Category | Serif |
---|---|
Classification | Scotch Roman |
Designer(s) | Matthew Carter Cyrus Highsmith Tobias Frere-Jones Richard Lipton |
Foundry | Font Bureau Carter & Cone |
Date released | 1997 (Text/Display) 2002 (Daily/Headline) 2010 (Banner) |
Variations | Miller Text (shown) Miller Display Miller Banner Miller Headline Miller Daily |
Miller is a serif typeface, released in 1997 by the Font Bureau, a U.S.-based digital type foundry. [1] 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. [2] [3] It is named for William Miller, founder of the long-lasting Miller & Richard type foundry of Edinburgh. [2] [4]
The general purpose versions of Miller are Miller Text and the Miller Display optical size for display printing, though since their release they have given rise to a number of variants, including Miller Daily, Miller Headline and Miller Banner, as well as some variants commissioned for use in specific publications. The Miller family is widely used, mostly in newspapers and magazines.
Miller is closely related to Carter's previous Scotch Roman revival, the very popular Georgia family for Microsoft. [5] Carter had been working on plans for what became Miller when contacted by Microsoft but put them temporarily on hold to work on Georgia, which is adapted to digital display. [6] [7] [8] Font Bureau in marketing have called Miller "the debonair cousin of Georgia". [9]
Miller was one of 23 typefaces included in MoMA's first acquisition of historically significant typefaces.
The Miller family was designed by Matthew Carter and developed with the assistance of the Font Bureau's Tobias Frere-Jones and Cyrus Highsmith, [10] and the encouragement of James Mosley, a librarian at the St Bride Library of the history of printing in London. [11]
Miller is a "Scotch Roman"—a style which 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 mostly cut by punchcutter Richard Austin of London. [12] This attribution is accepted by Austin's biographer Alastair Johnston (Hansard was writing in 1825, during Austin's lifetime) although Mosley had earlier expressed caution on the attribution. [13] [2] [14]
Although Miller remains faithful to the Scotch Roman style, it is not based on any single historical example. [15] The flat-topped lowercase “t” is not original to Miller’s or Wilson’s types, but a “wrong font” Didone sort introduced later — possibly by mistake — that became entrenched in the style in the latter half of the 19th century. [16] Certain other letters, such as the lowercase “k” and the Text cut’s default capital “R”, are drawn from other faces cut by Richard Austin, such as his type for John Bell. Mosley described Carter's revival of Miller as follows:
Matthew Carter's Miller is not a facsimile of Miller's Scotch Roman, any more than his Galliard was a facsimile of any one type by Robert Granjon. What it has done is to capture the good color, and the generous breadth and modelling of its model, and to bring a valid version of 'Scotch Roman' back into current use after a lapse [in England] of some decades. Miller was made with current production needs in mind, of which the two versions, 'Display' and the more robust 'Text' versions are evidence, and so is its relatively large x-height. [17]
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." [18] Carter as a companion digitised a Greek typeface based on British printing of the same period, based on the spare Porson typeface cut (in this case certainly) by Richard Austin and based on the handwriting of British classicist Richard Porson. [19] Miller's default numerals are historically appropriate "hybrid" or "semi-lining" figures, slightly shorter than upper-case and in some cases descending below the baseline, although alternative more conventional full-height lining or text figures styles are offered. [20] [21] [22]
As well as the general purpose versions of Miller, Miller Text and Miller Display, numerous variants designed by Carter and others have been added to the Miller family. Variants include:
Miller and its variants are widely used in newspapers, magazines and other publications around the world. Miller Daily is used for body copy in The Washington Post , [13] while Miller Banner features in Glamour magazine. [25] Another Miller variant, Miller News, was commissioned by Simon Esterson of The Guardian for his 1998 redesign of the newspaper, [26] [27] [28] Miller Globe was designed for The Boston Globe , [29] and Bibliographical Miller was commissioned by the University of California, Los Angeles for use in its Aldine Press incunable collection. [11] The Miller family has also been used in the National Post , The Straits Times , The Dallas Morning News , Hindustan Times and the San Jose Mercury News . [17]
A 2005 survey by Ascender Corporation found Miller to be the tenth most popular typeface featured in American newspapers. [30] As of 2010 [update] , it is Carter's biggest source of royalties amongst the fonts to which he owns the rights. [31]
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 desktop computers.
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and body text.
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.
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with consumer electronics devices. Incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, the company has been responsible for many developments in printing technology—in particular the Monotype machine, which was a fully mechanical hotmetal typesetter, that produced texts automatically, all single type. Monotype was involved in the design and production of many typefaces in the 20th century. Monotype developed many of the most widely used typeface designs, including Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Arial, Bembo and Albertus.
Georgia is a serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for the Microsoft Corporation. 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. The typeface's name referred to a tabloid headline, "Alien heads found in Georgia."
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
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 nineteenth. 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. It is also used as the official font of Indonesian laws since 2011.
Impact is a sans-serif typeface in the industrial or grotesk style designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry of Sheffield. It is well known for having been included in the core fonts for the Web package and distributed with Microsoft Windows since Windows 98. In the 2010s, it gained popularity for its use in image macros and other internet memes.
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.
Bell is the name given to a serif typeface designed and cut in 1788 by the punchcutter Richard Austin for the British Letter Foundry, operated by publisher John Bell, and revived several times since.
Porson is an influential typeface in the Greek alphabet based on the handwriting of the English classicist Richard Porson.
Richard Austin (1756–1832) was an English punchcutter. He was the original cutter of the typefaces now known as Bell, Scotch Roman, and Porson. Born in London 4 August 1756 and christened at St Luke's Old Street, he studied seal, die and copper-plate engraving as an apprentice to John Phillips near Finsbury Square. He married Phillips' daughter Sarah and set up on his own about 1786. He was hired by John Bell's British Letter Foundry in 1788 as a punch-cutter, to imitate Didot's 1782 types "de la troisième manière," cut by Pierre Vafflard to F-A Didot's designs. Bell sold his interest in the foundry to S & C Stephenson. When the foundry closed in 1797, Austin brought in his own punches and sold strikes to Fry & Steele, Figgins, and Caslon. Strikes were even sold in North America. Austin cut Greek types for Cambridge University Press in 1806–8, following designs provided by the famous master Richard Porson. He probably also cut the Sarcophagus Greek that preceded it. Austin then provided strikes to William Miller's foundry in Edinburgh & Alexander Wilson's Sons' foundry in Glasgow, creating the types now known as Scotch, before founding his own Imperial Letter Foundry in London in 1815, with his son George. The first Miller Specimen of 1809 is now lost. Wilson's earliest specimen showing the improved types is dated 1812. Richard Austin died circa 20 August 1832, leaving the foundry to his son George, whom many credited with the innovations in type designs manifest in the Scotch types. Austin's other sons were John Phillips Austin, a music engraver, and Richard Turner Austin (1781-1842), a painter and commercial wood engraver.
Plantin is an old-style serif typeface. It was created in 1913 by the British Monotype Corporation for their hot metal typesetting system and is named after the sixteenth-century printer Christophe Plantin. It is loosely based on a Gros Cicero roman type cut in the 16th century by Robert Granjon held in the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.
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.
Scotch Roman is a class of typefaces popular in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom. These typefaces were modeled on a design known as Pica No. 2 from the Edinburgh foundry of William Miller. Some accounts suggest that Miller's type, the oldest surviving specimen of which dates to 1813, was cut by Richard Austin, who had previously produced the Bell types for the British Letter Foundry.
A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text.
In typography, a fat face letterform is a serif typeface or piece of lettering in the Didone or modern style with an extremely bold design. Fat face typefaces appeared in London around 1805–1810 and became widely popular; John Lewis describes the fat face as "the first real display typeface."
Mr. Austin...has since executed most of those of Messrs. Wilson, of Glasgow; and of Mr. Miller, Edinburgh.