctive and sturdy, Caslon long ago 
proved itself as a workhorse, and Adobe 
Caslon has already proven popular in 
new media like the web—a testament to 
Twombly’s skill and the universal appeal 
of Caslon’s original types.
adobe-caslon-2
Adobe Caslon Pro
Kepler, first released in 1996, was 
conceived as a typeface family to cover 
an expansive range of text and display 
typography. A modern typeface with 
humanist, transitional elements, Kepler 
has a distinctive personality at large 
sizes in display settings, but gracefully 
serves at text sizes as well, avoiding the 
tedium that can come with reading long 
text passages set in more severe modern 
faces like Bodoni. Its vertical stress, a 
feature of all modern style typefaces, can 
often be the perfect choice for screen 
rendering.
Typekit offers sixteen variations of 
Kepler for desktop syncing, covering text 
and display designs in regular and 
semicondensed widths, and in roman 
and italic styles—making it a particularly 
flexible and powerful choice for a wide 
range of projects.
kepler-2
Kepler Std
Below is a complete list of the families 
from Adobe that we’ll be making available 
for desktop sync.Add them to your 
favorites so you can find them quickly 
when we launch the desktop sync 
feature, and use them on the web today. 
If you’ve never given Typekit a try, sign 
up (it’s free!), and upgrade to apaid 
plan when you’re ready.
Posted by Christopher Slye
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