Frederic W. Goudy Award, Prix Charles Peignot, SoTA Typography Award, TDC2 Awards
Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987.[1] 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.[2] His typefaces are among those most commonly used in books.[3]
Slimbach's signature on a copy of the Arno Pro specimen.
Slimbach was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1956. Shortly after, he moved to Southern California where he spent his childhood and his youth. After attending UCLA on an athletics scholarship, he developed an interest in graphic design and typefaces while running a small screen printshop for manufacturing posters and greeting cards. This work brought him into contact with Autologic Incorporated in Newbury Park, California.[4] After training from 1983 to 1985, Slimbach worked as a type designer with Autologic Incorporation. There he received further training, not just as a type designer but also as a calligrapher.[5] Slimbach was then self-employed for two years as a freelance type designer, during which developed the two typefaces ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni for the International Typeface Corporation.[6][7] He later commented of this period that "I wasn’t really making enough money to live on."[7]
In 1987 he joined Adobe Systems. Since then, he has concentrated primarily on designing typefaces for digital technology, often drawing inspiration from classical sources. He has developed many new fonts for the Adobe Originals program. Among his early projects at Adobe were the Utopia (1988), Adobe Garamond (1989), Minion (1990) and Poetica (1992) families.
In 1991, he received the Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design. More recently, Slimbach's own calligraphy formed the basis for his typeface Brioso. Slimbach has described himself as being particularly interested in humanist and serif projects, calling his work on the neo-grotesque Acumin, in the Swiss modernist style, as being "outside of the design realm I normally prefer."[8][9][10]
Since 2000, the rate of Slimbach's (and Adobe's) new typefaces has slowed, as he has taken advantage of the new linguistic and typographic capabilities offered by the OpenType format. Where in the 1990s a given typeface design might be instantiated in one or two fonts, with 200-500 glyphs, a typical new Slimbach work post-2000 has 1500-3000 glyphs.[11][12] Reviewing Slimbach's 2007 project Arno, font designer Mark Simonson noted that it 'almost becomes a different typeface' when italic alternates are enabled.[13] A hallmark of Slimbach's designs is his use of a 'Th' ligature.
In 2004, Adobe released Garamond Premier Pro, a new take on the Garamond designs, which Slimbach had been working on for 15 years, since he first completed Adobe Garamond in 1989.
Outside of work for public use, Slimbach has designed Adobe's corporate font, Adobe Clean Sans and Adobe Clean Serif, which are used by Adobe in branding and user interfaces.[14] He also designed Adobe Hand B, based on his handwriting, for use in Acrobat's digital signature feature.
Slimbach has notable skills in several fields other than type design: he went to college on a gymnastics scholarship, and he is an accomplished calligrapher and photographer. His photographic work uses black & white film, and is mainly portraits that examine human foibles and idiosyncrasies.
Slimbach typefaces designed before the 2000s were first released in the PostScript Type 1 format, and later re-released in the more capable OpenType format (abbreviated OT in the following table).
Typeface families designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems[15]
↑ Twardoch, Slimbach, Sousa, Slye (2007). Arno Pro(PDF). San Jose: Adobe Systems. Archived from the original(PDF) on 30 August 2014. Retrieved 14 August 2015.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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.
Frutiger is a series of typefaces named after its Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif typeface, intended to be clear and highly legible at a distance or at small text sizes. A very popular design worldwide, type designer Steve Matteson described its structure as "the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation" at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann named it as "the best general typeface ever".
Apple Inc. uses a large variety of typefaces in its marketing, operating systems, and industrial design with each product cycle. These change throughout the years with Apple's change of style in their products. This is evident in the design and marketing of the company.
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase 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 defines how high lowercase letters without ascenders are compared to the cap height of uppercase letters.
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.
In typography and handwriting, an ascender is the portion of a minuscule letter in a Latin-derived alphabet that extends above the mean line of a font. That is, the part of a lower-case letter that is taller than the font's x-height.
Ephram Edward Benguiat was an American type designer and lettering artist. He designed over 600 typefaces, including Tiffany, Bookman, Panache, Souvenir, Edwardian Script, and the eponymous Benguiat and Benguiat Gothic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Utopia is the name of a transitional serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and released by Adobe Systems in 1989.
Robert Granjon was a French punchcutter, a designer and creator of metal type, and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Antwerp, and Rome. He is best known for having introduced the typeface style Civilité, for his many italic types and his fleuron designs, although he worked across all genres of typeface and alphabet across his long career.
Jovica Veljović is a Serbian type designer and calligrapher. He is professor for type design at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
Hans Eduard Meier, was a Swiss type designer. He created the neohumanist typeface Syntax at Stempel Foundry, along with Barbedor (1984), Letter (1992) and Lapidar (1995).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
(age 66)
