Skia (typeface)

Last updated
Skiaspecimen3.svg
Category Sans-serif
Designer(s) Matthew Carter
Foundry Apple Computer
VariationsCadmus

Skia is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Apple Computer in 1994. [1] Skia is Greek for "shadow", and the letterforms take inspiration from stone-carved 1st century BC Greek writing. The typeface was the first QuickDraw GX font, and has been pre-installed in Mac operating systems since System 7.5 (1994), and is in the current Mac OS.

Skia includes "GX variations" technology that – if an application offers the UI – allows its weight to be adjusted smoothly between thin and bold, and its width between narrow and extended. (Adobe's "multiple master" technology was similar.) In 2016 it was announced that several technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and Adobe, are adopting Apple's GX variations as the basis of the variations specification inside OpenType 1.8, and since that announcement Skia has been much used to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology.

Related Research Articles

TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Verdana</span> Humanist sans-serif font

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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typeface</span> Set of characters that share common design features

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helvetica</span> Neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface

Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garamond</span> Typeface family

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.

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Carter</span> British type designer (born 1937)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arial</span> Neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface

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.

QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw (QD) 2D graphics engine and Printing Manager inside the classic Mac OS. Its underlying drawing platform was an object oriented, resolution-independent, retained mode system, making it much easier for programmers to perform common tasks. Additionally, GX added various curve-drawing commands that had been lacking from QD, as well as introducing TrueType as its basic font system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typography of Apple Inc.</span> Overview of typography of Apple Inc.

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.

Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) is Apple Inc.'s computer technology for advanced font rendering, supporting internationalization and complex features for typographers, a successor to Apple's little-used QuickDraw GX font technology of the mid-1990s. It is a set of extensions to the TrueType outline font standard, with smartfont features similar to the OpenType font format that was developed by Adobe and Microsoft, and to Graphite. It also incorporates concepts from Adobe's "multiple master" font format, allowing for axes of traits to be defined and morphing of a glyph independently along each of these axes. AAT font features do not alter the underlying typed text; they only affect the characters' representation during glyph conversion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Myriad (typeface)</span> Sans-serif typeface family

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zapfino</span> Typeface

Zapfino is a calligraphic typeface designed for Linotype by typeface designer Hermann Zapf in 1998. It is based on an alphabet Zapf originally penned in 1944. As a font, it makes extensive use of ligatures and character variations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multiple master fonts</span> Extension to Adobe Systems Type 1 PostScript fonts

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.

Apple's Macintosh computer supports a wide variety of fonts. This support was one of the features that initially distinguished it from other systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Rickner</span> American type designer (born 1966)

Thomas Rickner is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at Apple Inc., supervised the production of the first TrueType fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s System 7 operating system for the Macintosh. Rickner provided TrueType production and font hinting of Matthew Carter’s Georgia, Verdana, and Tahoma typeface families, commissioned by Microsoft and widely distributed in the Windows operating system and Apple’s Mac OS X. Rickner’s original type designs include Amanda, Buffalo Gal and Hamilton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yale (typeface)</span> Typeface

Yale is an old style serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter and first released in 2004. It was commissioned by Yale University for use in all of its signage, promotional and internal material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Variable font</span> Font file with many design variants

A variable font (VF) is a font file that is able to store a continuous range of design variants. An entire typeface can be stored in such a file, with an infinite number of fonts available to be sampled.

David G. Opstad is a retired American computer scientist specializing during his career in computer typography and information processing, leading to several breakthroughs. Opstad was a contributor to Unicode 1.0, together with Joe Becker, Lee Collins, Huan-mei Liao, and Nelson Ng.

References

  1. "Matthew Carter". Design Museum + British Council. Archived from the original on 13 June 2010. Retrieved 25 April 2010.