Cyrus Highsmith (born 1973) [1] is an American typeface designer, illustrator, and author. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, he worked at Font Bureau in Boston as Senior Type Designer [8] [9] until founding his own type foundry, Occupant Fonts, in 2016, distributing alongside his former employers via the Type Network service. [10] [11]
Some of Highsmith’s most well-known typefaces are Zócalo, used by the Mexican daily El Universal , and the Antenna series, which was used in several magazine designs [12] as well as by Ford and the official Star Wars website. Other clients for custom fonts include or have included The Wall Street Journal , Martha Stewart Living , La Prensa Gráfica of El Salvador, ESPN , and Men’s Health . His typefaces Prensa and Relay won the 2001 Bukvaːraz! award, [13] [14] organized by ATypI (the International Typographic Association) in 2001. In 2015, Cyrus Highsmith received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize by the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. [15] [16]
In addition to typeface design, Highsmith has been teaching at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design, since 2000, [17] while also lecturing and taking part in juries in North America, Japan and across Europe. [18] He is the author of Inside Paragraphs: Typographic Fundamentals published by Font Bureau in 2012. [19] With his own imprint, Occupant Press, he publishes children’s books and other prints. In 2016, Highsmith founded Occupant Fonts in Providence, Rhode Island, which continues to publish his typefaces designed while at Font Bureau as well as new releases.
In September 2017, it was announced that Occupant Fonts had been acquired by the Japanese type foundry Morisawa [ ja ] [20] [21] and thenceforth functioned as their Providence drawing office, with Highsmith as its creative director, overseeing RISD graduates June Shin, Marie Otsuka and Cem Eskinazi. [22] The first two releases in cooperation with Morisawa are Citrine and the Latin-character range of A1 Gothic (both derived from his typeface Allium), published that same year. [23]
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque and § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist and § Other or mixed.
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 sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic", and serif typefaces as "roman".
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts.
Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards.
Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head designer Morris Fuller Benton. “Gothic” was a contemporary term meaning sans-serif.
Tobias Frere-Jones is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program.
Carol Twombly is an American designer, best known for her type design. 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.
Benton Sans is a digital typeface family begun by Tobias Frere-Jones in 1995, and expanded by Cyrus Highsmith of Font Bureau. It is based on the sans-serif typefaces designed for American Type Founders by Morris Fuller Benton around the beginning of the twentieth century in the industrial or grotesque style. It was a reworked version of Benton Gothic developed for various corporate customers, under Frere-Jones's guidance. In developing the typeface, Frere-Jones studied drawings of Morris Fuller Benton's 1908 typeface News Gothic at the Smithsonian Institution. The typeface began as a proprietary type, initially titled MSL Gothic, for Martha Stewart Living magazine and the website for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. As Benton Gothic, there are 7 weights from Thin to Black and only 2 widths.
In typography, the Vox-ATypI classification makes it possible to classify typefaces into general classes. Devised by Maximilien Vox in 1954, it was adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) and in 1967 as a British Standard, as British Standards Classification of Typefaces, which is a very basic interpretation and adaptation/modification of the earlier Vox-ATypI classification. On April 27, 2021, ATypI announced that they had de-adopted the system and that they were establishing a working group building towards a new, larger system incorporating the different scripts of the world.
Martin Majoor is a Dutch type designer and graphic designer. As of 2006, he had worked since 1997 in both Arnhem, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland.
The Gerrit Noordzij Prize is given to type designers and typographers for extraordinary contributions to the fields of type design, typography and type education. The prize, initiated by Anno Fekkes during the 1996 ATypI conference in The Hague, is awarded every three years by the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague together with the Museum Meermanno, under the auspices of the Dr. P.A. Tiele Trust. The prize is named after Gerrit Noordzij, who was a professor of typeface design at the Royal Academy of Art. For the continuity of the prize, the Gerrit Noordzij Fund was created.
Matthew Coffin Butterick is an American typographer, lawyer, writer, and computer programmer. He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his book Typography for Lawyers, which started as a website in 2008 based on his experience as a practicing attorney. He has worked for The Font Bureau and founded his own website design company, Atomic Vision. Expanding Typography for Lawyers, Butterick published Practical Typography as a "web-based book" in July 2013.
A reverse-contrast or reverse-stress letterform is a design in which the stress is reversed from the norm: a typeface or custom lettering where the horizontal lines are the thickest. This is the reverse of the vertical lines being the same width or thicker than horizontals, which is normal in Latin-alphabet writing and especially printing. The result is a dramatic effect, in which the letters seem to have been printed the wrong way round. The style invented in the early nineteenth century as attention-grabbing novelty display designs. Modern font designer Peter Biľak, who has created a design in the genre, has described them as "a dirty trick to create freakish letterforms that stood out."
Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1929 onwards.
Egyptian is a typeface created by the Caslon foundry of Salisbury Square, London around or probably slightly before 1816, that is the first general-purpose sans-serif typeface in the Latin alphabet known to have been created.
Petr van Blokland is a Dutch graphic designer, software author and typeface designer who lives in Delft.
East Asian typography is the application of typography to the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages and Vietnamese languages. Scripts used in East Asian typography include Chinese characters, hiragana, katakana, hangul, and Chữ Nôm.
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