Georgia is a serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Thomas Rickner for Microsoft. It was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century and was based on designs for a print typeface on which Carter was working when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name Miller the following year.[1] The typeface's name referred to a tabloid headline, "Alien heads found in Georgia."[2]
As a transitional serif design, Georgia shows a number of traditional features of "rational" serif typefaces from around the early 19th century, such as alternating thick and thin strokes, ball terminals and a vertical axis. Speaking in 2013 about the development of Georgia and Miller, Carter said: "I was familiar with Scotch Romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular... and then they disappeared completely."[3] Its figure (numeral) designs are lower-case, or text figures, designed to blend into continuous text; this was at the time a rare feature in computer fonts.[4]
Georgia was designed for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes.[5] It features a large x-height (tall lower-case letters), and its thin strokes are thicker than would be common on a typeface designed for display use or the greater sharpness possible in print.[6][7] Its reduced contrast and thickened serifs make it somewhat resemble Clarendon designs from the 19th century. The glyphs were manually hinted.[8]
Georgia's bold is also unusually bold, almost black. Carter noted that "Verdana and Georgia... were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white... The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series."[3] Given these unusual design decisions, Matthew Butterick, an expert on document design, recommended that organizations using Georgia for onscreen display license Miller to achieve a complementary, more balanced reading experience on paper.[9][10]
The Georgia typeface is similar to Times New Roman, another reimagination of transitional serif designs, but as a design for screen display it has a larger x-height and fewer fine details. The New York Times changed its standard font from Times New Roman to Georgia in 2007.[11]
Georgia is a "Scotch Roman", a style that originated in types sold by Scottish type foundries of Alexander Wilson and William Miller in the period of 1810–1820. According to Thomas Curson Hansard, these were cut by London-based punchcutterRichard Austin. Hansard was writing within Austin's lifetime, and this attribution is accepted by Austin's biographer Alastair Johnston, although historian James Mosley has expressed caution on the attribution.[12][13][14]
Microsoft publicly released the initial version of the font on 1 November 1996 as part of the core fonts for the Web collection, and later bundled it with the Internet Explorer 4.0 supplemental font pack: these releases made it available for installation on both Windows and Macintosh computers. This made it a popular choice for web designers, as pages specifying Georgia as a font choice would display identically on both types if users installed the core fonts package (or later Internet Explorer), simplifying development and testing. Its creators also produced Verdana at the same time, the first Microsoft sans-serif screen font, for the same purposes. Some early public releases of Georgia included number designs between upper- and lower-case, similar to those later released with Miller.[15][16] Carter was asked by Robert Norton, Microsoft's type director, to change these to text, a decision that Carter later considered an improvement.[17]
Georgia Pro
By default, Georgia uses non-lining numerals and Georgia Pro uses lining numerals.
New versions of Georgia, along with its sister sans-serif font Verdana, were released in 2011.[18]
The extension of the original font, named Georgia Pro, features a set of additional typefaces and designs, including:
The expanded font was designed for organisations that had made extensive use of Georgia and Verdana because of their availability but that desired additional versions for specific uses.
Georgia Pro is available for purchase. However, users of Windows 10 or above can download Georgia Pro for free either from Microsoft Store[19] or by enabling an optional feature called "Pan-European Supplemental Fonts".[20][21]
Other Variants
Microsoft has commissioned a number of variants. Georgia Ref, a variant of Georgia consisting of a single weight, but with extra characters, was bundled with Microsoft Bookshelf 2000, Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 99 and Encarta Virtual Globe 99. MS Reference Serif, a derivative of Georgia Ref with a bold weight and italic, was also included in Microsoft Encarta. However, Microsoft's font manager Bill Hill wrote, "I for one never felt totally comfortable with it as a book face. There's something very dark and 'vertical' about the way it feels." He also noted that Microsoft had commissioned an alternative, versions of the existing typefaces Berling and Frutiger, for its Microsoft Readere-book product.[22] Despite this, Georgia is included among the bundled book-reading fonts for several e-book applications.[23]
Awards
The Cyrillic font won an award at Kyrillitsa in 1999.[24]
↑ Friedl, Friedrich, Nicolaus Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Throughout History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN1-57912-023-7.
Palatino is an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in The Times's advertising department. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers.
Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group and commissioned by Steve Ballmer. The name "Verdana" is derived from "verdant" (green) and "Ana".
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 typefaces.
Arial is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers.
Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Matthew Carter designed for Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft first distributed it, along with Carter's Verdana, as a computer font with Office 97.
Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft Corporation in 1996. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Windows XP default theme, succeeding MS Sans Serif and Tahoma. Released free of charge by Microsoft as part of their core fonts for the Web package, it remained one of the most popular body text fonts on webpages as of 2009.
Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles. Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.
Didone is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the 19th century. It is characterized by:
Bookman, or Bookman Old Style, is a serif typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both display typography, for trade printing such as advertising, and less commonly for body text. In advertising use it is particularly associated with the graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, when revivals of it were very popular.
Clarendon is the name of a slab serif typeface that was released in 1845 by Thorowgood and Co. of London, a letter foundry often known as the Fann Street Foundry. The original Clarendon design is credited to Robert Besley, a partner in the foundry, and was originally engraved by punchcutter Benjamin Fox, who may also have contributed to its design. Many copies, adaptations and revivals have been released, becoming almost an entire genre of type design.
Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, intended as a refinement of what are now called old-style typefaces of the period, especially those of his most eminent contemporary, William Caslon.
Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and people previously involved in developing fonts used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones, and other digital technology devices. On December 8, 2010, Ascender Corp. was acquired by Monotype Imaging.
Century is a family of serif type faces particularly intended for body text. The family originates from a first design, Century Roman, cut by American Type Founders designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894 for master printer Theodore Low De Vinne, for use in The Century Magazine. ATF rapidly expanded it into a very large family, first by Linn Boyd, and later by his son Morris.
Miller is a serif typeface, released in 1997 by the Font Bureau, a U.S.-based digital type foundry. It was designed by Matthew Carter and is of the 'transitional' style from around 1800, based on the "Scotch Roman" type which originates from types sold by Scottish type foundries that later became popular in the United States. It is named for William Miller, founder of the long-lasting Miller & Richard type foundry of Edinburgh.
University of California Old Style is a serif typeface designed by Frederic Goudy and created for the University of California Press from 1936–8. It is one of Goudy's most popular serif typefaces. It is also known as Berkeley Old Style and Californian.
A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use in display type at large sizes for titles, headings, pull quotes, and other eye-catching elements, rather than for extended passages of body text.
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