Carol Twombly | |
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Born | Concord, Massachusetts, U.S. | June 13, 1959
Alma mater | Rhode Island School of Design Stanford University |
Known for | Typography, digital fonts |
Notable work |
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Carol Twombly (born June 13, 1959) is an American designer, best known for her type design. [1] [2] She worked as a type designer at Adobe Systems from 1988 through 1999, during which time she designed, or contributed to the design of, many typefaces, including Trajan, Myriad and Adobe Caslon.
Twombly retired from Adobe and from type design in early 1999, to focus on her other design interests, involving textiles and jewelry. [3] [4]
A biography of Twombly and her type design career by Nancy Stock-Allen was published in 2016. [5] [6]
Carol Twombly was born June 13, 1959, in Concord, Massachusetts. [7] She attended and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where she first studied sculpture, and later changed her major to graphic design. She credits her professors Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, whose studio she worked in, [8] for her inspiration and stimulating her interest in typography. Gerard Unger, a visiting instructor at RISD during Twombly's time as a student, also influenced her work. [7] At Stanford University Twombly was one of only five people to graduate from the short-lived digital typography program with Masters of Science degrees in computer science and typographic design. [3]
Twombly joined Adobe in 1988. One of her first projects at Adobe was Trajan. [9] [10] [11] As a designer, Twombly closely studied historical scripts for inspiration in creating digital fonts. She successfully translated Roman inscriptions – stone carvings on Trajan's Column – into a modern digital design: the typeface Trajan, in 1989. [12] She next drew upon her background as a calligrapher and interest in paleography to translate Carolingian versals, or decorative capital letters, into a digital typeface called Charlemagne (also in 1989). The specific source was a page of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictional of Saint Æthelwold in the British Library. [13] Similarly, Twombly based Lithos on historical precedents, although more generally to ancient Greek inscriptions, rather to any specific models. [13] Adobe marketed Trajan, Charlemagne, and Lithos as "Modern Ancients." [14] In designing Adobe Caslon, she also examined closely the well-known eighteenth-century typeface designed by William Caslon to create a modern digital equivalent. [15] She collaborated with Robert Slimbach to create the sans-serif Myriad, her first completely original typeface design. [16]
In her first international type design competition, Twombly was awarded the Morisawa gold prize for her typeface design in 1984. [17] Subsequently, Morisawa Ltd., a Japanese typesetting manufacturer and the sponsor of the competition, licensed and marketed her entry as the Mirarae typeface. Twombly was also the 1994 winner of the Prix Charles Peignot, given by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) - the first woman, and second American, to receive this award given to a promising typeface designer under the age of 35. [3]
Under Twombly's art direction, fonts such as Ponderosa, Pepperwood, Zebrawood, and Rosewood, were part of an Adobe project to revive American display typefaces in wood type from the 1880s. [18] [19] [20] After this series, she went on to design two more typefaces for Adobe: Nueva, an original design, and Chaparral, which references nineteenth-century slab serif forms and sixteenth-century roman book hand, a calligraphic form. She designed Chaparral in collaboration with calligrapher Linnea Lundquist. [21]
Twombly left Adobe in 1999. Speaking in 2014, she cited a variety of reasons for the decision, including a lack of interest in designing fonts for onscreen display and the market failure of Adobe's multiple master font technology. [4] She is currently an independent artist, specializing in drawing, painting on textiles, beading shekeres, and basket-making. [22]
Roman square capitals, also called capitalis monumentalis, inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and capitalis quadrata, are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters. Square capitals are characterized by sharp, straight lines, supple curves, thick and thin strokes, angled stressing and incised serifs. When written in documents this style is known as Latin book hand.
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.
William S. Gillies was an American artist, letterer and type designer working in New York City.
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
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.
Warren Chappell was an American illustrator, book and type designer, and author.
Trajan is a serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe.
Adobe Jenson is an old-style serif typeface drawn for Adobe Systems by its chief type designer Robert Slimbach. Its Roman styles are based on a text face cut by Nicolas Jenson in Venice around 1470, and its italics are based on those created by Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi fifty years later.
Multiple master fonts are an extension to Adobe Systems' Type 1 PostScript fonts, now superseded by the advent of OpenType and, in particular, the introduction of OpenType Font Variations in OpenType 1.8, also called variable fonts.
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.
Minion is a serif typeface released in 1990 by Adobe Systems. Designed by Robert Slimbach, it is inspired by late Renaissance-era type and intended for body text and extended reading. Minion's name comes from the traditional naming system for type sizes, in which minion is between nonpareil and brevier, with the type body 7pt in height. As the historically rooted name indicates, Minion was designed for body text in a classic style, although slightly condensed and with large apertures to increase legibility. Slimbach described the design as having "a simplified structure and moderate proportions." The design is slightly condensed, although Slimbach has said that this was intended not for commercial reasons so much as to achieve a good balance of the size of letters relative to the ascenders and descenders.
Lithos is a glyphic sans-serif typeface designed by Carol Twombly in 1989 for Adobe Systems. Lithos is inspired by the unadorned, geometric letterforms of the engravings found on Ancient Greek public buildings. The typeface consists of only capital letters, no lowercase, and comes in five weights, without italics.
Arno, or Arno Pro, is a serif type family created by Robert Slimbach at Adobe intended for professional use. The name refers to the river that runs through Florence, a centre of the Italian Renaissance. Arno is an old-style serif font, drawing inspiration from a variety of 15th and 16th century typefaces. Slimbach has described the design as a combination of the period's Aldine and Venetian styles, with italics inspired by the calligraphy and printing of Ludovico degli Arrighi.
The Adobe Originals program is a series of digital typefaces created by Adobe Systems from 1989 for professional use, intended to be of extremely high design quality while offering a large feature set across many languages. Many are strongly influenced by research into classic designs from the past and calligraphy. Adobe Originals fonts are sold separately or with Adobe products such as InDesign.
Clearface is a serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton with the collaboration of his father Linn Boyd Benton, produced at American Type Founders in 1907.
Utopia is the name of a transitional serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and released by Adobe Systems in 1989.
Thomas Maitland Cleland was an American book designer, painter, illustrator, and type designer.
Joseph Warren Phinney (1848–1934) was an American printer, type designer, and business executive. Phinney began his career at the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston where he designed type and worked in management, eventually becoming owner. He was a key player in arranging the merger of twenty-six large foundries to form the American Type Founders Company in 1892, becoming both manager of the Boston branch and head of the design department, where he oversaw the consolidation of type faces following the merger. Though his own designs were largely derivative, Phinney took a great interest in type and its history and throughout his tenure at A.T.F. he sought to preserve and protect that company's legacy, as for instance, when he oversaw the re-introduction of Binny & Ronaldson's 1796 type design, Roman No. 1, as Oxford in 1892, or when he purchased Frederick W. Goudy's first type design, Camelot, in 1896. He stayed with A.T.F. for the rest of his career, passing the role of design head to Morris Fuller Benton and becoming senior vice-president. Phinney retired shortly before the company fell upon hard times during the Great Depression and died in 1934.
Bernard William "Berne" Nadall (1869–1932) was an American typeface designer and an artist. He was the designer of the Caslon Antique typeface.