Alexa (typeface)

Last updated
Alexa
Alexa font.svg
Category Script
Designer(s) John Benson
Foundry Adobe Systems
Alexa sample.svg
Sample

Alexa is a typeface. It was designed for Adobe Systems in 1995 by John Benson, a United States carver of inscriptions, including those at the John F. Kennedy Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Benson modeled the friendly, casual script after his own handwriting and named it after his niece. Although based on the cancelleresca style of 16th-century Italian writing masters, Alexa has no swash terminals or ligatures. The absence of these features and its pronounced slope give this typeface a distinctly modern look for lively lines and pages. One can use Alexa for both text and display sizes.

Related Research Articles

In typography, a serif is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface, and a typeface that does not include them is a sans-serif one. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic", and serif typefaces as "roman".

Garamond Typeface family

Garamond is a group of many old-style serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and often used, particularly for printing body text and books.

Alexa may refer to:

x-height Distance between the baseline and the mean line of lower-case letters in a typeface

In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lower-case letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font, as well as the letters v, w, and z. One of the most important dimensions of a font, x-height is used to define how high lower-case letters are compared to upper-case letters.

Myriad (typeface) typeface

Myriad is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems. Myriad was intended as a neutral, general-purpose typeface that could fulfill a range of uses and have a form easily expandable by computer-aided design to a large range of weights and widths.

Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Internationale, the SoTA Typography Award, and repeated TDC2 awards from the Type Directors Club. His typefaces are among those most commonly used in books.

Rotis typeface

Rotis is a typeface developed in 1988 by Otl Aicher, a German graphic designer and typographer. In Rotis, Aicher explores an attempt at maximum legibility through a highly unified yet varied typeface family that ranges from full serif, glyphic, and sans-serif. The four basic Rotis variants are:

Trajan (typeface) Typeface

Trajan is a serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe.

Swash (typography) A typographical flourish found on some letterforms, particularly in italics

A swash is a typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph. The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's La Operina, which is dated 1522. As with italic type in general, they were inspired by the conventions of period handwriting. Arrighi's designs influenced designers in Italy and particularly in France.

John Benson may refer to:

Sabon typeface

Sabon is an old-style serif typeface designed by the German-born typographer and designer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) in the period 1964–1967. It was released jointly by the Linotype, Monotype, and Stempel type foundries in 1967. The design of the roman is based on types by Claude Garamond, particularly a specimen printed by the Frankfurt printer Konrad Berner. Berner had married the widow of a fellow printer Jacques Sabon, the source of the face's name, who had bought some of Garamond's type after his death. The italics are based on types designed by a contemporary of Garamond's, Robert Granjon. It is effectively a Garamond revival, though a different name was chosen as many other modern typefaces already carry this name.

Bitstream Charter serif typeface

Bitstream Charter is a serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter in 1987 for Bitstream Inc. Charter is based on Pierre-Simon Fournier’s characters, originating from the 18th century. Classified by Bitstream as a transitional-serif typeface, it also has features of a slab-serif typeface and is often classified as such.

John Everett Benson, known as Fud, is an American calligrapher, stonecarver and typeface designer who has created inscriptions for monuments including the John F. Kennedy memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the National Gallery of Art, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC.

Utopia (typeface) typeface

Utopia is the name of a transitional serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and released by Adobe Systems in 1989.

Ron Carpenter (designer) British designer

Ron Carpenter is an English typographer. He was trained as a cartographer and later became a typeface designer. He works for independent font foundry, Dalton Maag.

Typefaces, fonts, and their glyphs raise intellectual property considerations in copyright, trademark, design patent, and related laws. The copyright status of a typeface—and any font file that describes it digitally—varies between jurisdictions. In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent. Typefaces can be protected in other countries, including the UK, Germany, and France, by industrial design protections that are similar to copyright or design patent in that they protect the abstract shapes. Additionally, in the US and in some other countries, computer fonts—the digital instantiation of the shapes as vector outlines—may be protected by copyright on the computer code that produces them. The name of a typeface may also be protected as a trademark.

<i>Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc.</i>

Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc. was a case in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California regarding the copyrightability of digitized typefaces. The case is notable since typeface designs in general are not protected under United States copyright law, as determined in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer. Since that case, the United States Copyright Office has published policy decisions acknowledging the registration of computer programs that generate typefaces. In this case, the court held that Adobe's Utopia font was protectable under copyright and Southern Software, Inc.'s Veracity font was substantially similar and infringing.

Font catalog collection of specimen of typefaces with the purpose of aiding a typesetter or graphical designer in selecting a font

A font catalog or font catalogue is a collection of specimen of typefaces offering sample use of the fonts for the included typefaces, originally in the form of a printed book. The definition has also been applied to websites offering a specimens collection similar to what a printed catalog provides.

Source Sans Pro open-source sans-serif typeface

Source Sans Pro is a sans serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe. It is the first open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License.

Source Serif Pro open-source serif typeface

Source Serif Pro is a serif typeface created by Frank Grießhammer for Adobe Systems. It is the third open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License.