[This series] has offered me the opportunity to think back on some of the perceptions that we had at that time and what we were really up to. I was thinking that John Warnock was the one who really was the visionary. He really had a much broader fantasy about what could happen than anybody else. And most of it came true.

— Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first Director of Typography

It doesn’t really matter what you do, but if you bring that kind of quality to it, it’s going to uplift you and whoever else comes in contact with it. So why not spend the extra time, if you can, to make it really beautiful, even for your own spirit? You know, most companies don’t feel that. I always feel like Adobe still had a tiny bit of that kernel, and that’s what made it worth working there.

— Carol Twombly, former Adobe type designer

Every day, I look at stuff. Every day, I think about type. Some days, I am so glad I don’t have to get into that detail. If you watch Rob [Slimbach] go through the process, it takes a unique kind of human being to consistently do that kind of work. Rob is incredible; dozens of families and nurture done; tons of work on other people’s fonts. He’s a machine. He’s a keeper. Rob is grandfathered in.

— Fred Brady, former Manager of New Type Development for Adobe

Although a quarter-century is a blink of the eye compared to how long people have been communicating via the printed word, the past 25 years have seen enormous innovations over a relatively brief timeframe. New technologies emerge, and are adopted — and sometimes discarded — at a startling pace. Today’s type designer must be a constant student, learning new tools, programming languages, and world scripts while diving deep into the historical and cultural aspects of type design and typography. The learning curve will only grow steeper as the path of innovation continues.

The Adobe Originals program, originally conceived by Sumner Stone and company as a means to legitimize digital type and promote PostScript, became so much more than a marketing tool. Adobe Type and the Originals team employed some of the world’s finest artists and scientists in setting the highest standards for type design and typographic technologies. The makeup of the team has evolved over the years, with people coming and going — that’s business as usual for any large company. A handful of members of the Adobe Type team have been in it for the long haul; some have moved on to other companies in the type world. Still others left Adobe to pursue non-typographic ventures. Whether or not they’re still with Adobe, they are part of a shared history, an incredible legacy, that changed their lives, and the lives of those who make type and use typography to express their ideas.

Sumner Stone
Then: Director of Typography for Adobe
Now: Proprietor, Stone Type Foundry
Sumner Stone joined Adobe in the summer of 1984; his last day was New Year’s Day 1990. He brought type designers Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly on board, and with them, drove the Adobe Originals program to heady success. He now operates Stone Type Foundry from his Alphabet Farm in Northern California’s Capay Valley, surrounded by orchards, hills, and serenity. His body of work includes the ITC Stone superfamily, Magma, Basalt, and Arepo. He art directed the ITC Bodoni project for International Typeface Corporation, overseeing a team of five other designers working on a family based on Giambattista Bodoni’s original types. Stone writes and lectures on type extensively, and serves as a core instructor for the Type@Cooper post-graduate type design program at New York City’s Cooper Union.

Sumner Stone presenting at TypeCon2014, Washington, DC, August 2014. Photo by Peter Bella.

“I was employee number 25. We were in those little offices in Palo Alto. Even when we moved to Mountain View, I always rode my bicycle to work,” Stone said. “It really was a wonderful time. It was one of the most exciting times of my life as far as the business of creative and stuff I’ve done. I think it was the same for most of the people who participated — it was really exciting and it was really fun. I think everybody felt we were doing something that was really going to have an impact. You don’t get that chance too often.”

Carol Twombly
Then: Type Designer, Adobe Type
Now: Independent Artist
Carol Twombly joined Adobe in 1988 and remained with the company for nearly a dozen years. Her typefaces include Charlemagne, Chaparral, Lithos, Trajan, Adobe Caslon, and Myriad (with Robert Slimbach), and she directed the Adobe Wood Type revivals. Twombly now lives in a charming home built in 1870, in a tiny town nestled in the foothills of Northern California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. She works out of her home-based studio, lately creating calligraphically-inspired paintings as well as percussion instruments and sculptural art from natural elements like gourds and Manzanita wood.

Carol Twombly at home. Photo by Tamye Riggs.

“My singing teacher said a great thing the other day. She said, ‘words are the connective tissue between people.’ So whether they’re printed or spoken, she’s speaking very much of a connective thing,” Twombly said. “You can’t hear without feeling. Hearing goes directly to your heart if you’re really listening. And I think words have that ability, too, even if they’re printed. And you don’t know why they go right there, but sometimes the typeface is why it goes there.”

Carol Twombly’s hand-beaded percussion instruments made from gourds. Photo by Tamye Riggs.

Fred Brady
Then: Manager of New Type Development for Adobe
Now: Independent Artist
Fred Brady joined the Adobe Type team in 1987 and left in 2001. A creative collaborator and business manager for the Adobe Type group, he was also a tireless promoter of the Originals, speaking at dozens of conferences. He traveled with Slimbach to the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, to research the types that would inspire the Adobe Garamond and Garamond Premier revivals. Brady now lives on a five-acre walnut farm in central California, focusing on sculptural art and utilitarian pieces of wood, stone, and glass.

“[My work is] all about positive and negative space, figure-ground relationship, details, whether a font or a chair,” Brady said. “Fonts are utilitarian. My partner says, ‘why are you being so careful with that curve?’ Because I’m crazy and I worked on too many fonts to let a curve go out like that.”

Jim Wasco
Then: Member, Adobe Typographic Staff
Now: Senior Type Designer, Monotype
A talented calligrapher who learned the art of sign painting from his father, Jim Wasco joined the Adobe Type team in the fall of 1989, and left in 2002. “I was like Robert’s helper,” he said. “I would do things like the ligatures for Waters Titling, or the small words.” In addition to assisting Slimbach, Wasco worked extensively on the design of Tekton Bold and the expansion of the family into Greek and Cyrillic. He developed Mythos with Min Wang, and worked on Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif, typefaces that were central to Acrobat’s inner workings. Since joining Monotype, Wasco has published Elegy and Harmonia Sans, in addition to developing many other custom and retail type families. He lectures and conducts workshops on type design and the lettering arts.

Julian Waters, left, designer of the Adobe Original typeface Waters Titling, with Jim Wasco. Washington, DC, August 2014. Photo by Helen Lysen.

“We were like a family. We had a lot of fun,” Wasco said. “He [Robert] was a gymnast. He’d be standing in the hall and do a backflip by jumping up in the air and landing on his feet. It’s so hard to do this type design work — there are not enough hours in the day to do them. You end up just glued to the mouse and the computer, and things come together eventually.”

Pictured from left: Jim Wasco, Adobe Type’s David Lemon, and Mark Jamra (designer of the Adobe Original typeface Kinesis). TypeCon2014, Washington, DC, August 2014. Photo by Helen Lysen.

Robert Slimbach
Then: Type Designer, Adobe Type
Now: Principal Designer, Adobe
Since beginning his tenure with the Adobe Type team in the spring of 1987, Robert Slimbach has designed some of the world’s most widely-used typefaces. His body of work includes Adobe Garamond, Arno, Brioso, Kepler, Minion, Myriad (with Carol Twombly), Garamond Premier, Utopia, and Warnock. Slimbach now directs Adobe’s type design program, developing original typefaces while mentoring younger designers.

“You know, I want them to be learning the process, not just me saying, do this, do that. I always participate in a way where I’m sort of guiding — but in a very subtle way — to where they’re allowed to do whatever they want to do,” Slimbach said. “They appreciate my experience, because I’m not dictating to them; I’m giving my opinion all along the way while allowing them to choose within that opinion. I think that’s a good way to mentor. I know that’s the way I would like to get help. Ultimately, they need to be self-driven and self-guiding.”

Slimbach is determined to continue building on the tradition of typographic excellence and innovation he and the other founding members of the Adobe Originals team established 25 years ago.

David Lemon, senior manager of type development at Adobe, said more than 100 people have passed through Adobe Type, although not everyone was directly involved with the Originals. While it wasn’t possible to connect with everyone from the past, it has been incredible talking with so many of the talented people who have been part of the Adobe Originals program. In addition to commentary from the rock stars mentioned above, the reflections of Adobe Type alums Thomas Phinney (now vice president of FontLab), Christopher Slye (now licensing manager for Adobe Typekit), and Carl Crossgrove (now senior type designer with Monotype) were enlightening, as was the perspective of Roger Black (Font Bureau, Danilo Black), a key member of the Adobe Type Advisory Board assembled by Stone.

Thomas Phinney, Adobe Type alum and designer of the Adobe Original Hypatia Sans, celebrates with Fiona Ross, designer of several non-Latin Adobe Originals, when she was awarded the SOTA Typography Award at TypeCon2014 in Washington, DC. Photo by Helen Lysen.

Slye, who came to Adobe Type in 1997, was initially hired as a general member of the typographic staff to work on implementing the new OpenType format. Although he was not present for the birth of the Adobe Originals program, he has been through multiple evolutionary periods for the type team throughout his tenure, and envisions more in the future.

“The program succeeded in its mission to legitimize digital type and establish a long-lasting collection of typeface designs that work within, but also transcend, their digital medium,” Slye said. “Simply proving that was an invaluable contribution. Obviously, there are many others who have made important contributions in the last 25 years, but Adobe’s focus on that goal, in those early days especially, has been the most impactful, it seems to me. Using its unique and highly visible position as an innovator allowed Adobe to carry the typographic arts into a new era, and also helped create a really solid foundation on which others could build.

“I am probably as hopeful about the Adobe Originals program as anyone. Its mission is still relevant, and we have seen such good work coming from our younger designers like Paul Hunt and Frank Grießhammer — and continuing from Robert and others. All that’s needed is sustained support from Adobe, and, to be honest, that support has varied over the years. What I’m really pleased about now is that, with the addition of Typekit here, awareness of type around Adobe is very high. I will be doing my part to keep it that way.”

The Kepler alphabet on the lobby floor of the West Tower of Adobe’s San Jose headquarters serves as a constant reminder that type is part of the company’s foundation.

Thank you for joining us for the story of the Adobe Originals. We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the history of the program and the people who made it so special. In case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

In addition to this series, we wanted to mark this milestone with a poster. We set out to create something unique that was classic in nature but also innovative.

Photo by Norman Clayton.

This was a team collaboration between John Caponi, a creative director for Adobe, Norman Clayton of Classic Letterpress, and a few of us on the Adobe type team.

Tamye Riggs gives a behind-the-scenes look at this poster’s creation in the latest edition of Adobe INSPIRE Magazine. Want to see the poster for yourself? We’ll be raffling off a couple at Adobe MAX this fall — and keep your eyes peeled for other conference appearances beyond that!

Check out the INSPIRE article, Experimental Letterpress, by Tamye Riggs.

The first digital versions of the classic typefaces like Bodoni, Garamond, Caslon, Jenson, et al, were pretty bad. Done in a hurry with primitive tools. The classics from Berthold were better than most others and became part of the Adobe library pretty early. But even those didn’t have complete character sets, didn’t offer enough features like old style figures, let alone Greek or Cyrillic. Robert Slimbach is a genius, and John Warnock’s willingness to indulge him and the other designers at Adobe to go back to the sources and re-imagine what the old guys would have done with our tools put Adobe at the front of typographic development in the 1990s.

— Erik Spiekermann, Founder and Partner, FontShop International, Edenspiekermann

It’s been funny this whole time to hear people say, oh, bitmaps will die, bitmaps are going away, because there is PostScript now. Hinting will die, because all these screens are going to get sharper. So now the challenge is that … we don’t even know what the output quality is. It makes you realize it’s sort of like the specialization of any set of tasks for a process or industry; what’s it like to design aircraft or to be a car engineer now. If you open the cars built in every decade of the twentieth century, they just get more and more complicated. Open the hood of a 2014 model — it’s intimidating. There are so many systems there. You can’t be a mechanic and fix them. They’re electronic, they’re digital, there are sensors you can’t fix. Same as type anymore. When digital tools came out, I was so excited! I can do everything: test, blow up, down, check it, doing great, and just be satisfied with that. It takes a lot more now. A font has so much more in it.

— Carl Crossgrove, Senior Type Designer for Monotype

Born as a result of the intense atmospheric shifts of the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s, the Adobe Originals program, and the heightened typographic standards set by Adobe, had a profound effect on both makers and users of type. Adobe served as the go-to source of quality typefaces for discerning typographers, while raising the bar for creatives and technologists entering the world of digital type design.

After some of Adobe’s active designers discussed the Originals program in the previous chapter of this series, professionals from the type and design community were given the opportunity to share their views. For frame of reference, those interviewed were also asked to describe how they fell into type and design in the first place.

Jim Parkinson
Type Designer/Lettering Artist, Parkinson Type Design
typedesign.com
Adobe Originals Typefaces: Jimbo, Mojo, and Montara

How did you become interested in type and design?
“When I was really little — seven or eight years old — in Richmond, California, there was this old man (but maybe he was only in his thirties or something). He lived across the alley from us — he had a room in his house, and he did showcard lettering for department stores, for graduation diplomas and stuff. I would go to his studio and sit for hours and watch him work.

“He was pretty entertaining. He had a show he did, entertained at birthday parties. He would letter upside-down and backwards, turn numbers upside-down and there would be letters. Trick lettering! From then on, I always had an affection for it.

“When I graduated from art school at CCAC (now California College of the Arts), there weren’t any kind of jobs. You’d have to get a job sharpening pencils, getting coffee, maybe eventually cutting rubyliths … so I got a job at Hallmark in Kansas City. I talked to a recruiter on campus and I went out there and was in this thing called the ‘new artists group.’ They give you projects to figure out where they’re going to place you. At one point, they said, you’re just not working out, you’re just not greeting card material. The guy said, we might be able to find a spot in the lettering department if you might be interested in that. Like it was purgatory or something! Then I met this guy called Myron who taught me how to design for film type, met Hermann Zapf, … I started out not being good enough for greeting cards to having an affinity for type and lettering.”

Jim Parkinson at a Bay Area typophiles picnic in Oakland’s Temescal Park, October 2012. Photo by Jesse Ragan.

How did you get involved as one of the external designers for the Adobe Originals program?
I think what got me involved with Adobe in the first place was the consulting team of Roger Black working with Adobe Type. I had worked with Roger so much, otherwise, I don’t know how they would have heard of me. Before the internet, you’re just alone in a room and the telephone never rings.

“I live in Oakland. Fred Brady and two other people from Adobe came to my house one day. They knocked on my front door. They brought me a computer, a Macintosh with a special font-specific version of Adobe Illustrator, pre-Fontographer. I spent like a week trying to learn how to draw a sans serif cap. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t even know how it worked.

“Nothing ever came of that, and eventually they came and got the computer. But later, once I learned how to use Fontographer, I did these little speculative type specimen books I’d send out to people. I phoned them [Adobe] up; they were still up in Mountain View or wherever they were. They said, come on down, let’s have lunch. So different compared to how it is today.

“So I printed out a bunch of these little type specimen books and we sat down in a conference room. Everybody looked at them and said what they wanted, and I got my first couple of type jobs out of that. They were extraordinarily anal about things. I have a couple of little samples I print out to test my fonts, but they print out big thick 3-ring binders full. They sent me like two binders of printouts of every size: upside-down and backwards and everything. They might have thought they were raking me over the coals, but they were really raking themselves over the coals! In the end, there were just a few corrections out of all that. The same corrections were on every sheet. It wasn’t bad.

“Once they decided to go with a typeface [Jimbo], Linnea Lundquist was my first liaison. Jocelyn Bergen was the liaison for Montara. So you don’t have to keep going back in and keep dealing with Robert [Slimbach] or Carol [Twombly] or anybody. Once they say OK, you don’t have to go down and sit in the office and listen to it, they just send it to you. It was all pretty painless. And, of course, I came from three decades of pen and ink, so anything I did on the computer was like coasting. It was so much easier than lettering. They might have thought I was working really hard, but I thought, how can people pay you this much to just play around? It was crazy.”

Sketches for Jimbo, an Adobe Original designed by Parkinson and published in 1995.

Parkinson’s personal hand lettered logo, an ancestor of Jimbo.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Robert Slimbach did a thing called Adobe Jenson. I think it’s because I’m familiar with Jenson typefaces and have done things myself reminiscent of Jenson typefaces. I like what he did with it. They published a little catalog with all kinds of information about it. It was nice that somebody who had a sensitivity towards real type and type history set the bar high enough so that the type industry didn’t just die because it was done by a bunch of teenagers. Somebody had to say, there’s something to this … let’s do it right. I think they’re one of the companies that led that.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“I think what happened at Adobe was they invented PostScript, and they figured out the best way to sell it was to make type with it, and they had their type department selling PS like crazing by selling fonts like crazy. All the type was the little blossom that came from PostScript.

“A lot of times, technology accidentally causes people to do good things, like PostScript and the whole type revolution. It wasn’t done by artists — it was done by engineers who said, we can make these dots connect and fill in. I worked for a long time at the San Francisco Chronicle. I spent a lot of time in the newspaper industry, and a lot of times it was because the newspaper was replacing presses they used, so the type and logos needed to be redesigned to fit a narrower page. Not because it looks good — because it didn’t fit any more. A lot of good design doesn’t come from visionary designers; it comes from technicians who have thought of a better way to do it.”

Allan Haley
Director of Words and Letters, Monotype
monotype.com

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I’ve been a designer — a least a ‘drawer’ — since I can remember. When I entered college, I had to make course/career choices, and graphic design seemed to be a natural. I was very fortunate that the college had a printing press, hand-set type, and a professor that was a true typophile. My senior projects all contained hand lettering, and my first job out of school was as an apprentice typesetter at a local ‘type house’ — and that began my life in type.”

Monotype’s Allan Haley talks typographic mastery at the HOW design conference in Boston, May 2014.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“They are wonderful and complex endeavors — that allowed me to grow and find my own way in my career. I knew pretty early on that I was not going to be much more than an average type designer, but there are so many other things that make up the typographic arts — and our community — that I could change and continue to grow over the years. I like to say that I have the second best job in the typographic arts. (Matt Carter has the best.)”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“I knew of the Adobe Originals program very early on. ITC [International Typeface Corporation] was the first ‘type company’ that Adobe worked with, and I had known Sumner Stone for several years before he went to work for them. It was a terrific idea that almost instantly made Adobe a player in the type community. My hat’s off to Sumner for doing such a smart thing so well.”

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Of course, Adobe Garamond. Robert Slimbach did such a wonderful job in researching and designing the family. I also have a great fondness for Adobe Caslon. It stands out as one of — if not the — best example of the Caslon design in the decades before and since its release. It’s pushing the quarter-century mark, but it is still fresh. Many have complained that the original Caslon, while a distinctive milestone, was peppered with inelegant characters. Carol Twombly’s interpretation gives the design a sophisticated grace, with no loss of the original’s personality.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“While faces like Quake and Giddyup may not be ‘important faces for our time,’ the Adobe Originals is a typographic resource that is deep, rich, and wide. Many of the designs have become staples of graphic communication.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“If the decision were mine, I would reinvest in the program, reach out to more type designers, develop more original designs, and add to the families that would benefit from additional weights and proportions.”

Jessica Hische
Letterer/Type Designer
jessica.is/awesome
Follow ​@jessicahische on Twitter

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I really fell in love with design and type in college, and learning about it made me realize how much I’d always appreciated good design and typography. (I had definitely bought a number of records and books specifically because of the crazy lettering on the covers.) My love of art became more distilled and specific the more I learned, until I found myself in the niche industry of lettering.”

Jessica Hische at the Title Case offices in San Francisco. Photo by John Madere.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?

“I never thought that drawing letters for a living would enable me to travel all over the world educating people about lettering and type! Creating type can be a pretty solitary activity, but I’ve found that it’s enabled me to not only travel, but to meet amazing people that also love letters as much as I do.”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“​I believe in school, mostly because of the naming system of the typefaces released (like Adobe Garamond).”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use typefaces from the Adobe Originals collection?
​“Of course! While every generation of art students has its go-to typeface, my generation’s was definitely Rosewood. Every single portfolio in the few years surrounding my graduation (2006) had at least one piece using Rosewood. Birch was another big hit among my peers in my early twenties. I teach a lettering workshop and use Adobe Caslon as the base font for it — I make my students draw the ‘H’ and ‘O’ after looking at it for a few seconds and then guess what the rest of the letters look like — and we used Juniper on a branding project while I worked for Louise Fili. There are probably dozens of other times I’ve used Adobe Originals fonts in one way or another.”

The Title Case website uses Garamond Premier web fonts.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
​“There are so many! If I had to choose, though, it might be Adobe Garamond, Chaparral, and Bickham Script (which isn’t really my style, but Richard Lipton is just so talented).

​“I don’t have a favorite font, but I do have several favorite type designers (like having a favorite fashion designer instead of having a favorite dress — if I have a favorite dress, I wear it until it’s threadbare, but if I have a favorite designer I can go back for more and have a more varied wardrobe). Even when perusing the Adobe Originals collection, I found myself gravitating toward certain designers whom I know created other typefaces I like.”

John Hudson
Type Designer, Tiro Typeworks Ltd.
tiro.com
Follow @TiroTypeworks on Twitter
Adobe Originals Typefaces: Adobe Arabic, Adobe Devanagari, Adobe Hebrew, and Adobe Thai

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“The ability to make a living doing something that I find interesting and rewarding. I read an interview with Matthew Carter recently, in which he acknowledged that all industrial design involves some amount of frustration, and I thought, ‘Damn true.’ But, like him, I think the rewarding aspects of type design outweigh the frustrations. One of the biggest rewards for me has always been the sense of working within history, of the connection of typography to language and literature and to the development and spread of ideas.”

John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks. Photo by Ben Mitchell.

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“Very early in my days doing desktop publishing [in the 1990s]. As I recall, the very first font license I purchased was for Adobe Garamond: the fonts arrived in the mail, on 3.5-inch floppy disks. I quickly built a collection of Adobe Originals specimen books, which were always interesting and attractive.”

How did you get involved as one of the external designers for the Adobe Originals program?
“We were commissioned by Adobe in 2001 to design new typefaces for Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai. These were initially for use with Acrobat interactive forms, so were designed with modern business communications in mind and generously proportioned to be legible on screen. I was responsible for what came to be called Adobe Hebrew, and worked with Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross to make the Adobe Arabic and Adobe Thai types. Other than their experience with CJK fonts, I think this was Adobe’s first direct foray into non-Latin font development. At the time, Adobe’s own OpenType Layout tools couldn’t handle the mark positioning we needed to do for these scripts, so we developed our own workflows. Of these three initial projects, the Adobe Arabic has been particularly influential: it ushered in a whole new style in Arabic type design, which I now see reflected in a lot of other new fonts.

“After the success of those first three projects, Adobe also commissioned a Devanagari typeface design, which was again produced collaboratively with Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross. It remains one of the most attractive Devanagari types available.”

“Typographic Design” spelled out in Adobe Devanagari.

Who have you worked with mostly during your projects with Adobe?
“Tom Phinney organized the initial commissions, and then we worked with Christopher Slye to ensure we had the materials we needed for the projects. These included sets of Minion multiple master sources that we used to create custom weight and size instances of a Latin character subset to harmonize with each of the non-Latin scripts.

“Particularly interesting for me was working with Ernie March and Eric Muller to refine our workflow to solve QA issues. Because no one had ever tried to make CFF fonts in this way before, we found we needed to post-process some of the font tables in order to make them conform to Adobe’s standards. This meant decompiling those tables to XML and then manually editing them.”

Example of Adobe Arabic, which won a 2006 Type Directors Club award.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“I am a huge fan of what I think of as the core of the Kepler design. There are all sorts of weight and width variants in that huge family that I’ve never seen any use for, but at its core is this incredibly good Romantic typeface that I’ve gone back to again and again. It has that ‘workhorse’ quality of so many of Robert Slimbach’s types, while also being very elegant and more readable than types of that style are reputed to be. A few years ago, I recommended it to a friend who was starting a new Canadian historical and political journal, and it works so well.

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“Firstly, by setting the bar high and by showing what was possible in making new types for the new digital medium, instead of just converting older fonts from other technologies. Today, when we have so many new fonts being released every week, it is probably difficult for many people to appreciate just how typographically impoverished the early years of desktop publishing were in comparison. We were desperate for fonts, and what we mostly got were hastily converted versions of old standards and poor quality knock-offs of the same. The Adobe Originals program, along with pioneering work from a few independent foundries, changed that: new type designs for a new medium.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“To be honest, I’m concerned about the recent focus on open source font development in the program. It seems to me a significant shift in the character of the Adobe Originals project, from a curated library of fonts for a professional design market to something that is more responsive to the demands (and funding) from large internet companies such as Google. While I admire Source Serif and the new Source Han Sans very much, and appreciate that the latter would have been unlikely to have been produced any other way, these fonts seem to me to sit uncomfortably beside the older Adobe Originals.”

Fiona Ross, PhD
Typographic Consultant in Non-Latin Scripts and Associate Professor in Non-Latin Type Design, University of Reading
Associate Designer, Tiro Typeworks Ltd.
reading.ac.uk/typography/
Adobe Originals Typefaces: Adobe Arabic, Adobe Devanagari, and Adobe Thai

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I came from a very different background from most of the people that I teach or collaborate with. I started in languages, and it was really because I did my second degree in Sanskrit with Pali. During the course of that, I read a lot of literature, and really, it’s from a love of literature that my interest in type design arose. Then my husband saw an advert from Linotype: ‘Can you prune the tree without damaging the roots?’ It was a language tree. I said, well, this is wrong. I was doing my Sanskrit finals at the time, having had experience of other scripts during my year at the University of Tuebingen, where I worked on transliterating book titles from India into the Latin script.

Fiona Ross at the University of Reading. Photo by Eben Sorkin.

“I was quite familiar with a  lot of typefaces in Devanagari script from reading and looking at book covers. I was well aware of what was going on in the publishing industry before joining Linotype. I was young and had this sort of rashness of youth and noticing how terrible a lot of the publications were; the scripts were so beautiful, and the publications were so poor and how much could be done to remedy the situation.

“Many publications were in Linotype hot metal, which couldn’t kern or position accents properly. I was not the only person who felt these were quite poor publications — even foundry type was fairly limited at that time. I felt glad to be involved with the publishing industry. And my university tutors were very pleased. They felt they had someone of their own in the industry to help improve Indian-script publications.

“So I come from very much a research background, and that’s fed into everything I do, including my work teaching. I work very much collaboratively — I’m not a solo artist. I work with Tim Holloway. He’s a brilliant designer.”

Example of deep and complex characters in Adobe Devanagari Bold, emphasizing roundness rather than verticality.

How did you get involved as one of the external designers for the Adobe Originals program?

“Linotype had a deal with Adobe — Mike Fellows was really instrumental in us working with Adobe. That was before we did any designs for the Adobe Originals. Before working with Adobe, we were creating and producing original designs for Linotype, which we would then convert to new formats, often with enhancements that exploited the new technologies. Full-page layouts rather than galleys and that kind of thing. That was 1988, I think, when we started doing this kind of work.

“These were the projects that dominated the late eighties — converting all our non-Latin library to Postscript. Later on, Tim Holloway and I were approached by Adobe, together with John Hudson (who we’d worked with on one Linotype project), to see if we could create original designs for Arabic, Thai, and Hebrew. Tim and I were happy to pick up on the Arabic and Thai. The Thai was wanted first, in a very short amount of time. I explained to Tim what I had in mind. He said, ‘Oh yes, I think that can work,’ and sent me seven sketches. I suggested changes, and we revised these and I took it on from that. Tim needed to work on Adobe Arabic; John was working on the Hebrew. I work in Gloucestershire, Tim in London, John in Canada, but I see John more often than Tim.

Adobe Thai trials with notes by Fiona Ross.

“Thomas Phinney was the one who brought the project to us, and it was excellent working with him. Really good. And, of course, David Lemon was involved, but Thomas was our main point of contact at the time. So that was really how it worked. I think ever since then, most of the work that I have done has been with John. I also work as a consultant on the current Adobe programs for non-Latin that involve Indian scripts, the ones Paul Hunt is overseeing. We did Adobe Devanagari, which I think is one of the best things we’ve done, fairly recently; Tim and me doing design, John doing the production, including the italics and rescaling the Latin companion. It had a lot of quite revolutionary aspects to it, in addition to the styling.”

Adobe Devanagari lettering trials.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“I would have to say Adobe Arabic is superb, and it’s very influential. It was novel in that the counters were open; the curves are very graceful; it’s very legible at small sizes. You can see Tim Holloway’s hand. He’s just so skillful at capturing the shapes of Arabic and bringing something new. I think that was groundbreaking.

“The second would be the Adobe Bengali. Linotype Bengali — the type Tim and I did 30 years ago — still dominates. I think this Adobe Bengali is going to add a new voice, which is very much needed.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“Having good designs like these, and really, the fact that they function so well and have OpenType features and are Unicode-enabled. It has a huge impact in giving voice to the vernacular scripts. It’s hard to overestimate the importance that something like that has in adding to the sort of typographic palette that will be valuable in full Bengali typesetting. It’s not a minority script; it’s 300 million speakers. They’re still transliterating into Latin for text messaging. Four of the major daily newspapers all use Linotype Bengali, and only one has it legitimately. That’s the world we’re working in. I think what Adobe is developing is really important, and what they’re doing with enabling better foundations for Indian scripts in InDesign.

“The quality of the design work is very important: Combining design aesthetics and high quality of production with the technological attributes of OpenType. It’s the attention to details that shows in Adobe’s vernacular fonts and makes Adobe’s work stand out.”

Corey Holms
Graphic Designer
coreyholms.com
Follow @CoreyHolms on Twitter | on Behance

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I was really into comic books, which was this interesting weird medium that wasn’t text like a book or image like a movie, but was something wholly different. There were some experimental comics that did really interesting things like painting over photographs, gluing pieces of typewritten paper onto it and collaging disparate art forms together to tell a surreal story. I couldn’t explain why, but it was exceptionally compelling art to me. When I applied to art school, I explained that I wanted to be a fine artist that dealt in typography. Because typography was part of the design program, they had me meet with the dean of the design department, who in no short order convinced me that fine art was for hippies and that design was the way to go. To this day, I revel in the parameters set up by design projects and stumbled through typography into the world of design. I was very fortunate that the school I went to, CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) has a very strong typography program.”

Corey Holms in throwback mode.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“Designers are basically translators, helping people get ideas and concepts across to others. Typography is basically a signifier of language, and each typographic decision has meaning. I enjoy using type to add and clarify meaning in my projects. My primary design focus is in entertainment design, and the typography makes or breaks a poster. If I’m working on a science fiction movie, I use a clean, thin, condensed sans serif; it looks appropriate, it looks like the future. Take that same typeface and lower the crossbar, and suddenly you’re on the Orient Express, and you’ve ruined the poster. Typography tells you all those extra cues about authenticity that the reader may not even notice straight away. Typographic choices are a huge part of my job.”

Holms’ film poster for “Jobs” features Myriad, an Adobe Original used as Apple’s corporate typeface.

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
When I was at CalArts, everyone was into experimental typography — David Carson, Emigre, Tomato, etc. — so I was kind of reactionary and would focus on classic typography. The Adobe Originals was where I looked to for those typefaces. It was my entré into non-postmodern typography.”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use typefaces from the Adobe Originals collection?
As a movie poster designer, we can all get a big laugh about the use of Trajan. But before it became a cliché, it was perfect for making something look elegant. For the appropriate project, I still use it today.”

Holms’ used dimensional Trajan for HBO’d “Game of Thrones” promo.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
Waters Titling MM is my absolute favorite, because it is beautiful, elegant, expressive, and (most importantly at the time) made me look like a star. Also Penumbra.”

Why are these your favorites?
Waters Titling was a multiple master font (don’t get me started on the level of disappointment and rage I have to this day about the discontinuation of that technology), which meant that I could very easily customize the type to fit my needs and it would look phenomenal. I could fit it into tight spaces and customize it without losing the width of the stems, without any visible distortions. Whereas Trajan clearly looks produced, Waters Titling MM always had that human touch, made by a brush. It changed the feel of a poster from just epic to epic about a person. It was awesome.”

Holms’ spookily elegant poster for “Lady in the Water” features Waters Titling, a 1997 Adobe Originals release by Julian Waters.

Indra Kupferschmid
Typographer, Professor of Typography
University of the Arts Saar
Follow @kupfers on Twitter

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I became interested in what we call Schrift in German and Schriften (typefaces) in high school thanks to my art teacher who brought in Letraset catalogs and explained type classification to us (although absolutely nobody was interested in that but me). I didn’t even major in art but in chemistry, which I was thinking of pursuing after school. But the German type terms like Serifenbetonte Linear-Antiqua mit klassizistischen Charakter sounded so cool and it seemed all so crystal clear and logical to me that I thought, oh, this is just like science, I can do that. This bug never let go since. However, that all was before I even knew the term typography or what that was. That came a bit later, after I started studying at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. In my first or second week there, I saw a door sign that said ‘Professor of Typography’ and thought, this is what I want to do, without actually knowing what it was or implied (and that I might ever become a teacher myself).”

Typographer and educator Indra Kupferschmid in Bonn, Germany.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?

“Maybe the sport of identifying typefaces is where it all began to really have an effect on life. Once you start that, and become even kind of good at it, you can’t go through the world like a normal person anymore. The differences in typefaces got me interested in their history, terminology, the technique and people behind them, their design and production, and, of course, their use, but I’m almost ashamed to admit that the Type an sich part always interested me more.

“An even bigger impact on my life was serendipitously meeting like-minded people over the years. Fred Smeijers, who was my mentor and teacher for many years, and from whom I learned most of what I know about typefaces. Fantastic peers young and old I met on my restless expeditions into type and who I developed close friendships with, in particular Nick Sherman, my type alter ego; goading each other into concocting, considering, and collecting the craziest stuff. Type-related activities have a huge impact and huge place in my life today, for many years actually.”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“I first got exposed to some of Adobe’s typefaces in the mid-1990s, don’t remember exactly, but I had these 1990s specimen booklets for Caslon and Minion and the like. I didn’t know that this was a ‘typeface design program’ or anything, though, or how Adobe, the company, sit together. Also not sure how I even got those specimen books, probably at a conference? (My first was 1996 TypoBerlin). The catalogs I had as a student were still the (pretty horrible!) purple Creative Alliance ones, I think. I bet I still have all that somewhere.”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use typefaces from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Not that I remember, really, apart from Kepler when I worked as a freelance book designer for the German Bibliographic Institute that publishes the Duden (our ‘Oxford Dictionary’) and similar reference books in the early 2000s. The style guide specifies Kepler for text and listings (base design by Iris Farnschläder). It was a joy to work with Kepler!”

The “Duden,” Germany’s answer to the “Oxford Dictionary” uses Robert Slimbach’s Kepler for text and listings.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Because of the above-mentioned project, I really like Kepler. It is very flexible with its many styles/design axes, good atmosphere between the friendly and the authoritarian, good readability, versatile personality, and it’s not overused.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“To me, the Adobe type department has most notably contributed with technological advancements and the popularization of multi-axis designs like with MM fonts. Some of the revivals in the type catalog are very worthwhile though.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“Not so much innovation as I would wish for. It seems that it is a) about maintaining existing designs, expanding them, and bringing every possible font on the web, and b) the development of zero-priced fonts that are easy to implement into applications.

Fonts as add-ons to software more than typefaces as an independent form of design to advance the culture of type.”

Paul Shaw
Owner, Paul Shaw/Letter Design
paulshawletterdesign.com
Follow @PaulShawLetters on Twitter

How did you become interested in type and design?
“Through being interested in calligraphy and lettering. A natural extension of a general interest in letterforms and, specifically, of the work of W.A. Dwiggins, Rudolf Koch, Hermann Zapf, Georg Trump, and Karl-Erik Forsberg. An interest in design was an outgrowth of being interested in lettering and typography. It is hard to have graphic design without letterforms. So, I think I started with an interest in book jackets by calligraphers and letterers such as George Salter, Phil Grushkin, Michael Harvey, and Helmut Salden; record covers by Reid Miles (once I discovered jazz and Blue Note Records); then Art Nouveau posters (especially by Mucha, Koloman Moser and Alfred Roller) and Art Deco posters (Cassandre); and, after that, the work of Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman. And on and on.”

Paul Shaw draws letters on a sandy Oregon beach in 2011. Photo by Bronwen Job.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“It changed my career plans from studying the history of American labor to studying Dwiggins and working as a lettering artist, which led to my present mixed career. It is all due to discovering William Morris and the Kelmscott Press.”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“When it began in 1989 with the release of Adobe Garamond and Lithos/Trajan/Charlemagne.”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use Adobe typefaces from the Originals collection?
“I have used many of them in teaching: Adobe Garamond (and the premier version), Trajan, Utopia, Adobe Jenson, Minion, the Wood Type series, Ex Ponto, Caflisch Script, Poetica, Adobe Caslon, Bickham Script, Chaparral, Silentium, Arno, and I am sure others. In work, I think I have used Mezz, Poetica, Blackoak, Poplar, and Bickham Script.”

Super-sized punctuation from Madrone, one of the Adobe Wood Types, dominates Shaw’s 1998 New Year’s greeting.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?

“Not sure. Possibly Poetica or Bickham Script. (Except that Poetica badly needs a display version.) But I really admire Utopia and Minion.”

Why are these your favorites?
“Poetica is an astonishing achievement. Hidden in its original twelve or so subfonts are all sorts of goodies (along with some swash letters that should have been left out), principally the set of ampersands and the roman caps. Both are excellent for use with other fonts. Poetica is significant because it is an italic that is not mated to a roman. There are only a handful of such faces and none with its versatility. I think I included it in my list of the ‘100 Most Significant Typefaces of All Time’.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“I think the original program (from roughly 1989 to about 1992) was highly important in the history of typography and graphic design. Adobe Garamond and Trajan proved to skeptical designers (especially those in the world of book design) that digital type could be as good, if not better, than the metal type they were nostalgic for in the phototype era. Adobe Garamond was a true Garamond, arriving at a time when ITC Garamond was incredibly popular (even being the basis for the Apple logotype). It had true small capitals, old style figures, extended fractions, and other items that had disappeared from the phototype versions of many classic book faces. I think it was a pivotal design. Trajan is important because its design proved that the new digital tools could handle subtle letterforms and that digital type did not have to look ‘digital’ like Matrix or be stripped down like ITC Charter. They could replicate any letterform from the past that one wanted. Trajan also made the iconic letters of the Trajan inscription familiar to a wider world of graphic designers.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“I don’t really know. The last Adobe Original I paid a lot of attention to was Garamond Premier Pro. The only other font in the program that has caught my eye since 2006 has been Trajan Sans. It seems the program is shifting toward non-Latin fonts and web fonts, two areas that I have little interest in at the moment.”

John D. Berry
Director, Scripta Typographic Institute
typoinstitute.org | www.johndberry.com

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I have no idea. I didn’t study type or design; in fact, when I was a student, I was barely aware that such things existed, and had no clue that eventually typography would become my métier. Though perhaps it’s significant that during a ninth-grade class trip to Colonial Williamsburg, the colonial business that I chose to focus on was the printshop.

“I have always been interested in both words and their visual presentation, which seem to me to go hand in hand. That’s why I usually describe myself simply as a typographer and editor: it’s all about the arrangement of words.”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“When it began. Certainly I was well aware of it when I went to my first type conference, Type90, the 1990 ATypI conference in Oxford.”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use typefaces from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Many times. In 1990, for a new edition of William Everson’s long poem River-Root by the new publisher Broken Moon Press, I chose Carol Twombly’s newly released Lithos as the display face for the cover and a dramatic two-page title-page spread. I’m not sure, but this may have been the first use of Lithos in a book. Certainly, this was well before the typeface got picked up by MTV and found its way into almost everything; in 1990 it was new and fresh. Besides, the poem’s subtitle, A Syzygy, had three y’s; the plunging capital ‘Y’ of Lithos looked wonderful in it.”

Carol Twombly’s Lithos is featured in this Broken Moon Press edition of William Everson’s “River-Root,” designed by John D. Berry.

“I used Minion quite a lot in the 1990s as a text face. It had (and has) much of the elegance of the hot-metal Bembo, but worked better in digital typesetting because it was designed from the start with that in mind. I also used Minion sometimes as a display face when I was using Bembo for the text of a book. (See the cover of Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o.) This was in the days before direct-to-plate typesetting, when you could control the output of type onto RC (resin-coated) paper and use the density to beef up a thin digital adaptation like Bembo or Centaur.

Berry used Robert Slimbach’s Minion in designing the cover of the “Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o.”

“On a complex book for University of California Press, originally sketched out by Steve Renick and then given to me for completion as an outside designer, I used Adobe Garamond (which Steve had spec’d) for the text and Myriad (which he hadn’t) for captions and secondary material. It worked well, and I think achieved the kind of balanced, very typographic look that UC Press specialized in when he was art director. (I had to track a light weight of Myriad a little loose in order to make it comfortably readable; it’s always been slightly too tight by default.)

“When the University of Washington Press asked me to design a small book about Chief Seattle’s famous speech, Answering Chief Seattle, I found a chance to use Kepler and take advantage of the flexibility of its multiple-master origins.

Berry employed Slimbach’s Kepler in designing “Answering Chief Seattle.”

“I even found a book use for the wonderful Caflisch Script, when I designed the cover for Anna Swir’s Talking to My Body, a translation by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan that was published by Copper Canyon Press. Caflisch Script’s almost monoline handwriting echoed the tied string in the photograph of a sculpture that we used as the dominant cover image.

“Much more recently, I finally got to use Warnock Pro, which is gorgeous, but a little too spiky and idiosyncratic for most of the books I design. This was for a very large illustrated book, Acutonics: From Galaxies to Cells, where I felt that the colorfulness of Warnock Pro would be attractive to the book’s potential audience, while still being extremely readable en masse. (Again, we used Myriad as a complementary sans.)

“When her friends published a Festschrift for Ursula K. Le Guin on the occasion of her 80th birthday, and asked me to design the book, I found that Adobe Jenson fit the project perfectly. Its classic associations worked well with Le Guin’s work and the varied material by the contributors to the book, and the way Robert Slimbach had designed his Jenson as a robust digital typeface meant that it carried through well as readable and adaptable text.

“This is by no means an exhaustive list, of course.”

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“I suppose the Originals typeface that I’ve put to use most frequently is Minion, notably in its multiple master version. The multiple master technology was never properly integrated into Adobe’s applications, but it was brilliant; it should have been built in so that everyday users got the benefit of MM’s capabilities by default (especially the optical-size axis, which I believe Minion was the first to exploit). I used Minion’s MM range quite a bit, crafting exactly the text version I needed as I designed books, notably for Copper Canyon Press, and used Minion in Copper Canyon’s visual identity for brochures, ads, and catalogs. I also used Minion in many CCP books, including their 25th-anniversary anthology, The Gift of Tongues.

Berry uses Minion extensively in branding and promotional material for Copper Canyon Press.

What do you see for the future of the program?
“Continuing to give the typographic world new families of elegant, functional text typefaces, and occasional display faces, that will work with the evolving technology of publishing and reading.”

Marian Bantjes
Graphic Artist
bantjes.com
Follow @bantjes on Twitter

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I fell into a job at a book typesetter in the days of phototypesetting, where I was trained from the ground up in the fineries of book (and magazine) typesetting. It was a job that I became good at, then passionate about.”

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“Well, I have observed with students that the learning of typography — the awareness to type that comes with it — changes the way you look at the world. The more you learn, the more you notice, because type is absolutely everywhere, and it affects how you see streets and everything you read. It can make or break any reading experience. So this happened to me, of course, but also, it somehow wormed its way deeper into the artistic part of my brain and eventually became a major component of my work, in fantastical custom lettering.”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“In the early 1990s, when I started a design firm. Adobe was *the* place to buy type from, and typefaces such as Adobe Garamond became the backbone to any collection.”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use typefaces from the Adobe Originals collection?
“It was the 1990s to the early 2000s, and by perusing the list, these are the ones I remember. This was pre-OpenType, so there were no Pro versions at the time. I ran a design studio, and we bought and used a lot of fonts for a lot of projects: “Arno, Bickham Script (which remains one of the most beautiful scripts ever designed), Birch, Blackoak, Caflisch, Carta (used extensively, both for its useful icons and ironically, for its tank and battleships), Caslon, Charlemagne, Cottonwood, Adobe Garamond, Giddyup (yes, I confess: the dingbats, I believe), Ironwood, Adobe Jenson, Lithos, Madrone, Mesquite, Minion, Myriad, Nueva, Penumbra (I had this in the multiple master version and it was an astonishingly beautiful and elegant typeface in all of its many variations), Pepperwood, Poetica (I was on the bandwagon of the Poetica craze!), Poplar, Rosewood, Tekton (I probably only used this once, as it quickly fell out of favor due to overuse, and was considered tacky: especially if used for architecture firms), Trajan, Utopia, Warnock, Willow, Wood Type Ornaments, Zebrawood (I’m surprised by the number of wood types I used, but when you need one, well, these are the ones you need).”

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Either Penumbra or Bickham script.”

Why are these your favorites?
“Bickham Script is incredibly well crafted. It flows beautifully and was one of the first to have an extensive set of alternates and swashes. It was a revelation at the time that a font could be adapted in so many ways and could take on aspects of uniqueness depending on how one used it. But, more importantly, it holds up over time. If I could have only one script, it would be this one.

“Penumbra filled the gap of semi-sans where the much reviled Optima failed. Of course Penumbra was so much more, being variable between serif and sans. It’s incredible that it worked at all, visually, let alone how well it worked. Penumbra is in that corner marked ‘elegant,’ and yet it is more modern than most of its ‘elegant’ contemporaries.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“Well, I’m not an expert on such things, but of course they were known for the creation of quality text faces as well as a few exceptional display faces in the 1990s. When the type world was going experimentally mad, the Adobe Originals was a sort of haven of sanity, with greatly esteemed type designers. I believe they invented the multiple master system which, sadly, ultimately failed, but was a great experiment in its time.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“In all honesty, the program seems to be stagnant. I’ve not heard of anything significant coming out of Adobe for a very long time. There was a number of years I didn’t even know they still sold type! Almost all of the faces in the list are well known to me — from 20 years ago. Typography went through an explosion in the 1990s; Emigre ousted Adobe as *the* place to get type, and now a decent number of excellent independent firms can be counted on to deliver great typefaces, with Hoefler and Co. arguably *the* hot studio of the past six years or so. Monotype continues to absorb the rest of the old great foundries to gain a monopoly on the historical standards. Adobe, as far as I know, is nowhere to be seen. They would need a major investment of time, energy, cash, and some brilliant designers with new ideas to re-enter the scene at this stage.

“Well, you may not want to print that, but there it is!”

Alastair Johnston
Editor/Publisher, Poltroon Press
poltroonpress.com

How did you become interested in type and design?
“Through writing and drawing as a child. I always drew elaborate letterforms (like the MAD magazine logo and lettering from posters and dust jackets), drawing them in outline rather than calligraphically, and when I dropped out of college, I supported myself for a few years as a signwriter before becoming a letterpress printer.”

Alastair Johnston at Poltroon Press, which he co-founded with Frances Butler in Berkeley in 1975.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“I have spent a lot of time setting type by hand, or by computer, and printing. When you handset type, you are not only looking at the characters, but the spacing around and between them; and often you are making decisions about 1/144th of an inch in letterspacing, which is about as small a space as the eye can distinguish. I have also studied, written about, and taught the history of type and typography.

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“Probably about 1984, when Sumner Stone gave an Apple Mac to Wesley Tanner, whom I knew. I had known Sumner as a calligrapher and also at Autologic, where they worked on a Janson revival. We discussed the Caslon type specimen of 1734.”

Have you ever had the opportunity to use Adobe typefaces from the Originals collection?
“Before the creation of Lithos, Adobe was considering a revival of Koch Neuland. I made repros of my eight sizes of Neuland types (the letterforms are different at each size) for Lynne Garell. Ginger contacted me when Adobe was considering wood type revivals, and I put her in touch with Rob Roy Kelly. Around 1999, David Lemon, who had been my student, hired me to work on an online database describing all the types in the Adobe and ITC collections. They were all generous in giving me review copies of types, but at the time I used Sabon for almost everything (now I use Swift a lot). However I always appreciated the booklets!

“I used some of the Adobe types in The Ampersand, a book arts magazine I edited for 15 years. I remember having problems using multiple masters. In the magazine, we regularly reported on the struggle between Adobe and Microsoft with articles titled Hot Air and Vaporware, and Font Wars. In 1990, I wrote an article in The Ampersand called Adobe Awakens, after the release of many new types, where I said, ‘Now that the slumbering giant has finally awoken, let’s see if Adobe can save the Princess Desktop from the poisoned Apple and a fate worse than ITC.’ In the article, I reviewed the three new faces of Carol Twombly, saying, ‘Lithos, instead of being an instant classic, is one of those easily recognizable novelties that is already wearing thin. Charlemagne seems tailor-made for Sonoma Valley vintners,’ and my pick-to-click ‘Trajan outdoes anything old Fred Goudy ever produced.’ I also wrote a lengthy analysis of Minion and dismissed Tekton as rubbish.”

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“I like the Wood Types. They fill a gap in the library. I am a fan of the decorative late nineteenth-century American types. I would like to see more well-done revivals of late nineteenth-century display faces (but not text faces), just for fun.”

How do you feel the Adobe Originals program has contributed to type and design?
“There was a type conference at Stanford in the early 1980s (I think Donald Knuth was behind it: he was an enthusiast with no aesthetic sense) and Hermann Zapf said something really profound. He said, ‘we need new types for new technology.’ I agreed, and felt it was a mistake to try to revive Garamond, Caslon, and Jenson, which were designed in and for completely different media. I always felt it was a mistake of Adobe to pursue these ideas. I am glad they are now focused more on original work.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“The program was important in supporting and recognizing the work of type designers and giving them not only credit, but income. However, historical revivals are no longer useful for text, and certainly not on computers, which are increasingly our reading environment. So to reiterate Zapf: new types for new technology.”

Do you have examples of Adobe Originals in use that you feel are significant or special that you are able to share?
“I made a collection of examples of Lithos when it first came out to show (my students) its use and abuse in popular print and signage. Sumner Stone told me they feared designers were stretching and condensing types beyond reason, so Adobe wanted built-in resistance to anticipate this, which is why they went with the taffy-like qualities of Lithos as opposed to the more rigid Neuland, and why Lithos (which, in some ways, is a revival of Pericles) did so well. There was a plague of Rosewood Fill in the early 1990s, showing that designers still wanted to play with and modify types and refused to use them out of the box.”

Erik Spiekermann
Founder and Partner, FontShop International and Edenspiekermann
spiekermann.com/en
Follow @spiekermann on Twitter

How did you become interested in type and design?
“I got a little printing press when I was twelve. That’s when the bug bit.”

Erik Spiekermann in the printshop. Photo by Max Zerrahn.

How have type and typography most impacted your life?
“The fact that type is visible language and that, without it, there would be no culture, no science, no communication.”

When did you first become aware that Adobe had an original typeface design program?
“At or around Type’87, the ATypI conference in NYC, where I met several Adobe designers, as well as Liz Bond and Sumner Stone. They then invited me to be a guest on the Type Board.”

According to Spiekermann: “These three pictures are a scan of very bad and very small color prints from photos I took back in 1988 or 1989.” Far left: The Type Board meeting place at the Cowper Inn in Palo Alto; center: Liz Bond and Sumner Stone; far right, pictured from left: Type Board members Stephen Harvard, Louise Fili, and Jack Stauffacher.

Do you have any stories to share from your experience working with Adobe?
“In 1988, I also got invited to participate in the Adobe Publishing Packs. I worked on that with Gail Blumberg from Adobe who brought in Bill Hill, then with Ideo, to work with us on the concept. Bill and I first met in Palo Alto for that project and, not much later, decided to start the SF branch of my then-design firm, MetaDesign. The office opened in June 1992, and one of our first projects was the production of Stop Stealing Sheep for Adobe Press, which I wrote with the help of E M Ginger as editor and chief butt-kicker. The text was set in Minion, the cover in Myriad.”

Adobe Publishing Pack curated by Spiekermann, circa 1988.

Have you ever had the opportunity to use typefaces from the Adobe Originals collection?
“For a while, Minion and Myriad were our staple corporate faces. We often used the multiple master technology to generate specific weights that we would then rename for the client. One of the biggest projects was for Springer Publishing, one of the biggest scientific publishers in the world. To this day, they use SpringerMi [customized Minion] for text and SpringerMy [customized Myriad] for headlines. I introduced Utopia as the serif companion for Futura (which we had redesigned for the purpose), the typeface used for Volkswagen’s branding from 1994. Also still in use today. I also mixed Minion with my own FF Meta a lot, for example for the WDR, Germany’s largest TV and radio station. When we finally designed FF MetaSerif as the companion face, Minion was the benchmark.”

Spread from a forthcoming book about Spiekermann (Gestalten Verlag: “Hello, I’m Erik”) shows the Springer publishing project using Myriad and Minion.

What is your favorite typeface design from the Adobe Originals collection?
“Definitely Minion. It is incredibly versatile, but not at the expense of originality. It feels different without it being in-your-face over-designed. A great combination of all the qualities of classic serif faces with the choices offered by a large family of weights and widths, and one of the best italics ever. It makes Times New Roman look meek and totally useless by comparison.”

What do you see for the future of the program?
“There are still areas of typographic problem solving not addressed by an Adobe Original. And there will always be a new technology for making and using type and fonts. Adobe invented tools and methods that have become standard, and I expect that to happen in the future as well. A commitment to type not only supports the other applications, but is expected from designers everywhere.”

Up next: The final chapter — a “where-are-they-now” glimpse at the Adobe Originals team, past and present.

Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

Updated December 8, 2014: At the request of some interviewees, quotations in this article were modified to more accurately reflect their opinions.

When you look through the list of typefaces, it’s clear that you’re essentially looking at a list of household names, and that’s an incredible achievement: to bring type to the masses. And yet we’re talking about bringing high quality type to the masses, and that’s even more impressive.
— Elliot Jay Stocks, Creative Director, Adobe Typekit

Adobe Originals more often than not set the proverbial bar higher, meaning that we are at the cutting edge of type innovation, both in terms of design, but also in functionality. Anything that cuts can also cause bleeding, which explains why being at the cutting edge often translates into our fonts sometimes being too innovative, which usually means that applications need to catch up to support some of the feature or functionality that we include. This keeps our application teams on their toes, which ultimately results in better products for our customers. After all, it is our customers who ultimately make Adobe successful.
— Dr. Ken Lunde, Senior Computer Scientist in CJKV Type Development at Adobe

The Adobe Originals program launched in 1989 through an initiative driven by Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first director of typography. A flurry of releases in that first pivotal year by lead type designers Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly included Adobe Garamond, Utopia, the “Modern Ancients” of Trajan, Lithos, and Charlemagne, and the launch of the Adobe Wood Types. From that auspicious debut of historical revivals and original designs for Western digital typography, the Adobe Type team has become the standard bearer for expanding language support, technological innovation, and improving typographical aesthetics. Recent additions to the Originals library include open source releases — Source Sans, Source Code, and Source Serif — and a groundbreaking Pan-CJK joint effort with Google, Source Han Sans. The Originals collection now contains 101 type families. While other foundries may have released more designs over the past 25 years, the team’s mission has remained clear: to maintain the highest standards aesthetically and technologically; to anticipate needs and exceed expectations. The quality mandate remains constant due in no small part to the vision and artistic direction of Robert Slimbach, who joined the type team in 1987 and became Adobe’s first principal designer. To achieve the high standards set by Slimbach, an average of two years is spent in crafting a typical Adobe Original family for release. The time investment pays off in the form of quality, and it’s not just the end user that appreciates the craftsmanship of the Originals: the respect the Adobe Type team members have for each other’s work is a testament to the success of the program. In hopes of uncovering some personal typographic opinions, members of the Adobe Type/Typekit teams were asked the same set of questions: What’s your favorite type design from the Adobe Originals collection? Why is it your favorite, and what makes it special or significant in the world of type? The answers were enlightening, and often surprising. Paul Hunt Official title: Computer Scientist for Adobe Type Unofficial title: Typeface Designer and Font Developer The favorite: “It’s always hard for me to pick a favorite typeface. When asked this question, I always follow up with, ‘for what purpose?’ In terms of text type, I really like the solid, non-assuming character of Arno. The design doesn’t really draw too much attention to itself and it just works beautifully when setting test for extended reading. In terms of display, I have always had a soft spot for the beautifully calligraphic forms of Brioso. Unfortunately, there are not many opportunities to use a typeface of this refined, delicate character, but when one does present itself, Brioso breathes liveliness and sophistication into designs that it touches. “Both of these choices are very firmly ‘Slimbach types,’ by which I mean that they are firmly rooted in the humanistic calligraphic tradition. In a way Arno and Brioso are extremes in this particular category along the axis of ‘typographic expression’: where Arno would be on the reserved end and Brioso is more an even balance between general usability and personality. To the other extreme on this scale, we have Ex Ponto by Jovica Veljović, square in the corner of free expression.” Ken Lunde Senior Computer Scientist in CJKV Type Development at Adobe The favorite: “For me, it is the 101st one, Source Han Sans, followed closely by Kazuraki. Source Han Sans holds a special place in my heart, because I first envisioned such a typeface design over 15 years ago, and continued to think about it over the years. It also embodies all of the languages and scripts that interest me, meaning all of CJK, with a little V (CJKV) thrown in. My heart and soul went into its development.

Sketches of Source Han Sans, designed by Ryoko Nishizuka.

“Kazuraki is also special to me because it breaks the traditional rigidity that is prototypical of Japanese type, and is the world’s first fully-proportional Japanese OpenType font. A lot of ingenuity went into making sure that the font works correctly for both writing directions, which was a challenge due to the fully-proportional nature of its glyphs.” Taro Yamamoto Senior Manager, Japanese Typography, Japan Research and Development The favorite: “Kazuraki — because it is a proportional Japanese typeface. Unlike traditional typefaces in Japan, each of whose type body is an EM square, Kazuraki has a proportional width.”

Example of Kazuraki, designed by Ryoko Nishizuka.

Elliot Jay Stocks Creative Director, Adobe Typekit The favorite: “That’s very hard! I think right now I’m going to go with Garamond Premier Pro. It’s on the top of my mind right now because I’ve been using the display weights to set the type in our Typekit print ads. Robert Slimbach is a true modern master of type design, and I have a personal fascination with display versions of text faces — I love seeing how they’re connected, and how a display weight can pull out some of that inner beauty from the text face.”

Typekit print ad, designed by Elliot Jay Stocks, featuring Garamond Premier Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach.

Caleb Belohlavek Principal Product Manager, Adobe Type The favorite: “My favorite font is Trajan Pro. I was lucky enough to see an original rubbing taken from the Trajan column when I was studying calligraphy at the age of 19. Little did I know then, that I would someday work for a company where a font derived from these very beautiful forms would be among the most popular Adobe Originals to date. To cap it off, I’ve been lucky enough to meet with Carol Twombly, the designer of Trajan Pro, a number of times — even though she is no longer designing type. Like her typeface, she is a beautiful soul as well. “For me, Trajan Pro is all about proportion, and that it was derived from characters cut into stone. I was able to see some of the work Father [Edward] Catich did incising both characters and illustrations into stone, and even though I’ve never done it myself, I am still fascinated by letters formed in three dimensions. Every time I see Trajan, my mind sees not only the pure form, but also the chiseled origins. They can’t be separated for me.” Benjamin Trissel Quality Engineer Lead for Adobe Typekit The favorite: “For sentimental reasons, I love Carol Twombly’s Trajan. My connection to it is this: Father Ed Catich taught calligraphy for a time at Colorado College — he had also taught my father back in the day. My father had had zinc cuts made of Catich’s original calligraphy of Trajan, and I used to use these in poster designs. Twombly’s Trajan takes me back to those memories in that letterform. Trajan is the first expression of a formal Roman letterform coupled with the ‘modern’ alphabet. The line from Trajan, through Arrighi and Bembo to, say, Nicholas Jenson, are, to me, the real beginnings of modern typography.”

A plaster cast shows the inscription at the base of Trajan’s column, the inspiration for Carol Twombly’s landmark Adobe Original typeface. Photo by Chris Dobbins, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2008. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0.

Steve Ross Program Manager, Adobe Type The favorite: “I would have to say both Minion Pro and Source Sans Pro. The former, because I leaned on it as my workhorse typeface in my prior career at design agencies. It is very economical, space-wise, which is very useful if you’re designing bilingual print pieces (as was often the case working in Canada). Robert did a fantastic job on that design. The latter, because it is both a very nice design by Paul, and also because it’s our first open source family, which made it a really cool project with which to be involved. I love it when we can have our users interact with us on projects, and the open source community certainly does that.” Christopher Slye Licensing Manager for Adobe Typekit The favorite: “I am not one to pick favorites, but I will admit to particular admiration for Kepler. To me, it is one of the most ambitious multiple master designs ever produced, maybe the zenith of that era. I remain amazed by how it encompasses very distinctive display sizes down to effective caption sizes — and, on top of that, also includes truly extreme dynamic ranges in weight and width. It is a design tour de force and, of course, beautiful. To me, it perfectly embodies the promise of multiple master technology, the talent of Robert Slimbach as a designer, and the collective accomplishments of the Adobe Type team. “Beyond that, I think Minion and Myriad are nearly perfect typefaces, not just among Adobe Originals, but among the vast array of contemporary and classic typefaces. They both achieve the honorable goal of a certain kind of type design, which is to convey information as clearly and unobtrusively as possible. It’s a quality that very few typefaces achieve.” Miguel Sousa Team Lead for Type Development at Adobe The favorite: “I think I have mentioned Warnock — what I like about Warnock is that it’s different from all the other ones. It’s a text face, but it’s kind of idiosyncratic. It has some shapes that you would probably not use in a text face, but then it works. It’s not a traditional text face; it’s something that would be nice if Robert would do more of, instead of just classical text faces. But that’s just my opinion! I have mentioned this to Robert: it would be nice if he could make more text faces that are unconventional. I think it’s because Warnock does not follow any historical model. All the others just kind of follow pen shapes, follow Garamond, follow old style, or traditional… Instead of a refinement of something that exists already, it’s an original that just came from Robert.” Tim Brown Type Manager for Adobe Typekit The favorite: “Oh gosh, I like so many of them. Adobe Caslon has always been one of my favorites, for simple reasons: Caslon types feel honest and thoughtful, and I knew I could trust Adobe to offer a well-made font. Source Sans is fantastic. I’ve used it for all kinds of things recently, from user interfaces to small caption text to big titles in presentation slides. The enormous Kepler family has been really useful for illustrating the ways in which type might behave in responsive design contexts — getting wider, narrower, or more optically optimal as needed.” Ernest March Quality Engineer for Adobe Type The favorite: “My current personal all around favorite is Kepler, but Brioso is a close second. Kepler, because of its enormous range. Also, it’s the hugest Western font we currently have (something like 176 faces). Brioso, just because I think it’s so beautiful and the swash caps in the italics are some of my all time favorites.”

Calligraphic drawings for Brioso, designed by Robert Slimbach.

Nicole Miñoza Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Type The favorite: “My favorite of the Adobe Originals is Bickham Script, designed by Richard Lipton. It’s such a beautiful typeface — I especially love all of the swash alternates it has. I used Bickham alongside Brioso on my wedding invitation and other printed pieces when I got married six years ago.”

Menu card for Nicole Miñoza’s 2008 wedding features Bickham Script, designed by Richard Lipton.

Frank Grießhammer Type Designer for Adobe The favorite: “My favorite Adobe Original is Source Code Pro by Paul D. Hunt. I have been interested in monospaced and coding fonts for quite some time. I feel this project is a very good vehicle for making a broad audience (programmers on GitHub) aware of typeface design, and also showing them the amount of work that is involved with creating a decent typeface. I am happy I could contribute something to its creation, and I use it every day. “Since a single typeface can never fulfill all possible needs, I would like to mention some more. We have a lot of good text faces in the Adobe Originals library, many of which can be seen virtually everywhere. My go-to text face is Adobe Text — simply because it is not so well-known, and, in its style, is quite different from Robert Slimbach’s other text faces. Also, I find the very limited scope of the family (really only for text) appealing. “When it comes to display type, I have a weakness for slightly odd or quirky typefaces; for instance, Michael Harvey’s Mezz or Studz (as I already mentioned in a talk at Typo Berlin this year). Often the freshness is lost in early digital typefaces, but those designs are still appealing and look good to me, even after years have passed. For the same reason I also like Galahad by Alan Blackman, in all its quaintness.” David Lemon Senior Manager of Type Development for Adobe The favorite: “I’ll talk about a different topic, since I couldn’t possibly select one face. I find it odd that some truly great design goes so unrecognized. First, there’s Carol Twombly’s work. Her faces were quite popular in Europe, but aside from Lithos and Trajan were virtually unrecognized in the United States. I think that disappointed her, and was one of the factors that led her to stop making type. Second, there’s Robert Slimbach. Lots of people know his name and some of his designs, but I think very few actually get what a consummate craftsman he is, especially with text faces. Things like Kepler, Arno, Adobe Text, and Warnock are probably better than the faces he’s well known for. “I will give a mention to Source Han Sans, our new open source Pan-CJK family. I’m seriously proud of it for two reasons. First, because it’s the largest single font development project Adobe ever undertook, and one of the largest ever done anywhere, yet we managed to do it quite well in a surprisingly short period. Second, because the project would never have happened if I hadn’t refused to give up. It took two years of wrangling with ‘stakeholders’ (as we say) inside Adobe and Google to get the green light, and there were times when I was the only person who was still pushing for it.”

Lemon’s comments regarding championing the Source Han Sans project are, in a way, representative of the history of the Adobe Originals program and the people who worked so diligently to make it a success. During the early years of the desktop publishing revolution, typography was in a sorry state. The pioneers at Adobe Type, brought together in a perfect storm of aesthetics, technological curiosity, and industry upheaval, were in a position to craft digital type at a level that would gain broad acceptance, and change the world of publishing for the better. Effecting that kind of change is not easy, and maintaining ever-higher standards of perfection is a difficult proposition even for the most dedicated. “The program succeeded in its mission to legitimize digital type and establish a long-lasting collection of typeface designs that work within, but also transcend, their digital medium,” Slye said. “Simply proving that was an invaluable contribution. Obviously, there are many others who have made important contributions in the last 25 years, but Adobe’s focus on that goal, in those early days especially, has been the most impactful, it seems to me. Using its unique and highly visible position as an innovator allowed Adobe to carry the typographic arts into a new era, and also helped create a really solid foundation on which others could build.” Up next: An outside perspective on the Adobe Originals. Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

It was certainly one of the striking and exciting things about being there and working with everyone — everyone was passionate about the craft, about making good stuff that would be reliable, and, at the same time, represent an advance in type design. Percentage wise, there’s just a huge amount of finely crafted workhorse typefaces and classic display faces that have already stood the test of time, and I’m sure will for decades, probably centuries to come. Whether it’s Adobe Garamond or Trajan, these typefaces are going to be around indefinitely.
— Thomas Phinney, former Product Manager for Adobe Type

Knowing what I know now, I would have fought very hard outside of Adobe and within Adobe to make sure the [multiple master] business model made sense. John [Warnock] and Chuck [Geschke] thought it was cool. Steve Jobs thought multiple masters were cool. But it didn’t work out that way — wanting to do something, and then really doing it. But it’s cool stuff. I love it. Everyone is using it to come up with fonts.
— Fred Brady, former Manager of New Type Development for Adobe

OpenType solved some very compelling problems and also offered some really fascinating capabilities for type designers, offering the kind of technical challenge that Adobe had become very good at confronting and implementing.
— Christopher Slye, Type Licensing Manager for Adobe Typekit

The early days of the Adobe Originals program were also golden years for the company in general, and a boon to typographically savvy graphic designers who embraced desktop publishing. With digital type gaining broader acceptance throughout the early 1990s, the Originals team was continually challenged to produce high quality type quickly and efficiently.

In addition to expanding its typeface library, Adobe was constantly developing font technology. Much of this development was driven by sheer necessity: Adobe had to push hard to stay competitive in the “Font Wars” that began brewing in the late 1980s. After two years spent in development, Apple engineer Sampo Kaasila completed what would become known as the TrueType font format in August of 1989. This format, which would be popularized through a partnership between Apple and Microsoft, had every chance of toppling Adobe from its font technology throne by replacing PostScript Type 1 fonts.

“Sampo went to Apple because he’d been developing font technology for Imagen, one of the companies that had competed with Adobe in the page-description language space,” said David Lemon, Adobe’s senior manager of type development. “When Imagen lost to Adobe, Sampo needed a new home for his innovation. The ‘law of unintended consequences.’”

Subsequent to Apple and Microsoft announcing TrueType in the fall of 1989, Adobe countered with the announcement that it would be publishing its PostScript Type 1 font specification. Adobe’s shift from a proprietary to an open standard would allow third parties to develop Type 1 fonts as long as they adhered to the spec, helping PostScript remain competitive in the battle for font tech supremacy.

The first version of Adobe Type Manager (ATM) was released in 1990. ATM was a utility designed to improve font handling and appearance on screens and printers that didn’t use PostScript. ATM was also necessary for proper functionality of multiple master fonts.

To further combat Apple and Microsoft’s efforts to knock down PostScript fonts, in 1990, Adobe released Adobe Type Manager (ATM), which gave accurate real-time previews of type on a user’s screen. “Prior to that, one had bitmapped ‘screen fonts’ that were scaled to approximate any sizes that weren’t prebuilt, so they looked awful,” Lemon said. “ATM was rasterizing on the screen (and on printers that didn’t use PostScript). This was a capability we knew Apple would have when they shipped TrueType, so we got it out nine months before they did.”

Circa 1996, ATM Deluxe would be released as a monetized product, with the software expanded into a robust font management and troubleshooting tool. With increasingly sophisticated non-PostScript publishing tools and a viable alternative font format available, continually improving font handling was essential to keeping type users — the paying customers — happy.

ATM played another important role in the Adobe Originals story: it was an essential utility for type users who wanted to take advantage of the flexibility of an emerging font format.

Introducing multiple masters

In 1991, the multiple master format was introduced as an extension to PostScript Type 1. Multiple master fonts, or MM fonts, were built with two or more design masters — outline typeface styles — with font “instances” generated through interpolation along one or more design axes (such as weight, width, and optical size). MM fonts allowed end users greater flexibility and more precise control of their typography than was possible with standard PostScript fonts.

“Interpolation is a mathematical term borrowed by computer graphics, where one things morphs into another through a smooth continuum,” Lemon said. “Multiple master fonts were another cool way to use computer power to improve font technology. A single multiple master font offered untold potential for typographic fine-tuning, without compromising the aesthetics or readability of letterforms.”

Typographer and lettering artist Stephen Harvard, a member of Adobe’s Type Advisory Board, sparked the team’s interest in typographic interpolation early on in the Originals  program. At a 1988 board meeting, he brought along a printout he had made that displayed a series of interpolated letters.

“[Stephen Harvard] had digitized two letter a’s, one a large optical size — probably Garamond’s Gros Canon type — and the other from a small size of Garamond type, running a series of interpolated letters between them. Interpolation was not new, but the progression of intermediate sizes that his test revealed remained in my mind. Later that year, while viewing various sizes of Garamond and Granjon type at Plantin-Moretus Museum, I began to pay close attention to this aspect of their work which fueled my interest to eventually produce a Garamond with a range of size-specific fonts.”

— Robert Slimbach [1]

Slimbach and fellow lead type designer Carol Twombly developed the first multiple master typeface designs: “sibling” fonts Myriad MM and Minion MM, both released in 1992. Minion MM was a reworking of Slimbach’s popular serif family, while Myriad MM, its sans text companion, had been a collaborative project initiated by Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first director of typography. It was Stone who drove the concept of multiple master fonts within the company.

“I promoted it at Adobe, but I left soon after,” Stone said. “I said it should be called the Mother Hubbard project: she had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. I’m not the one who thought up the interpolation — that person was Peter Karow [co-founder of URW]. Peter put it to use in IKARUS [in the early 1970s]. The thing I thought up was putting the interpolation in the interpreter. [John] Warnock was enthusiastic because of Acrobat, and what about fonts? They got away with embedding, which was incredible finesse. But initially, we’re going to imitate every font with some basic font.”

On putting the power of multiple masters in the hands of typographic novices:

“The purists are going to say, ‘Whoa, wait a minute.’ My guess is that the scribes and monks didn’t think Gutenberg had such a good idea, either.”

— Allan Haley, Director of Words and Letters, Monotype [2]

The stroke weight ratio between the light and bold weights of of Myriad MM. Originally shown in “Designing Multiple Master Typefaces,” published by Adobe 1995, 1997.

Myriad MM and Minion MM were ambitious designs, developed in tandem in order to have both a sans and serif family to show the multiple master font technology to its best advantage. Myriad MM included four masters and 15 primary instances in each font, ranging from Light Condensed to Black Semi Extended, with expansive weight and width axis ranges. Minion MM also featured weight and width axes — from Light to Bold and Condensed to Regular — and it was the first family to use the optical size axis, ranging from Caption to Display. “This component included some pretty cool technology itself, approximating a curve to apply the interpolation non-linearly,” Lemon said.

Some of the potential design axes and dynamic ranges that can make up a multiple master typeface. Originally shown in “Designing Multiple Master Typefaces,” published by Adobe 1995, 1997.

Inspired by the possibilities of the new font format, the Adobe Type team set to work developing MM fonts. Over the next six years, the majority of multi-font families by Twombly and Slimbach would be developed as multiple masters, including Caflisch Script, Adobe Jenson, and Warnock (Slimbach), and Chaparral, Nueva, and Viva (Twombly).  A number of outside designers were also recruited to develop MM fonts: the late Michael Harvey (Mezz and Conga Brava), Lance Hidy (Penumbra), Richard Lipton (Bickham Script), Jim Parkinson (Jimbo), and Julian Waters (Waters Titling), among others.

Two-page advertisement for Adobe’s multiple master fonts, published in “U&lc,” Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 1993, by International Typeface Corporation. Image courtesy of Monotype. (Click image to access a PDF of the entire issue.)

Lemon recalled Adobe Type worked on designs from early foundry partners to expand available multiple master font offerings: “We also made MM ‘retrotfit’ versions of some existing Berthold and International Typeface Corporation [ITC] faces as a way to help promote the technology.”

One such retrofit was the making of ITC Avant Garde into a multiple master font. Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase’s expressive geometric sans was an ad typography staple of the 1970s, and highly successful in the hands of skilled typographers (but badly mistreated by less-than-talented practitioners). ITC Avant Garde MM was released to great fanfare in May 1993 as a two-axis typeface; the Light Normal, Bold Normal, and Bold Condensed master type designs were taken from the original PostScript family, while the Adobe Type team created the Light Condensed master to complete the design.

ITC Avant Garde was “retrofitted” for the multiple master font format, and was the first ITC family to be released as an MM font. This two-page announcement was published in “U&lc,” Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 1993, by International Typeface Corporation. Image courtesy of Monotype. (Click image to access a PDF of the entire issue.)

ITC Avant Garde MM, “retrofitted” for the multiple master font format. The primary fonts are highlighted in black. Originally shown in “Part 2: Adobe’s Typeface Design Process,” published by Adobe 1995, 1996.

Although the technology was exciting, multiple master fonts were daunting for end users to work with. Application developers were slow to show real support of multiple masters, and in software that could use MM fonts, working with the format was invariably a painful process. Users were forced to generate instances for each variation of a font they wanted to try, resulting in a hard drive littered with font files bearing such arcane names as MinioMM_578 BD 465 CN 11 OP. Rather than deal with such cumbersome logistics, users would often stick with the pre-generated instances that shipped with MM fonts, missing out on all that glorious technology.

“The multiple master format was a wonderful idea,” said Read Roberts, font tools engineer for Adobe Type. “The obviously wonderful thing about is you had a font file that let you explore a whole design space. The end user could end up with any instance they wanted in a range from heavy to bold, expanded to condensed, cap height variations, optical height variations … whatever you wanted to throw in as a developer.”

While a handful of third-party type designers and foundries released MM fonts, the format wasn’t widely embraced by developers outside Adobe. Fred Brady, former manager of new type development for Adobe, recalled that other foundries didn’t want to design multiple masters: they were a lot more work, and it made better fiscal sense to use interpolation to create static masters for fonts and sell them separately.

“When we came up with multiple master font technology, I think that was probably — for me — the most exciting type-related tech thing other than scaleable fonts that happened in all the time I was doing fonts,” Brady said. “It was a great innovation that Adobe had done, allowing you to interpolate fonts on the fly. It died because of a lack of total commitment from the market and in educating people. It could have been very useful for any market if seamlessly integrated.”

In the mid-1990s, while the type team was still working to promote multiple master fonts to the masses, another font technology with far-reaching potential was peeking over the horizon. Font War alliances shifted when Adobe and Microsoft mended fences and announced their joint OpenType initiative in 1996.

The OpenType initiative

The globalization of design and communications necessitated a more robust font format, one that could provide international language support and enhanced typography. Built to accommodate Unicode character encoding, multiple world scripts, and up to 65,536 glyphs, OpenType could easily support typographic layout features like ligatures, small caps, multiple figure styles, and many other niceties. What’s more, OpenType fonts consisted of a single file that could work across platforms (as opposed to Type 1 fonts, which needed two files to run on the Macintosh operating system, and a completely different pair of files to run on Windows). Adobe and Microsoft intended for OpenType to replace PostScript Type 1 and TrueType.

Robert Slimbach’s broad-edged pen exercises and pencil sketches from the development of Warnock Pro. Slimbach was an early advocate of broadening language support in the Adobe Originals, inspiring him to learn to design Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew in order to extend his Western character sets.

The same OpenType functionality that enables advanced typography for Western languages is necessary just to do basic typesetting of languages such as Arabic and the Indic languages. “What’s rarely clear to Western typographers is that many of the ‘cool’ features of OpenType are enabled by an architecture that’s essential for many non-Western systems,” Lemon said. “This is critical because Microsoft would never have gone down the OpenType path if it weren’t for the need to support ‘complex scripts,’ as they were called then.”

Hampered by memories of the less-than-spectacular response to multiple master fonts and Apple’s advanced GX font technology, OpenType would have a great many obstacles to overcome before it would gain acceptance by developers and end users alike. About a year after Adobe and Microsoft announced their initiative, Adobe Type was fortunate enough to recruit a new employee who would become one of OpenType’s biggest proponents.

Thomas Phinney, who had completed his master’s in graphic arts publishing at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the spring of 1997, was considering his career options when he became aware of an opening in Adobe’s type group.

“I almost didn’t apply for it,” Phinney said. “The job description called for someone to do software mastering: the official key duty was to do the final crank-turning steps and throw the fonts on a disk, [along with] other bits they had to put on the floppy; ATM Light, EULAs, etc. It didn’t sound that exciting at first.”

But Phinney recalled that, in the job description, Adobe asked for some more advanced skills that had little to do with the job described. “It wasn’t clear whether this person would get to do something more exciting,” he said. “They emailed me the job opening because I managed to get the attention of the manager of the group at the time, Dan Mills. I looked at it and said, well, the job duties aren’t exciting — but it’s at Adobe, which is my dream place to be.”

“Dan was a strategist, so he approached Thomas with the question: ‘Do you know someone who’d be a good fit … ?’ It looked like we were asking about Thomas’ students but Dan was really angling for Thomas,” Lemon said.

Phinney, who had taught a font production class at RIT, encouraged a few of his students to apply, but his interest in Adobe got the better of him. “Eventually, I had a little more back and forth; Dan made it super clear that while it was entry level, there would be real opportunities for advancement. I applied for it, and — long story short — they flew me out and eventually hired me.”

Phinney joined the type team in June 1997, at a time when the Originals program was in a major transition. “Adobe type had gone through dramatic downsizing in 1994. They hadn’t hired anyone new in the type group in three years. A month later, they hired Christopher [Slye] as well. He was always the new guy to me!”

The type team began the migration away from multiple master fonts to OpenType, a move that would require a tremendous time investment. In addition to revising and expanding the Adobe Originals for OpenType, the type team had another Herculean task ahead of them. The Alchemy project, as it was dubbed, was the planned conversion of the entire Adobe library — then consisting of more than 2,700 fonts — into OpenType.

“This was no straight conversion,” Phinney said. “Characters such as the euro were added, kerning enhanced, and supplemental fonts merged into base fonts (with all the OpenType features such merging required). In the most extreme case, that of Poetica, 21 fonts merged into one.”

The Alchemy project afforded the type team an opportunity to greatly expand and make technical and aesthetic enhancements to a number of the existing Originals. “Some of the Originals were seriously reworked for OpenType, including Minion (Robert refined the design and added Greek — he had already done the Cyrillic in 1992) and Utopia (optical sizes added),” Lemon said. “We extended the Latin in Bickham and added extensive contextual behavior rules for its many alternate glyphs.”

“I did a lot of work developing the layout features in those first OpenType fonts, and it was a chance to combine very straightforward software programming techniques with typographic considerations — which seemed to me at the time like a perfect job,” said Christopher Slye, type licensing manager for Adobe Typekit. “Those first fonts also served as models for subsequent third party developers, so it was very satisfying to be establishing new standards while also engaging in serious typographic problem solving. Combining all of the old expert sets, putting the pieces together into a single font, and writing instructions to let each feature work in an intuitive way — it all seemed very much like the next natural step for digital type. Doing it at Adobe with the cooperation of other product teams was really fun and satisfying.”

The Alchemy project took more than two years to complete, with the last fonts converted to OpenType in 2003.

Richard Lipton’s elegant Bickham Script lights the edifice of Macy’s in Herald Square, New York City, during the 2012 holiday season. Bickham was a multiple master type design that made a successful leap to OpenType, becoming one of the most popular scripts in use since it was first published in 1997. Photo by Nick Sherman.

“The transition to OpenType was technically challenging, of course, but challenging on all sorts of levels,” Phinney said. “On the outside, it looks like the production of Adobe Originals plummeted. These OpenType fonts got way bigger; [we were] designing for more languages and so on. We went from having fonts that had 220-some glyphs to the smallest new fonts having 384 or so, while these days, a typical new Adobe typeface has 3,000 glyphs per font. Yes, there are a lot of accented glyphs you can compose without much work, but when you have twelve times as many glyphs per font, it takes substantially longer.”

In the literal sense, the perception of reduced typeface output was partly true, Phinney said. “Although the ones that come out are so much more: richer typographically, more depth linguistically … you can’t produce as many.”

The migration to OpenType was the kiss of death for multiple master fonts. The last Adobe Original MM font family was Reliq, designed by Carl Crossgrove and released in 1998. The OpenType revolution had begun in earnest. But would this new format succeed where multiple master technology had failed?

“There are all sorts of smart talented creative folks on the team,” Phinney said. “I think one thing I brought to the mix when looking at everything was just some particular analysis and thinking about OpenType. We were putting everything into this new font format, and, if it flopped, it was going to be bad for us in many ways: wasted work; horrendous for morale; and a huge lost investment.”

“I was sitting there looking at this. Even before I started the MBA [at Berkeley], I was looking at it like you would a business case study. I was thinking about two things: Apple GX typography (now Apple AAT fonts) and multiple masters. Both were awesome font technologies; both MM and GX were brilliant ideas, both better mousetraps. But in neither case did the world beat a path to that new technology’s door.”

Phinney recalled spending a lot of time thinking about why GX, MM, and AAT failed. “I was trying to think if these same factors did apply to OpenType,” he said, “and to the extent that we had any control over it, trying to make sure we did what we could to make sure we didn’t repeat those errors.”

What did Adobe do wrong with multiple masters? “Adobe, for the most part, did not get multiple master support into its applications. Illustrator took advantage of sliders, but not Photoshop or Pagemaker,” Phinney said. “Partly as a result of previous fumbles, by both Adobe and Apple, it wasn’t obvious at the beginning that OpenType was going to be successful. [There was a] lot of skepticism. People thought it was cool; font geeks remembered GX that was similar — where did that go? Remembered multiple masters — Adobe’s own technology — that Adobe’s own apps didn’t adopt.”

Phinney knew he and the rest of the type team would need to evangelize OpenType fonts and typography to Adobe’s internal groups to generate support from within. He also became one of OpenType’s most vocal cheerleaders outside the company, giving talks at conferences, writing articles, and promoting the merits of this robust technology.

“I don’t think there was enough outreach about multiple masters to foundries: that you needed this, it was good for you, it would be cool, and here was how to make the fonts,” Phinney said. “But there really was for OpenType. I was deeply involved in trying to sell foundries on the idea, [espousing] best practice issues on how to make it work.” Phinney was also passionate about getting end users on board right away — no small feat when introducing a complicated new technology.

A determined cadre of Phinney’s colleagues also threw their collective weight behind OpenType. Mills, then director of typography, pushed hard for the technology internally. Lemon and Slye also talked nonstop about OpenType’s potential inside Adobe’s walls, and to outside type and application developers and standards groups. Unsung heroes from the engineering side helped drive the initiative.

“I was the type engineering manager when the OpenType effort was at its peak — that spanned roughly 1997–2000, with the peak of the work in 1998–99,” Roberts said. “Part of the problem we were trying to figure out what it was and how to make it work. In the beginning, nobody knows what they need to know — you have to figure it out.”

“Something the type team did differently for OpenType was tools support,” Phinney said. “Adobe had long used proprietary internal tools to make fonts, and had never licensed the code freely. But this time, not only did Adobe license their tools for creating (and testing) OpenType fonts to other font developers, but also to the makers of font creation software, all at no charge. Read Roberts developed the code and supported its use internally and externally. Today, all the major competing font editors use the Adobe feature definition language for OpenType features, and most use Adobe code to compile those OpenType features.”

Phinney said that InDesign was a critical nut to crack. “InDesign had a big jump in OpenType support in version 2.0,” he said. “Because I noticed a general lack of enthusiasm from InDesign product management to do more OpenType support in InDesign, I ended up talking directly to Eric Menninga, one of InDesign’s lead engineers, about how incredibly easy it would be. It was like, ‘gosh, from a programmer standpoint, they work like features you’re already doing. It’s just switches to turn on — easy to do.’ InDesign was between cycles, and the specs for the next big version weren’t out yet.”

“I didn’t specifically tell him go off and do it — I was trying to sell how easy it would be to do. But in a weekend, Eric went off and did it. He put it all on this flyout submenu. Because he’s not a user interface guy, he needed somewhere to throw all this stuff. At the time, InDesign product management was a little horrified. But they didn’t pull it out, because hey, it was done and it worked. Then again, it never got a UI either, other than what Eric hacked in over that weekend.”

Phinney admits egging Menninga on, but has no regrets. “I caught heck about that once or twice years later. I was told, ‘That’s not how it’s done.’ I might have burned some bridges, but key to OpenType being successful was InDesign supporting the format. It may have been clunky, but having feature support in InDesign was critical to foundries being convinced to add those features to fonts, and users buying the fonts and using those features.”

A new landscape for type design

One of the benefits of OpenType was that it afforded Slimbach the opportunity to reach new typographic heights, particularly with a new take on his classic revival, Adobe Garamond. Since visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, during a 1988 research trip, Slimbach had been interested in developing a new family based on the types of Garamond and Granjon, one that would feature a range of size-specific fonts, and cover the full gamut of the French masters’ designs. Over a period of 13 years, beginning in 1992, Slimbach worked on what would become Garamond Premier, crafting the optical sizes, adding a wealth of expert typographic features, and harmonizing the design for contemporary use.

The optical masters of Garamond Premier, each shown at 99 point for comparison.

Garamond Premier was originally conceived as a multiple master family with design axes for weight and optical size. The family’s optical size axis was defined by four individually-designed sizes (roughly caption, text, subhead, and display size ranges), with each size modeled on an equivalent Garamond or Granjon design. Each master, except the display range, was linked through interpolation. The display designs were isolated as a separate multiple master font with a single weight axis. With the discontinuation of multiple master fonts, these optical masters formed the basis for Garamond Premier’s four fixed size ranges.

— Robert Slimbach[1]

While the advent of OpenType opened up a world of typographic possibilities, the loss of multiple master fonts caused grief to those who worked so hard to make the format a success. One such team member was Twombly, who, in the middle of OpenType’s rise, was growing tired of the downside of working for a software giant.

Twombly made the decision to leave Adobe while her star was still on the rise. While there was no one single catalyst, she recalled a number of things precipitated her departure. “I think one was not feeling like there was a whole lot of real vision since Sumner left — we were really struggling, I think. Adobe was going more and more toward web-related things by the time I was leaving, and it sounded like we were going to have to design fonts for use on screen. I had done that in college or graduate school and it was a nightmare, because you can’t get any subtlety when you’re dealing with screen fonts, and you’re really limited.”

“I really didn’t like computers much; they were a tool I had to use, and I got conversant with them so I could do what I needed to do, but I didn’t enjoy being in front of of one at all, especially for eight or ten hours a day,” Twombly said.

“[And] that whole multiple master [thing] … we put so much effort into those! God, that was a lot of work, and we thought that was going to be a really great way to make it more flexible for the user to get what they wanted out of one font. We couldn’t get all the application people to really design their apps to support how big and beautiful those fonts were. They just became a big dinosaur, so we had to watch those die. That was tough. So I think I was a little demoralized by that. We’d had a few layoffs; it was like we weren’t as cherished as we were at the beginning. Plus the pressure to do more teaching or speaking, and I just needed to get out. I needed to get away from that whole electronic buzz down there.”

Twombly left in 1999, leaving Slimbach to blaze his own trail as visionary leader of the Adobe Type group. Meanwhile, Phinney was determined to not only keep OpenType from failing, but to see it become as universally accepted as PostScript type was in the early days.

“I was pounding the pavement pretty hard, trying to get the word out,” Phinney said. “We had to do that with end users so they wanted the fonts and were using the new functionality, and getting foundries making the fonts, and getting support into the apps. All three were critical. Not just having a better mousetrap — that no one knows about, and no one supports — that was not going to sell. It’s probably pretty freaking obvious now, but at the time … the way that multiple masters got marketed: in the later years they just slashed the prices so people would buy them, because they had failed to communicate the other benefits successfully (or to create those benefits with app support). That was the biggest ‘marketing innovation’ with multiple masters.”

Phinney recalled that the originally-released OpenType specification included multiple masters — at least in theory, as this was before OpenType fonts had really been produced other than for test purposes. Before releasing fonts, Adobe ultimately, albeit reluctantly, made the decision to remove multiple masters from the spec. Microsoft was only too happy to go along.

“It’s a shame about killing multiple masters — that was a tough point,” Phinney said. “It was Dan Mills’ call. There were two choices ahead of Adobe at that time: either we’re going to do OpenType and evangelize it and Unicode and so on. Or, we’re going to do OpenType with multiple masters, and have to evangelize everything else, plus multiple master functionality, and try to do what we should have done in the first place with multiple masters and overcome entrenched skepticism about MMs, plus all the other stuff that comes with OpenType. That was a tough call. Internally, of course we were all deeply saddened by the decision not to make multiple master OpenType fonts. I might have been one of the few people who thought it probably made sense, but I was as bummed as anybody — I’d done my Master’s thesis on this cool tech.”

“Dan Mills decreed the end of multiple masters as a shipping font format,” Lemon said. “This was explicitly aimed at removing a substantial piece of engineering overhead so we could do justice to the work that would be required for OpenType. We fought hard to change his mind, because we loved the idea and potential of MM. It took me at least ten years to see he was right.”

“The loss of multiple master font support at Adobe was very disappointing to me, personally,” Slye said. “The reasons were understandable on a general level, but we lost a very powerful typographic tool, and something that was uniquely digital and progressive. It was also discontinued at a time when multiple master technology seemed to be maturing. Adobe Illustrator finally had an amazing UI for manipulating fonts directly in a layout, and designers outside Adobe were picking up on it too. To this day, one of the most common questions I get at conferences is, ‘When are you bringing back multiple masters?’ Type designers (and type-savvy designers) have always appreciated multiple masters and still desperately want what it can offer.”

“Dan was probably — in retrospect — right,” Phinney said. “In the decision he balanced the increased chance of OpenType succeeding against the lost value of multiple masters — it was probably the right call, but, man, it was painful. We were giving up on extra typographic sophistication. There was a lot of unhappiness at the time. There was still a lot of excitement about OpenType, but it was bittersweet. Yet, I think it might have swung the difference between us having a one-third chance of success with OpenType to a two-thirds chance.”

Although multiple master fonts went away, the underlying technology is still used as a tool in designing type. All of Adobe’s designers — as well as many non-Adobe designers worldwide — use the tech for font development.

Phinney, who moved up through the ranks from that first “entry level” position to product manager during his eleven years with Adobe, was laid off in December of 2008, but he recalls his eleven-plus years in the type group with great fondness.

“There were fabulous people there back then, and more who have joined since. It’s good to talk about,” he said. “I loved evangelizing this stuff: whether OpenType or Unicode or extended language support, or doing things right so more languages would work out of the box with the software. This was very fun for me. I really cared about it. I still do.”

“I realize that typography is a small part of the world,” Phinney mused. “I like making things better. There’s the language support to help make software work out of the box — including fonts — for more of the people of the world. There is making more legible fonts for easier reading and better user interfaces. Finally, the aesthetic part may seem like a small thing, but it’s good too. Don’t forget, studies show that minor aesthetic differences in type may not make a difference for peoples’ reading speed, but they actually affect mood, which in turn affects all sorts of things. People actually function better on creative problem-solving tasks, after being exposed to better typography.”

“I like to tell myself that, in our small way, we’re making a better world.”

Carol Twombly’s departure spelled a big change for the close-knit Adobe Type team. Pictured from left to right: Jim Wasco, Christopher Slye, and Thomas Phinney with Twombly on her last day in 1999.

Up next: Love letters — type designers and other type fanatics dish on their favorites from the Adobe Originals collection.

Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

Apple and IBM had their devices manufactured in Japan. We knew that either we signed them up with PostScript or they’d come up with a solution themselves.
— Charles “Chuck” Geschke, Adobe Co-Founder (As quoted in “Inside the Publishing Revolution,” Pamela Pfiffner, Adobe Press, Berkeley, 2003.)

Almost 26 years ago, we started a relationship with Morisawa (which, at the time, was kind of the number two company in Japan). But we chose well. They were on their way up, and the number one company back then is barely remembered now.
— David Lemon, Senior Manager of Type Development at Adobe

[Masahiko] Kozuka was very impressed with Chuck’s attitude about trying new things as a relatively young American company. It was unusual that a new foreign company would try to make a Japanese font. He was very impressed by the ideas of Chuck and the spirit of the founders, [and felt] that Adobe could be a great company in the world of typography.
— Taro Yamamoto, Senior Manager of Japanese Typography for Adobe

In the early days of PostScript, it quickly became apparent that Japan would be key to the long-term success of the format. Adobe’s alliance with Apple meant that PostScript was resident in LaserWriters manufactured in Japan, but that was only the beginning — coveted potential partners like IBM also sourced printers from Japanese suppliers. Diversification was essential to ensuring the widespread adoption of PostScript, and moving into Asia was a necessary step toward making Adobe’s page description language (PDL) a global standard.

Adobe co-founders John Warnock and Charles “Chuck” Geschke knew they risked losing a lucrative Asian market for PostScript if another PDL were the first to gain a foothold in Japan, but they were at risk at home, too: Japanese manufacturers could effectively block the adoption of PostScript if alternative technologies landed too early in the US market.

In 1987, after signing a credibility-lending partnership deal with IBM, along with fighting off dozens of would-be competitors developing PostScript clones, Adobe was ready to expand its success outside North America. Japan took priority, mainly because most printer engines were manufactured there.

Sumner Stone, Adobe’s typography director at the time, was among the first team members to take part in the Japanese mission. Stone’s focus was on licensing Japanese typefaces for PostScript, a pretty tall order considering the technology was in its infancy. Stone pitched the idea to the two top typesetting manufacturers in Japan.

“There were two companies that dominated the Japanese market — Morisawa [in Osaka] and Sha-Ken [in Tokyo],” Stone said. “The people who [originally] ran these two companies had been partners before World War II: Mr. [Nobuo] Morisawa and Mr. [Mokichi] Ishii.” By the time Stone began traveling to Japan, Ishii had passed away and the senior Morisawa had retired, and family members were running both companies.

Film font for a Morisawa phototypesetting system, circa mid-1960s. Photo by Flickr user @themostinept, December 2012. License: Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

Sha-Ken had no interest whatsoever in PostScript, and scoffed at the notion that desktop publishing could ever replace traditional typesetting. Morisawa, on the other hand, was intrigued. Considering the history between the two companies, the disparity in response was hardly surprising.

Nobuo Morisawa, born in 1901, came from humble beginnings and had little formal education; what he did have was a knack for tinkering with machines. In 1923, he went to work at Hajime Hoshi’s pharmaceutical company, and was tasked with assembling a rotary printing press acquired from Germany. According to an account by Makoto Watanabe, a Japanese typographer based in Berlin, the press had been broken down and packed in thirty cardboard boxes for shipping. Without printed instructions or assistance from a professional installer, Morisawa was able to get the press up and running. Through that experience, he gained a unique insight into the inner workings of that press and the printing process in general, and was tapped to head up Hoshi’s in-house printing department.

Morisawa became fascinated with the idea of improving the printing process. He heard about failed attempts to produce a phototypesetting machine in Britain, and set to work designing his own phototypesetter. In 1924, 37-year-old Mokichi Ishii, a University of Tokyo graduate from a wealthy family, left a position at Kobe Steel to join Hoshi as an engineer. Although Ishii’s formal training was in the technical realm, he was also skilled at calligraphy and hand lettering. He met Morisawa at Hoshi and befriended the younger man; the two visionaries quickly realized that their interests and ambitions meshed, and planned to strike out on their own.

In 1925, Morisawa was granted a patent for his phototypesetting machine. Backed by Ishii’s family fortune, the two typographic pioneers launched the Ishii Phototypesetting Institute (which would later come to be known as Sha-Ken). Morisawa and Ishii worked together for several years and brought a phototypesetter to market, but limitations in existing offset technology, coupled with an economy and culture devastated by war, led to insurmountable disagreements between the partners. Morisawa parted ways with Ishii and began inventing machinery for industrial manufacturing — a more successful endeavor than his publishing innovations.

After World War II ended in 1945, phototypesetting became a viable tool in the publishing process, and there was a huge upswing in the printing industry. Ishii contacted Morisawa and the two resumed their collaboration. Morisawa designed new devices, while Ishii focused on designing fonts and serving as the face of the company. Unsatisfied with his role in the shadows, Morisawa broke with Ishii permanently and founded his own type-focused company.

Image excerpted from a patent on a phototypesetting machine invented by Nobuo Morisawa: U.S. Patent 3,272,102, filed Aug. 5, 1963, and issued Sept. 13, 1966. Click image to view a PDF of the full patent.

Fast-forward to 1987. Sha-Ken and Morisawa were the biggest names in Japan’s type industry, but it was a lopsided competition. Morisawa had to settle for the number two spot. Although Morisawa had made numerous innovations in typesetting machines, Sha-Ken held the lion’s share of the market, due in large part to the beauty of its type offerings (including the exquisite designs crafted by Ishii himself).

“Sha-Ken was not going to license their typefaces to anybody ever — that was their position,” Stone said. “At the time, any book of any quality used the Sha-Ken typefaces, because Mr. Ishii’s font was like the Garamond — so much better than anything else.”

When Adobe came calling, Morisawa saw an opportunity to topple its longtime rival.

“Morisawa had the rest of the market and also sold typesetters in China and in Korea,” Stone said. “At the time, they had been doing business with Linotype. They sold Linotype typesetters, I think the first generation Linotronics. [They had the] contract to distribute in Japan.” Stone recalled that mutual type development efforts with Linotype didn’t really go beyond supporting the German company’s typesetting machines sold in Japan. “So they were really excited about the prospect that Adobe wanted their fonts,” Stone said.

“At the time, even then, there was a kind of a fascination with the roman letter. So when you made a font, you made the Japanese, Chinese, hiragana, katakana, and a Latin font, and you made Cyrillic; that was all in one font. And when you walk down the streets of Tokyo, you see a lot of signs in English and roman letters. They had a really interesting take on what roman letters were about — they did all kinds of stuff I had never seen before. In the late 1980s, that was already happening.” — Sumner Stone

Stone and his Adobe colleagues soon learned that business negotiations in Japan included extreme dining after a long day of meetings, and an adventurous palate was a significant asset. “They treated me extremely well every night,” he said. “They learned that I would eat weird food, so every night they would take me to something a little weirder than before. We got to the point where the guys that took me out wouldn’t eat what I was eating. That gave me some capital with them — no question!”

Stone told Morisawa Adobe would give them software and train their team to digitize fonts they already had, with the proviso that the digitized fonts would be licensed for use in PostScript printers. Min Wang and Brian Wu, Yale design students studying under Alvin Eisenman, were put to the task of digitizing Japanese fonts as interns.

“Alvin clearly thought they were good candidates for this,” Stone said. “They came on one of their Christmas vacations. I said: ‘What we have to do is digitize a bunch of characters, convince the Japanese they are good enough for them to buy the whole package.’ They digitized [them] all! The Morisawa guys came to Adobe and they were impressed, so we made the deal.”

“I was really the guy from Adobe who was basically trying to buy stuff from them,” Stone said. “Finally, to close the contract, I convinced Chuck Geschke, and maybe Steve, a couple of people from Adobe other than me [to go], and we finally signed the contract when we went over there. I remember getting drunk on sake and throwing up. I was so relieved I had it all tied up. That was a big deal.”

It was a big deal indeed. Since PostScript was designed to accommodate 256 glyphs, Adobe had to modify its software to work with Japanese fonts, which can hold 10–20,000 characters. With the Morisawa agreement firmly in place and a new capability to support extensive character sets, PostScript had a firm foothold in Japan, paving the way for further licensing agreements with printer engine manufacturers. Adobe rapidly added Japanese companies like Canon, Epson, and Sony to its roster of partners.

Stone recalled that, when he left Adobe in 1990, the company’s typographic focus in Japan had not yet progressed to original design; the focus was on digitizing Morisawa’s existing fonts.

“[Adobe] had digitized some faces but had not yet hired [Taro] Yamamoto and [Masahiko] Kozuka away from Morisawa,” Stone said. “Morisawa, they did some interesting things. They published these calendars every year — extremely beautiful productions of historical examples of manuscripts of typography from around the world. Beautifully done. [They had a] very interesting collection of typographic treasures from Asia particularly, of course. But they did not seem to be able to do much innovation where the type design was concerned. Mr. Kozuka was it. There were other people around who were doing things that were probably more interesting than he had an opportunity to do at Morisawa.”

Masahiko Kozuka, former Director of Japanese Typography for Adobe. Photo by Kazushi Yoshinaga, provided courtesy of Morisawa Inc.

“We hired several people here in California who had some kind of a clue about Japanese, and several of us who didn’t have a clue got pulled into it also. I helped some,” said David Lemon, Senior Manager of Type Development at Adobe. “We did a bunch of engineering work and so forth and got it so that we could have some Morisawa fonts running in PostScript printers. By then, the Originals program was up and rolling in the US and it was clear that there were probably some advantages to Adobe having some Japanese fonts of its own.”

Adobe opened an office in Japan and began establishing a presence there. “It was mainly a sales and support office, but they started hiring some developers there and building a font team in Japan,” Lemon said. In 1992, Taro Yamamoto, a 1983 graduate of Musashino Art University who had been working in type development with Morisawa, was hired by Adobe as Manager of Japanese Typography.

“When I entered the university in Tokyo, I learned I was very interested in typography because it seems to be based on a very historical background as well as the very latest technology. Typographic design requires you to think rationally, and I think there needs to be a balance between rational thinking and aesthetic judgment. I was interested in the mixture of the two in typography.” — Taro Yamamoto

“A group of type management people — including Dan Mills — approached me because, about five years before I joined Adobe, Adobe started business relations with Morisawa to build the first Japanese PostScript printer,” Yamamoto said. “I knew them very well, including Sumner Stone, [although] he quit before I joined. I knew the people in the Adobe Type group very well. I knew Adobe was interested in building its own Japanese fonts. Masahiko Kozuka was also working for Morisawa in those days. He used to work for Mainichi Newspapers, a nationwide newspaper publisher. [He was their] typography director for more than 35 years.”

Initially, Yamamoto’s primary role at Adobe had been to make plans for Morisawa and its existing typefaces under the supervision of Kozuka. But Adobe wanted to develop its own Japanese fonts and approached the esteemed designer. “I guess Adobe thought it was a good idea to invite Kozuka to the first Japanese type team meeting in Tokyo,” Yamamoto said. “Two months after I joined, Mr. Kozuka joined Adobe. Under his supervision, we started to form a group of type designers. That happened in 1992.”

“Just as Adobe hired Sumner Stone originally to lead the font team in California, they hired Masahiko Kozuka to lead the font team in Japan,” Lemon said. “They had a reasonably-sized team — I think it was maybe ten to twelve people. That team worked with tools that Adobe developed; we were using our own tools for the Western fonts as well. We weren’t doing any of this stuff in Fontographer — it was all tools Adobe had created. We realized what a challenge Japanese fonts were, and developed some tools specifically for making ideographic fonts halfway reasonable.”

Stone said he was not surprised that Adobe was able to lure Kozuka away from Morisawa. “It was a much more appealing environment for him in the sense of supporting creativity,” Stone said. “That was probably a big attraction; he was one of the big experts.”

Kozuka alone could not handle the immense workload required to bring original Japanese typefaces to market. “We needed to hire some new people,” Yamamoto said. “[It was] hard to find skilled type designers at the time, so we decided to hire young contractors who did not have much experience and skill.” Kozuka and Yamamoto developed a set of procedures and processes to educate new designers, enabling them to systematically design Japanese scripts under the direction of Kozuka.

Adobe’s Japanese type team in the early days, pictured from left to right: Yutaka Ozawa, Masataka Hattori, Taro Yamamoto, Masahiko Kozuka, Isao Suzuki, and the late Akihiko Yamamoto. ASJ offices, Yebisu, Tokyo, circa 1997.

“As you know, there are many characters to be made in a Japanese font — about 9,000 characters needed to be made,” Yamamoto said. “We needed to hire some draftsmen, and one or two experienced designers. Most of the team members were young designers who had graduated from art school two or three years before.”

Yamamoto recalled introducing a radical change in font production techniques in the genesis of Adobe Type Japan. “At that time, usually in Japan designers used pen and ink to draw artwork,” he said. “We abandoned that kind of traditional method. With a handful of Adobe’s software engineers, we developed a new tool to combine and synthesize Japanese character strokes, define each shape’s variations. We used a multiple master typeface technique to make each stroke shape variable, and with the variable strokes, we could design Japanese characters. That was one technological gem at the time.”

The team became highly skilled in using this stroke-based technology — its systematic approach allowed Adobe Japan to build six weights of a font efficiently with a small team of type designers. “If you look at a typical type designing group in Japanese type foundries in those days, there are many people,” Yamamoto said. “We could produce work with a minimum of people.”

The new tools offered opportunity to work more efficiently, but also to radically depart from familiar design principles. Case in point were Kozuka’s namesake type families, the first Japanese designs in the Adobe Originals library: Kozuka Mincho, released in 1997, and Kozuka Gothic, released in 2001.

“Kozuka-san’s idea was that his first design for the Mincho style should be designed consistently with the Gothic typeface. In each typeface family, consistency can be guaranteed by applying a rational designing method using a tool,” Yamamoto said. “From today’s viewpoints, it can be said that I was young at the time. So I attempted, and also Kozuka-san, the new technology of PostScript at the time. We tended to be too ambitious about the design; we tried to make a completely new design when we first tried to make Kozuka Mincho. It seems the result may be too modernist, too rationalist. So we have designed some standard kana fonts. The intention was to weaken the too-ambitious, too-radical attitude in the first design. By using the old text and display and Gothic combined, it appears more traditional. These additions made these typefaces more useful and flexible than before, able to support a wider range of applications.”

Ryoko Nishizuka, Senior Type Designer for Adobe. Photo by Masataka Hattori.

Also involved in the development of the Kozuka types was Ryoko Nishizuka. Another graduate of Musashino Art University and a Morisawa alum, Nishizuka joined Adobe Type Japan in 1997. Although her type design career is brief when compared to that of her mentor, Kozuka, she has worked diligently to create a varied portfolio of typeface designs. Her Ryo Text, Display, and Gothic families were published through the Originals program in 2003–2004.

Nishizuka, who took the reins as Senior Type Designer after Kozuka retired from Adobe in 2001, completed a typographic labor of love in 2010: Kazuraki. Inspired by the calligraphy of twelfth-century artist and poet Fujiwara-no-Teika, Kazuraki was the first OpenType Japanese font to be fully proportional in both writing directions. Nishizuka had been working to perfect Kazuraki since its precursor, Teika, won the Silver Prize in the Kanji category in the 2002 Morisawa Typeface Design Competition. Although considered a kana font with a full complement of hiragana and katakana glyphs, Kazuraki also features more than 1,000 glyphs for kanji, symbols, and punctuation. To enhance typographic flow in vertical setting, the design also features 50 vertical multi-character hiragana ligatures.

Kazuraki, a design by Ryoko Nishizuka, based on the handwriting of twelfth-century artist and poet Fujiwara-no-Teika.

“Ryoko designed, to my non-Japanese eye, one of the most beautiful Japanese fonts ever made,” Lemon said. “Kazuraki is revolutionary because it’s based on the writing of Fujiwara-no-Teika, a twelfth-century court poet who kept more than forty years of diaries which are considered a national treasure. She captured the essence of his writing in this design and, to do that, she had to go back, sort of like what Carol [Twombly] did in a way with Trajan, Charlemagne, and Lithos, to stuff that predates type.”

Kazuraki is completely proportional and entirely vertical because that’s the way people wrote, Lemon said. “It includes a bunch of vertical ligatures which are natural in handwritten Japanese, but unheard of in a Japanese typeface. We broke a lot of software with this; we were going to ship it with CS 4, but had to wait until CS 6. We broke Microsoft Word; made stupid assumptions that are never specified anywhere about Japanese. I’m glad a lot of stuff got fixed — because of this, you can actually use Kazuraki. God, it’s beautiful.”

Considering the small size of Adobe’s type team in Japan — just three full-time staff — the amount of work produced is tremendous. Along with Yamamoto and Nishizuka, Masataka Hattori rounds out the close-knit core group. A 1994 graduate of Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, he just celebrated his twentieth anniversary with Adobe. As senior designer of Japanese typography, Hattori has been a key contributor to Originals projects like Kozuka and Kazuraki, his extensive skills in tools and processes essential to the successful development of complicated type families.

Adobe Type Japan’s most recent project, Source Han Sans, is a new open source Pan-CJK family. The Adobe Type team worked with Google and foundry partners in Japan, Korea and China in developing these region-wide fonts. “Because many of the Chinese characters are shared between China, Korea, and Japan, roughly half of the Chinese characters work across these locales,” Lemon said. “For some purposes, if you need to support more than one of those locales, you’re better off using a font that shares the characters. We worked on Source Han with a focus on the small screen — unsurprisingly, especially since this was funded by Google.”

Taro Yamamoto and Ryoko Nishizuka presenting at ATypI Hong Kong in 2012. Photo by Kunihiko Okano, Shotype.

Nishizuka led the in-house team on the project, a seven-weight family boasting nearly half a million glyphs. “Her designs are based on her work on Kozuka Mincho and Gothic, with some significant modifications,” Lemon said. “Ryoko started with her kana and reworked it substantially for this project. At least in the Japanese-facing part of the font, she has a significant voice. She’s starting to get to really stretch her wings.”

In developing Kazuraki and Source Han Sans, Nishizuka held fast to the typographic ideals espoused by Yamamoto. “Our two main principles in designing a new font are key: it should have some technological innovation, but it should also have some charm, purely from a typographical viewpoint,” Yamamoto said. “The balance between the two is important.”

Some current and former members of Adobe’s Asian type team, pictured from left to right: Masataka Hattori, Ken Lunde, David Lemon, Min Wang, Taro Yamamoto, and Isao Suzuki. ATypI 2012, Hong Kong.

Up next: The Tao of OpenType: Another typographic game-changer from Adobe. Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

The initial couple of years was the rise of the program. We were releasing advanced families for a number of years before other foundries began to follow suit. With every release, we were doing something new that wasn’t really in the world yet, pushing boundaries in both technology and design simultaneously. Extending capabilities. Reintroducing classic principles to modern type design that had been missing.

— Robert Slimbach, Adobe’s first Principal Designer

It was their intent for the Originals program that every single design be something that accomplished something new, that really hadn’t been done before in some way. Never do a mediocre design or a ‘me-too’ design or anything. If something’s already been done well, why should we do it?

— David Lemon, Senior Manager of Type Development at Adobe

“I don’t really mind which designs we decide to do. I just like to get in there and draw letters.”

— Carol Twombly, former Adobe type designer

After Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first director of typography, left the type team in January 1990, it was a shock to his colleagues. Several managers were brought in to try to fill the void, with varying degrees of success.

“It was harder after Sumner left — it felt like there was a real clear vision [before that].” said Carol Twombly, former Adobe type designer. “We were kind of casting about: ‘What are we going to do next, and how do we market it?’ Luckily, eventually, Dan [Mills] came in and was able to hold some of that.”

Dan Mills, former director of typography for Adobe.

Mills, who, like Twombly, had studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and been through the Stanford digital type program, took over as director of typography. He had formerly been a production manager for the type group, but his design background and an innate understanding of the sensitivities of the creative personality made him aptly suited for a higher profile role with the team.

“He was instrumental in picking up the ball,” said Fred Brady, Adobe’s manager of new type development. “Someone took over for Sumner for a few minutes, didn’t last… Dan stepped in and became director of typography. I think he did a great job. He kind of protected our group for a long time.”

“He was great at the big picture thing,” Twombly said. “Dan’s a great manager and a good guy. To this day, I’ll often say, okay, there’s a problem bothering me. What would Dan do? Because he’s very proactive. He would just pick up a phone and call somebody and ask a question so he could move to the next step. He could see how all the parts needed to fit together.”

“We went through a phase of departmental management that was rather disheartening, and (as Carol noted) Dan stepping in was a distinct improvement,” said Adobe Type’s David Lemon. “From a management standpoint, Dan was the best we’ve had (including probably better than I’ve been). But despite his font background, he left design decisions to the Originals team.”

Slimbach recalled his experience after Stone’s exit as “quite a bit different — because I didn’t interact with Sumner very often, his leaving didn’t affect me that much. I’m self-directing by nature, so I just carried on doing my thing. My primary concern was that the business side of things was taken care of so I could continue to focus on my work. I looked mostly to Fred to shield me from a lot of the everyday distractions of the corporate environment.”

With Mills taking the reins and Brady continuing in his role as manager and partner to the Originals team, Twombly and Slimbach could return their focus to the development of Myriad. A family of humanist sans serif typefaces, Myriad had been initiated by Stone as a collaborative project in 1989. At the outset, Stone, Slimbach, Twombly, and Brady were all dedicated to Myriad, which would become the first family of multiple master (MM) typefaces in the Adobe Originals library.

“Multiple masters were one of the coolest things Adobe did with font technology,” said Lemon. “We’d produce fonts that had several ‘master’ designs, and the user could specify any point in between them. This allowed nearly infinite variation in attributes like weight and width. We also used it to adjust the design for use at specific sizes.”

Twombly, Slimbach, and Brady reviewed a wealth of historical sources and existing sans models during the development of Myriad; not to find a source to base the family on, but to ensure they were doing something new. Aesthetics aside, the designers also were attempting to maximize the capabilities of MM technology, while addressing the constraints of output to low-resolution printers.

“One of the things we did for Myriad — we looked at a bunch of samples of fonts in that sans serif realm,” Brady said. “That font basically evolved more like from a functional standpoint: what looks best at these sizes; a really different process in a lot of ways. Not trying to look like another font. Myriad in its multiple master form — you can make it look like any other font. I did that experiment; people didn’t like that. [It was] kind of creepy.”

Slimbach and Twombly sketched letterforms by hand, and made numerous computer drawings and test fonts in resolving the design direction for Myriad. Once that direction was determined, each designer would tackle a particular font in the family, then hand off the design to their partner to refine. The goal was to create a clean, readable sans family free of the quirks and earmarks often inherent in faces crafted by a single designer.

“That was an intense design project, with Robert and me doing the work together, or sort of pieces of it and then switching,” Twombly said. “I’d give my design to him, he’d give his to me, and we’d rework them so it didn’t look like either of us individually; it looked more homogenous. And Sumner was [initially] directing that project, but designing by committee is really hard.”

“Getting multiple people to work on a type design project is a bit like herding cats,” Stone said. “Type designers are not by nature used to working on collaborative projects.”

“We only worked on a design project together that one time, and I think we all decided never again! [It’s] too hard,” Twombly said. “Mostly because I was the younger designer, I felt like I said yes to things more often than I might have otherwise. I didn’t say, ‘It’s gotta be my way.’ Because Robert was an excellent designer and we were designing a text face, and Sumner was in on the design, too. That made it easier, because we weren’t always butting heads. And since it wasn’t my face or his [Robert’s] face, it was more about making something homogenous — that seemed fair to me.”

Brady helped maintain a balance between Twombly and Slimbach, and served as a buffer between them and the corporate powers-that-be. “Fred was good in the comic relief department, kind of keeping us all happy, and taking care of Robert and making sure he wasn’t too upset about anything. Taking care of me, making sure I wasn’t too upset,” Twombly said. “It was quite a management project, I think — taking care of us all.”

The Myriad project was moving full-speed ahead, but it would take two years to ready the family for its release in 1992. In the meantime, there were other typographic battlefields to conquer.

Slimbach was finishing the first version of his Minion family of types for its 1990 release. A classical text face in the Garalde tradition of the late Renaissance, Minion was designed with a full range of typographic niceties, including small caps, archaic ligatures, swash characters, and ornaments. Rarely found in typefaces outside the Adobe Originals at the time, these extras made Minion appealing to high-end book typographers while it served as a legible workhorse text family for corporate interests.

While working on Myriad and other text families, Twombly was also busy overseeing the more “artistic” side of the Originals program. She led a team in reviving a series of historical wood types. Wood type historian Rob Roy Kelly “provided high-quality proofs of the wood types that we could use as a starting point for digitization,” Lemon said.

Twombly worked with Joy Reddick, Kim Buker Chansler, and Barbara Lind in developing the first two sets in the Adobe Wood Type Series from 1989 through 1991. A series of chromatic faces was developed a little later, with the help of Chansler and Carl Crossgrove — now a type designer with Monotype — who interned twice with Adobe Type in the early 1990s.

Character set for the Adobe Wood Type 3 package: Pepperwood (based on an 1877 ornamented Celtic typeface from Vanderburgh, Wells, and Company); Rosewood (based on a chromatic design by William H. Page, circa 1874);, and Zebrawood (modeled after alphabets shown in a specimen catalogue from the Wells and Webb Type Company, circa 1854).

“That [wood type project] was a very typical junior type designer thing to do — it was an alphabet and basic punctuation. They just needed to fill out the character set to some standards to Mac Type 1,” Crossgrove said. “Because the production stuff comes at the end, Carol and I figured out what would be the way these sets — two or three layers — would work together as fonts. At the time, there was no trickery about it — you had separate styles. You had to typeset them and put one layer on top of another in Illustrator or whatever.”

Rosewood images excerpted from the Adobe Type instructional document for the Adobe Wood Type 3 package, “Using Typefaces with Chromatic (Multi-colored) Effects.”

“Now, all these years later, one of the funny things about doing this wood type set — [I’m] fascinated how, with the outline component, diamond shapes inside, shadow effects — the one font out of that set that became more wildly popular than others was Rosewood Fill,” Crossgrove said. “It was not as interesting to use Rosewood Fill because [its] shapes and spacing were wonky. I thought Rosewood Fill was revealing of how messy and broken the design was: ‘Oh, wah wah, those inconsistencies… hidden in ornamentation.’ But I think the wonkiness is what people like. I think they choose it and gravitate toward it because it’s so clunky and strange looking.”

With the type group’s workload continually increasing, Slimbach and Twombly were blessed with two more colleagues who would become passionately involved in the Originals program: second-generation type designer and lettering artist Jim Wasco and calligrapher Linnea Lundquist, a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology who studied under Professor Hermann Zapf.

“She [Lundquist] was working for me doing Type 1 conversion work, then we moved her over to the Originals team,” Lemon said. “I hired her [in 1990] because of her calligraphy. It was a bit of a risk, because it wasn’t clear how well she would mesh with the tech side of it, but she worked hard at that and did well.”

In addition to becoming adept with typographic production, Lemon recalled

Lundquist was instrumental in making connections. “She acted as liaison with a number of the outside designers. She actually introduced many of them to Adobe — Jovica Veljović, Michael Harvey, Alan Blackman,” Lemon said. “A number of the more lettering- and calligraphically-oriented outside designers came in through Linnea. That was a really substantial contribution. “

Wasco, who had been taught the art of lettering by his father, had been working in San Francisco as a sign painter, calligrapher, and designer since moving to California in 1974 at the age of 18. He did a lot of work with type designer Jim Parkinson, drawing alphabets for Roger Black, and even helped Parkinson revamp the logo for Rolling Stone. Growing tired of running his own business, Wasco looked toward the fast-breaking technology sector for a career shift.

“I realized the future was in computers, so I wanted to get a job doing lettering on computers,” Wasco said. “Parkinson said I should go see David Lemon at Adobe; they needed someone like me. I went down there and David thought I was overqualified. This was about 1986.” Wasco ended up at SlideTek in San Rafael, digitizing fonts for their system in B-Spline vector graphics.

“After two years, they had enough fonts, and wanted me to demo their computer system at trade shows [such as] Seybold,” Wasco said. “Six tables with velvet curtains. Everybody had to have generic graphics and stuff. I didn’t want to do that. I gave two weeks’ notice. The same day, there was a message on my machine from David Lemon, looking for someone with more experience.”

Jim Wasco at TypeCon2007 in Seattle. Photo by Eben Sorkin.

Lemon had hired Wasco for the typographic staff in 1989, where he worked under Jocelyn Bergen, then manager of the type editors. “We would critique the Monotype and Linotype data,” Wasco said. “At that time, everyone was using Adobe tools to do their font work — if it had to be PostScript, you would do it with Adobe tools. Adobe would have control over it make sure it was done right.”

Before anything was released, Wasco said, people like Bruno Steinert (then managing director at Linotype) would send over their data. “We’d look at it and critique it and make comments about how you could make improvements,” Wasco said. “I did that while I did other production work, like taking ITC [International Typeface Corporation] fonts that were outlined with Ikarus data — they would put it through their Adobe tools and convert it to PostScript, but it didn’t have the character set to be a standard Mac font. I would add ligatures or whatever it needed to bring it up to the minimum 256 characters Mac Roman needed.”

Wasco recalled working on Cheltenham and ITC Garamond, among countless other typefaces. “I’m drawing a blank now, but I once went through and made a list of them, and there were over 100 fonts [that I had] worked on.”

Wasco’s role grew from finessing third-party fonts to working at the core of the Adobe Originals team. “I was like Robert’s helper,” he said. “I would do things like the ligatures for Waters Titling, or the small words.”

“The Originals team really functioned as a team,” Lemon said. “That was Robert and Fred and Carol as the three co-equals of the team, with Jim Wasco and Linnea Lundquist also on the team. They [Jim and Linnea] did the bulk of the production work, but they definitely participated as part of the team as well.”

Lemon recalled the process for selecting outside designers to help expand the Originals library. “The questions about whom to commission for outside designs — which we did a lot of in earlier designs — that was, as far as I can see, really a team decision. You had to get a consensus between Robert and Fred and Carol for somebody to get commissioned,” Lemon said. “I think that was a nice dynamic — they respected each other; they gave each other some leeway. If one was pushing for someone, they gave that person the benefit of the doubt. And we got a real variety of stuff and yet it was, at the same time, all innovative.”

Wasco and Linnea split duties equitably, each serving as point person for a specific designer. “Linnea worked with Michael Harvey and Akira Kobayashi. I worked with Jim Parkinson, etc.,” Wasco said. “The thing is, we were all involved with all the projects, because even though Linnea would be the one to write the letter and to convey the consensus of the group, we met as a team over the table, everything fanned out over the table. Robert, Carol, me, Linnea, David Lemon […] We would all put it on our two cents, take notes. Then Linnea would contact her people she liaised with; I would contact mine.”

One of the first outside designers to work with Adobe Type was David Siegel, yet another graduate of the Stanford typography program. Siegel had brought Tekton to the plate in 1989.

“Tekton was interesting — I spent a lot of time on Tekton myself,” Brady said. “Dave Siegel, the designer — he worked out a deal with Frank Ching, who wrote books on architectural lettering. He came up with a font — the essence of architectural handwriting. I went in and massaged a lot of the letters. When Dave was picking models out for each letterform, he was picking things that were anomalous, not representative of each letter. I thought, gee, this ‘a’ and this ‘b’ and this ‘c’ — here are a bunch of letters that look similar; not the one that should be the unique one in a batch of letters. I massaged to represent the look of overall letters — [I did] a lot he didn’t realize. I think he was very happy in the end, because I think he made a lot of money off the font.”

“One of the first projects I worked on was Tekton Bold,” Wasco said. “At the time David Seigel did Tekton, he delivered it and Fred Brady had to do a lot to get it to work. [It was a] hot seller — they gave it to me to do a bold, and Fred art directed.”

Wasco recalled meeting John Warnock at one of the Adobe company picnics. “He was always an inspiration, the way he would talk at the meetings,” Wasco said. “He asked what I was working on. I said Tekton. He said, ‘Oh great! The world needs more Tekton.”

In addition to introducing outside designers to the mix, Adobe Type brought a new kind of Original into the mix. The Wild Types were more casual, often illustrative, in stark contrast to the weighty, fully fleshed-out text families anchoring the Originals library.

Poster for Adobe Wild Type, designed by Min Wang.

Wasco collaborated on a Wild Type with Min Wang, former design manager for Adobe Creative Services. Mythos, an all-caps family based on mythological creatures from Eastern and Western cultures. “Min came up with the idea, but his drawings were non-typographic,” Wasco said. “I made his idea into a font and made everything work.”

From the Adobe Wild Type series: Mythos, the finished digital font, pictured at left, compared to Min Wang’s original illustrations.

Slimbach was against the idea of the Wild Types right from the start, while Twombly was more pragmatic.

“The quality was the thing; not so much which styles to bring out, because there’s a whole gamut of different styles. But it was really wanting to do that quality on every possible style,” Twombly said. “When we tried the Wild Type thing, doing quicker fonts from outside designers, Robert was like, no, that’s lowering our standards way too much. And they’ll be decent, but they won’t be really great.”

But digital typography continued to evolve, and with its growth came a demand for more lighthearted fare from the world of fonts.

Pictured at left: Min Wang, former design manager for Adobe Creative Services.

“What are you gonna do? I mean, you’ve got to have variety,” Twombly said. “You can’t design everything, so we had no choice but to spread out. We got to review those designs and you know the poor outside designers — we would actually criticize their work until they got it up to our standards. And it was understandably very hard for some of them to deal with that!”

“One of the things I could say about the group there — their standards were super high. They were very very picky,” Wasco said. “When we had Jim [Parkinson] come in with a design like Jimbo, they would send it back like ten times to get it the way they wanted it — because they would have so many details and opinions. It was like going to the Adobe school of font production.”

Adobe Type’s Dan Mills and Dr. Ken Lunde celebrate the publication of Lunde’s book, “Understanding Japanese Information Processing,” September 1993.

Up next: Adobe Originals go big in Japan.

Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

I think they [Adobe Garamond and Adobe Caslon] were the thing that really convinced people that we had a program. There was just a big demand for revivals, genuine revivals of important typefaces. Everybody recognized they were new — they were copies of these typefaces, but very good ones. And then we got on the whole notion which came from the type board — we should do all the bells and whistles. I think all that helped give the idea we were really serious.

—Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first Director of Typography

Sumner and Chuck Bigelow and Don Knuth were a big part of getting this whole desktop publishing thing [that] Steve Jobs started, and they really instilled in us that this is a huge change in history, and we need to do a really good job here so that we’re hopefully seen as one of the forefronts of this revolution. And we really saw it as a revolution, talked about it that way. We were all really committed to doing whatever we could to prove that this new medium was going to be as good as the old ones. So we were pretty driven. And it felt good — it was like, yeah, we’re gonna do this thing.

—Carol Twombly, former Adobe type designer

We were pushing the boundaries from day one. I was giving it my all on my end, and we had good people on the tech side to deal with the tech hurdles, and we had a good marketing program. Adobe was very supportive — they believed in Sumner’s pitch and gave us the support we needed to make the releases successful.

—Robert Slimbach, Adobe’s first Principal Designer

“Everybody was really jazzed”

Riding a wave of enthusiasm generated by the major milestones of 1989 — the release of Utopia, Adobe Garamond, and the “Modern Ancients” of Lithos, Trajan, and Charlemagne, as well as the development of Adobe Caslon — the Adobe Type group continued to grow at a rapid pace. There were still thousands of existing typefaces from other foundries that needed to be digitized for PostScript. Adobe Type’s David Lemon recalled recruiting nonstop, managing a slew of people working on font production and editing.

“We had a group of people headed up by one of the people in the type group, Carol Toriumi-Lawrence,” said Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first director of typography. “All they did was make bitmap fonts in five sizes for every font we brought out as a commercial product. We got Macs, trained them — they were mostly calligraphers.”

“Some of the calligraphers liked it, and some didn’t last too long,” Stone said. “I think it was a different mode for them. To be a calligrapher, you have to be a person who is paying a great deal of attention to detail; [you have to be] patient, have to have an eye. [They are] visual people already.”

With the blessing of Adobe co-founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, Stone’s type design team was on a mission to create more top-quality original type families and exceptional revivals of historical typefaces — designs far superior to anything on the market.

“When we made up the name [Adobe Originals], my intention was to do truly original designs, but the revivals turned out to be ‘original’ in the sense that both Caslon and Garamond had been revived, but not very accurately,” Stone said. “In the case of Garamond, the existing versions that were popular in the US were based on the Jannon types, not actually on Garamond’s types.”

This 1734 broadside type specimen from William Caslon I’s London type foundry was one of the sources Carol Twombly worked with in designing Adobe Caslon. Wesley Tanner made a copy of this rare work available to Adobe throughout the development of Twombly’s revival.

“Our plan was to make some historical revivals of great faces—Garamond, Aldine, Jenson, Caslon—then new faces to provide a broad range of functionality to cover text composition to display fonts so professional designers could do things. We wanted to have it all at once,” said Fred Brady, former director of new type development at Adobe. “The first fonts were Adobe Garamond and Utopia — they were pretty well received by the professional design community. We seeded designers with fonts; in some cases, we actually gave [them] Macs and printers they could use in their own work. I think that helped start kicking off into the high-end market.”

Along with Carol Twombly, Robert Slimbach, and Brady, other Adobe Type team members were caught up in the spirit of the Originals movement.

“Everybody was really jazzed by that time,” Stone said. “There were a bunch of people who had spent their time mostly editing outlines from Linotype and ITC [International Typeface Corporation], but those people got really excited about us doing new typefaces. Lynne Garell — directly out of RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology] — did a typeface intended for use with mapmaking called Carta. Cleo Huggins did a font for musical notation setting called Sonata. [They] did it on their own because they were excited that we were making new stuff and it was an honor to participate.”

Under Stone, the heart of the Originals program in the late 1980s was made up of type design heavyweights Slimbach and Twombly, in close partnership with Brady.

“It was a true three-person team,” Brady said. “We would always look at everything really carefully. There were these schedules I was responsible for making. It was difficult to go into meetings and say, ‘I need another three months, but it’s looking great.’ Always changing, adding… Robert always wanted to add stuff. Sometimes it was hard, because I could understand that desire, working on something you really care about.”

“It was really great to have Robert and Fred (who’s got really good eyes), and myself and Sumner on the team. We’d have weekly meetings about how the projects were going,” Twombly said. “We were the Originals team. Yeah! And with Sumner’s leadership, it felt stable, comfortable… like we were going somewhere, like we knew where we were going.”

“Do you want to go to Japan?”

As Adobe Type became more popular, and the Adobe Originals more high profile, Stone found himself spending less time working on the creative side of type development, and more time in meetings and marketing activities.

“I didn’t originally start out thinking I was going to be involved in marketing type, because [when he was first hired], there was no plan to do retail sales,” Stone said. “It was all about developing type that would somehow get into the market or be added onto printers.” But when desktop publishing took off, it became evident that there was a real market for fonts within the graphic arts industry, and the design world was expectantly watching Adobe Type.

“People wanted to do stories about what we were doing,” Stone said. “We were doing new typefaces; had a creative scene going. All these publications wanted to interview me for stories about Adobe Type. [There was] a lot of press during that period.”

Adobe’s marketing team was hard at work generating buzz from within. One of their primary efforts was the publication of Font and Function, a popular magazine spearheaded by Liz Bond, a big fan of ITC and its acclaimed U&lc, with its artful combination of promotional and educational content for type lovers. Font and Function followed a similar model and was distributed via complimentary subscription, showcasing offerings from the Adobe type library while demonstrating the extensive capabilities of PostScript as a graphic design tool.

Fall 1989 issue of “Font and Function,” a publication which served as a marketing vehicle for the Adobe type library as well as featuring typographic design techniques and other educational content.

“The Font and Function guys would come to us with their layouts and ideas for the magazine, and I would comment and give feedback,” Stone said. “The whole presentation of the department as being [all about] craftsmanship in the electronic age — I said I thought that’s what we should emphasize, and I thought they did a very good job of doing that.”

The type group also worked closely with the marketing team to publish beautifully designed specimen books, crafted with high production values, to accompany each of the Originals. “Everyone in the serious type world regards them as treasures,” Stone said. “Little gems.”

The specimen books for Adobe Garamond and Adobe Caslon contain a wealth of historical information about the source type designs, along with information about the process of developing each revival.

Stone also traveled frequently, giving lectures at a variety of venues to discuss type design and evangelize the Originals. “Of course, [I was at] every sort of big type event, but even beyond that, AIGA meetings and things like that all over the country,” he said.

Stone was also deeply involved in another venture on behalf of Adobe: the company’s expansion into the Japanese market.

“John Warnock came into my office one day and said, ‘Do you want to go to Japan?’ ‘Of course, I want to go to Japan!’ They decided they really wanted to go after the Japanese market, but they needed to license fonts to go into the printers,” Stone said. “The business early on was focused on this OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] business, where they would design the hardware that was an interpreter for PostScript to go in the laser printers, I think all of which were manufactured in Japan at that time. You could put this interpreter in your printer, and any PostScript file that came from your computer would print.”

Stone’s mission in Japan was to license typefaces. There were two type companies dominant in the Japanese market at the time: Sha-Ken and Morisawa. “Sha-Ken was not going to license their typefaces to anybody ever — that was their position,” Stone said.

But Morisawa was interested. Stone, along with other members of the Adobe team, made a number of trips to Japan to from 1987–1989, working toward a contract. “I spent a fair amount of time there,” Stone said. Time that, although fruitful and enjoyable, took him away from focusing on type design, his passion.

New Year’s 1989 greeting designed and lettered by Sumner Stone during his outreach efforts in Japan.

Back at Adobe headquarters, Twombly and Slimbach were furiously working on new type designs to build the Adobe Originals library. Twombly was leading other members of the type team in reviving a series of historic wood types. Another alumnus of the Stanford digital typography program, David Siegel, contributed Tekton, a design based on the hand lettering of architect Frank Ching. And Slimbach was developing Minion, another extensive family of text faces.

Stone initiated a collaborative type design project, the Myriad family, but wouldn’t stay to see it through.

“It’s been quite an accomplishment”

Stone had grown weary of his role as a manager superseding his role as a creative director and hands-on type designer. “I left at the end of 1989. I was gone right on New Year’s Day in 1990, then I started my own business called Stone Type Foundry.”

“I told myself various things about why I was leaving. The thing that I really got off on [was] the creative part of the process: making new designs, participating with other people making new designs,” Stone said. “I could see the writing on the wall. I was spending most of my day in meetings. Even when I was there doing the creative stuff, I was always involved in contract negotiations with people like ITC, Linotype, and other people we licensed fonts from; the business of holding onto software, opening up the whole font marketing thing.”

“Eventually everybody was selling everything,” Stone said. “I thought it was crazy, quite frankly. […] It really opened up the font world. [It was a] much different place than it would have been if we hadn’t revealed the mechanism to hint and edit fonts. Type 1 was at first a secret, copy protected.”

Fonts were downloaded to a printer, and couldn’t be used on another printer. “People [were] upset and complained,” Stone said. “We decided not to do that anymore—we decided to reveal the innards of Type 1 fonts. That was a big deal.” Stone recalled that, at the time, there was a lot of standing in people’s doorways, trying to predict what would happen. “John Warnock would come around and talk to people.”

“Those were big font things,” Stone said. “I just thought, if I stay at Adobe, what’s going to happen is I will get sucked up into the management world in a way that I don’t want to happen. I like the creative part. I have to say that I would be financially much better off if I had stayed, but I would have had a different life. I don’t regret it at all. I’m very happy I did what I did, and participated in font world in the way I have. It’s been gratifying.”

Although he left Adobe just five years in, Stone feels what he and his team did during his tenure made a tremendous impact on the world of typography and graphic design. “I’m quite proud we did the Adobe Originals,” he said. “It’s been quite an accomplishment. When I left, I told John Warnock we had raised the bar, and it’s true. We did.”

Sumner Stone doing the work he loves: drawing type.

Up next: How Adobe Type evolved after the exit of Sumner Stone and how the team continued to build on the early promise of the Adobe Originals program. We’ll further explore the output of the in-house type designers, and the introduction of more outside designers to help expand the Originals library.

Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

In the late 1980s, as desktop publishing was just taking off, there was a tremendous opportunity at Adobe to create new digital types that stretched the boundaries of quality, technological sophistication, and scope. The playing field was wide open, and we were very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.
— Robert Slimbach, Adobe’s first Principal Designer

It really was Sumner coming in saying, yeah, we’re gonna need some really solid historical revivals to prove that this new medium can live up to the metal type and the phototype industries. Because nobody really knew if that was true yet — even us.
— Carol Twombly, former Adobe type designer

In the mid-1980s, Sumner Stone, Adobe’s first director of typography, was heading a busy team working in font editing and production. The Adobe Type group worked at breakneck speed to increase its PostScript font offerings, which consisted mostly of existing typefaces licensed from established foundries.

“Digitizing high-quality type designs from Linotype and ITC [International Typeface Corporation] was key to the early success of PostScript. It demonstrated what this new technology could do,” Adobe Type’s David Lemon said. “As PostScript took off, Adobe quickly began releasing more PostScript fonts, and typesetting manufacturers that had previously dismissed PostScript agreed to digitize their libraries.”

But Stone envisioned much more for Adobe than rehashing typefaces that were already on the market. “He wanted to revive the art of fine typography by doing original designs and show how this new technology could surpass the old one,” Lemon said.

Robert Slimbach begins his life’s work at Adobe

With Stone determined to move into original type development at Adobe, he needed skilled designers capable of making new typefaces at the highest level of quality. In March 1987, Stone brought Robert Slimbach to Adobe. They had both worked at Autologic, where the self-taught Slimbach redrew typefaces for proprietary typesetting systems. In the two years immediately prior to joining Adobe, Slimbach had been working as a freelance type designer. He had already released his namesake type family, ITC Slimbach, and was finishing what would become ITC Giovanni.

“I was doing freelance type design for ITC,” Slimbach recalled. “I wasn’t really making enough money to live on, so I either had to alter my career plans or find a full-time job within the type industry, which were few and far between. I was very much open to the idea of working at Adobe.”

Stone recognized Slimbach’s skill at drawing type, and felt his passion for original design dovetailed nicely with his own vision.

“I initially split my time between font production and original design work,” Slimbach said. “That only lasted a couple of months — after that, I began to focus full-time on new designs exclusively.”

The Adobe Type Advisory Board comes into the mix

While Slimbach was busy developing new typefaces, Stone decided to put together an advisory board of established experts to help strengthen Adobe’s reputation among serious type users: “A bunch of people from outside who were well thought of in the field who would come together once or twice a year,” Stone said. “Every six months, we had a meeting. They would advise on what we should be making. What kind of innovations we should have. Critique the work. Offer feedback.”

The Adobe Type Advisory Board included Alvin Eisenman, then head of Yale’s graphic design department. “Yalies were really dominant in graphic design at that time,” Stone said. “A number of big NYC designers were graduates of the program. He had the best people — like Hoffman and Paul Rand — teach.”

Other members of the advisory board were Roger Black, “a big name in newspaper”; book designer and fine printer Jack Stauffacher; poster designer and Yale alum Lance Hidy; Stephen Harvard, book designer and then vice president of Stinehour Press; and Max Caflisch, “a very highly thought of Swiss teacher and writer about type design.” During the advisory board’s approximately three-year tenure, the group would expand to accommodate notable guests such as Erik Spiekermann, Gerard Unger, Louise Fili, and Julian Waters.

Members of the Adobe Type Advisory Board in 1988. Clockwise, from top right: Roger Black, Lance Hidy, Jack Stauffacher, Sumner Stone, Alvin Eisenman, and Stephen Harvard.

The advisory board was instrumental in helping Adobe shape the scope of the Originals program, Stone said. He recalled Eisenman saying, “We need more characters, caps, old style figures, etc.” That philosophy of prizing quality and typographic richness was mirrored by the key players on the Adobe Type team, who defined the eventual standard for the Adobe Originals.

“It was at a time when DTP [desktop publishing] type was very much frowned upon, because it was so immature as a medium, and the designs available were crude and lacked subtlety,” Slimbach said. He viewed the advisory board mainly in terms of a marketing asset, with prominent figures chosen to lend credibility to Adobe’s efforts to elevate digital typography to a new level. “It was more of a publicity thing — it worked,” Slimbach said.

“I was working with the type board, going through lists of fonts they needed to do,” Black said. “I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. […] I said, ‘You have to have the main standards, or you’re not a real library.’ It’s all fine and well to have contemporary type designers doing what they think is a great serif or sans serif, but we need Caslon and some kind of Clarendon; Garamond and Bodoni and those things.”

Under the direction of Stone, who was mindful of the suggestions of the advisory board, the Adobe Originals program was in full swing. “Robert turned out Utopia, [which was] quite widely used in the newspaper field,” Stone said. “[It was] an original design — not historical; some things in common with Melior, but definitely original. It was actually difficult to get people to come up with concepts about original designs — it’s not easy to make originals.”

Lemon recalled there was an ambitious list of potential revivals from the board. But Garamond was ultimately chosen as the companion release to Utopia.

Taking on Garamond

“I had thought for some time that the existing Garamonds, especially those that were popular in America, were far removed from the original, and that it was ripe for a revival,” Stone said. “My prior favorable impression of the type had come largely from the Egenolff-Berner specimen of 1592, which showed some of Garamond’s original work.”

Garamond was a natural selection for Slimbach to take on. “I see Utopia as somewhat of an extension of ITC Slimbach, while Adobe Garamond followed my work on ITC Giovanni, continuing my interest in humanist book types,” Slimbach said. “Sumner approached me to ask if I’d like to also work on a revival. I said that I’d like to do a Garamond.”

Slimbach drew early versions of his Garamond based on a number of published specimens. The first samples he could get were poor reproductions, which limited his design. Fred Brady, former manager of new type development at Adobe, found better material, which helped settle the question of which of Garamond’s designs to use. Harvard supplied still better images of the size Slimbach had chosen.

“Vraye parangonne seems to be a sweet spot for Garamond as a punchcutter — not too big and not too small,” Slimbach said.

“In the end, it became clear that still better images were needed,” Slimbach said. “The only way to get them was to visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum [in Antwerp, Belgium].” Slimbach, Brady, and type expert and historian John Lane visited the institution, studying the types of Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon.

Research trip to the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, during the development of Adobe Garamond, 1988. Clockwise, from left: Robert Slimbach, Fred Brady, Joy Redick, and John Lane.

“We took pictures of their collection of Garamond and Granjon types,” Brady said. “We took those images and had those enlarged and used those as starting points for design, Rob did, taking the right pictures of the right fonts. There were lots of choices; some were better than others. Sorting through all that stuff, it was very exciting. That institution was very open. [We] opened a book and took pictures — we didn’t have to use white gloves.”

“[With] historical revivals, you should go look at as much of the original material as you can, the place they were done,” Stone said. “You should try to absorb as much as possible of the spirit of the letters.”

As a result of his research in Belgium, Slimbach chose Granjon’s Saint Augustine, a slightly smaller size than the Garamond vraye parangonne, as the model for his italics.

“Each improvement in source material led to a complete redrawing,” Slimbach said. “The Plantin-Moretus trip also inspired me to add swash caps, ornaments, ending glyphs, additional ligatures, and titling caps late in the project to go along with the small caps and oldstyle figures.”

“I think Robert redrew that face over at least three or four times,” Stone said. “He is a man obsessed, which is the right kind of person to do type design.”

“Rather than a [completely] new design, Garamond was a design with a lot of respect,” Brady said. “There were a lot of Garamonds out there that didn’t hearken back to the original design. This was [based on] a beautiful model.”

Bay Area type designer Mark van Bronkhorst, who worked in graphic design and production during the shift from conventional typesetting to desktop publishing, recalled his first glimpse of Adobe Garamond in one of the type department’s marketing publications. “I said, ‘What is that!? I have to have it!’ That was the most important typeface they put out at the time. It had expert sets, old style numerals, true small caps — things real typographers wanted to use that weren’t available at all in the current PostScript fonts.”

Along with crafting fully fleshed-out families with all the bells and whistles needed for fine typographic work, the Adobe Type team was committed to getting the details right.

“I remember using Adobe Garamond,” Black said. His design studio, Danilo Black, did work for Colombian-born author and journalist Gabriel García Márquez. “I used it to set a book, [and] I remember his criticism of the font. He was primarily not happy with the tilde. He explained that the tilde must not be looking like it’s taking off or coming in for a landing; it must be an equilibrium flight, or level flight, he said. I emailed that to Sumner, and he said, ‘Right. We’ll fix it.’ And they did.”

Carol Twombly joins the team

With it apparent that the Adobe Originals program would be critical to the acceptance of digital fonts by high-end users, Stone made another key hire when he brought Carol Twombly on board in 1988. Twombly was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and had been through the (now-defunct) masters program in digital typography at Stanford University.

“I knew of her from Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes, old friends of mine. [Bigelow was instrumental in forming the Stanford program, and had hired Twombly to work in his studio.] They had high praise for her. I hired her originally to test whether we could use Adobe Illustrator to give to outside designers we wanted to work on the Adobe Originals. We had written software to edit fonts but had gotten digital outlines for Linotype and ITC and URW. Then we had to make them ready for PostScript.”

“[Fellow Stanford type program alum] Dan Mills had already moved over to Adobe and was already working with Sumner,” Twombly said. “So I pretty much followed Dan. He said, ‘Yeah, it’s happening over here, so if you want something to do, come on over.’ And I started as a freelancer in 1988. I had designed one font of my own [the Morisawa prize-winning Mirarae, 1984], but, other than that, I had only really worked with Chuck and Kris on their projects.”

The making of Trajan

Sensing Twombly’s potential, Stone gave her a critical historical project to tackle. “I had Carol digitize this typeface that came to be called Trajan. Trajan is probably the most popular display typeface today — it was incredibly successful,” Stone said. “That was the first thing that Carol worked on. She did, of course, a beautiful job.”

“Sumner gave me the task of drawing some beautiful classical roman letterforms from an inscription on Trajan’s column in Rome,” Twombly said. Letter carver Christopher Stinehour provided a vital piece of inspiration. “He gave us a copy of a full-sized rubbing of the inscription, and we had that up on the wall in the hallway. So I got to work with that and make scans from that.”

Facsimile of a rubbing taken from the inscription found at the base of Trajan’s column, located on the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome. This Roman triumphal column was erected in AD 113 to commemorate Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars.

That was the beginning of Twombly’s eleven-year career with Adobe. “That was the first project. It was like Sumner saying, hey, we’ll test her out, see how her drawing skills are,” she said. “We were using Adobe Illustrator to do the drawings, one page per letter. It’s not set up at all as a font design program.”

Twombly, who preferred working by hand to drawing on the computer, recalled the logistical difficulties of designing type with early production tools. “I don’t even remember how we worked that out,” she said. “I remember having three different computers in my office that would do different parts of the task, and you’d have to transfer data from one to the other to do different stages of the process. I always started with hand drawings; so did Robert. The first ideas were always drawn by hand — I wouldn’t be able to do it any other way.”

“It wasn’t as though you could take the rubbing and turn it into black and white and just use that,” Twombly said. “We came up with a series of sketches for our keyword, ‘HAMBURGERVONS,’ and just worked with it on the computer from there.” The forms had to be modified and perfected in order to work as a digital font, while remaining true to the spirit of the historical source.

“It was beautiful working with those letterforms, because those Romans — they really had it figured out,” Twombly said. “So lovely.”

Impressed with her work on Trajan and two other designs making up the “Modern Ancients” series (Lithos and Charlemagne), Stone gave Twombly a different historical period to conquer.

Adobe Caslon hand drawings by Carol Twombly.

“I assigned her to do the Caslon,” Stone said. “The Garamond and the Caslon were our first sort of running the flag up saying, look, we’re doing serious typography here. I talked to a lot of people — quite young graphic designers — who were early adopters. When Caslon and Garamond came out, they were very happy; it was an indication we were going to do serious typography. The DTP world was going to be successful and supported by good type. A number of people have told me that.”

“Both Caslon and Garamond were kind of watersheds,” Stone said. “And Trajan just kept getting more and more popular. It’s everywhere, and its popularity is still on the increase.”

Members of the Adobe Type team. From left: Jim Wasco, Robert Slimbach, Carol Twombly, and Fred Brady.

Up next: A more in-depth look at how the Adobe Type team worked together to make a success of the Adobe Originals. We’ll expound on the roles of other key team members, including Jim Wasco and Linnea Lundquist, and Adobe Type’s community outreach efforts and first forays into Japan.

Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series. And, in case you missed any posts, check out the rest of the series!

Type is always important. It has a significant position in the history of communication. There will always be people who understand that and those who don’t see it. I knew we’d take out Letraset and that Monotype and Linotype’s typesetting business would go down. But we had a responsibility to replace that with something better and to keep the values high.
—John Warnock (As quoted in “Inside the Publishing Revolution,” Pamela Pfiffner, Adobe Press, Berkeley, 2003.)

Adobe co-founders John Warnock and Charles “Chuck” Geschke knew PostScript had the potential to change the face of publishing forever. They also knew that, even though they had struck gold by getting a licensing deal to include Linotype’s Helvetica and Times Roman in the initial 13-font PostScript library, that collection had to grow—fast.

Publication designer and typographic consultant Roger Black remembers the early emergence of PostScript well. “Warnock came to realize that fonts were the secret sauce of page description languages; if he could have some good fonts, it would make all the difference in the world,” Black said.

“They learned something when they had the first LaserWriter with four fonts (Helvetica, Times Roman, Courier, and Symbol). The first Courier font at Adobe was a stroke font. It wasn’t an outline, and it was written longhand in PostScript because they didn’t yet have any tools to draw it (which is why it’s so bad). If they wanted a bold, they just stroked it more.”

Growing the world of PostScript type—and driving quality standards—meant bringing in some serious typographic muscle. When Warnock and Geschke brought Sumner Stone on board as Adobe’s first director of typography in the summer of 1984, a critical piece of the changing publishing puzzle fell into place.

Stone, after studying calligraphy with Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, had quietly been making a name for himself as a lettering artist and typographer. He spent two years at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Missouri, before becoming director of typographic development at Autologic in Thousand Oaks, California.

Stone says Autologic was really the first company to develop a successful digital typesetting machine, which was sold primarily to large newspaper dailies and chains.

“I went there and organized their font production situation so that they could try to sell their machines in the commercial marketplace to a much larger audience. I was there about five years [circa 1979–1983], remaking faces that already existed, always on a rush-rush schedule,” Stone said.

From Autologic, Stone made the cross-country move to Boston, Massachusetts, to serve as director of typography and design for Camex, a company which produced a machine for laying out newspaper ads. Stone had been with the startup for less than a year when John Warnock called him.

“[Warnock] said, ‘Would you like to come to California and interview? We are looking for someone to run our type program.’ I already knew a little from friends about what they were doing. I went out and spent a day interviewing. [At that time], everyone who would work with you got to talk to you,” Stone said. “At the end of the day, they offered me the job. I said, well, I’m very interested. I like the people, the whole situation. The only thing is, I don’t want to just grind everything up and spit it out again. I want to make new typefaces.”

The Adobe crew didn’t bat a collective eyelash, Stone said. “They came from research institutions; they thought innovation was very important. What I thought was going to be a sales job was actually really easy.”

Stone accepted the job offer and returned to California. “On the second day I was at Adobe, I had them move a drawing table into my office, just to indicate that it wasn’t just on the computer that we design typefaces,” he said.

Sumner Stone at his drawing table

Stone began working on the first original type family developed at Adobe, one that would become his namesake masterwork. Stone Serif, Sans, and Informal, which would be released in 1987, made up the first type super-family designed for PostScript. (The Stone family was subsequently licensed back to ITC.) These faces were crafted to play to PostScript’s device independence, and tuned to work as beautifully at small sizes on low-resolution printers as they did on high-end imagesetters. But as passionate as Stone was about crafting his typographic opus, he wasn’t able to work on it full time—he was busy ramping up Adobe’s type department.

Designed by Min Wang, 1987

“At the time, Adobe had no retail sales,” Stone said. The core business was licensing PostScript and designing interpreters for output devices. Stone recalled that Linotype (then commonly known as Mergenthaler) made an imagesetter which sold 50 units in the first week, a quantity they had originally imagined might sell in an entire year. The first LaserWriter was a smashing success by anyone’s standards—even with its mind-blowing price point of just under $7k. (To put things in perspective, Adobe Type’s David Lemon pointed out that the first LaserWriter bore the same price tag as a new VW Beetle sold during the 1985 model year.)

“People were buying them like hotcakes,” Stone said. “The same thing with the imagesetter—they couldn’t make them fast enough. Money was flowing. People were excited. By the time the LaserWriter had come out [in January 1985], I had hired a couple of people, working on software for editing fonts, for hinting fonts.”

The growing Adobe type team was tasked with the expansion of the PostScript font library, which would include more Linotype faces as well as type designs licensed from ITC. The new 35-font base set, which would be resident in the next incarnation of the Apple LaserWriter (and later become available for the Macintosh and Windows operating systems), included four styles each of ITC Avant Garde Gothic, ITC Bookman, Courier, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, and Times, along with eight styles of Helvetica, plus the singles: Symbol, ITC Zapf Chancery, and ITC Zapf Dingbats.

PostScript core font set: the “base 35”

“I don’t know how the ITC faces came to the list for Apple,” Black said. “I’ve always assumed that Steve Jobs was a fan of ITC since his days at Reed, when students were sent free subscriptions to U&lc.”

Stone was part of the group that would eventually decide on the PostScript standard font set, lending a voice of typographic reason when discussions veered too far off course. Lemon recalled that Cleo Huggins, an early member of Adobe’s typographic team, regaled the crew with stories about Jobs’ take on which faces to include in the expanded set. “She talked about Jobs wanting ITC Gorilla, and about people planning to use ITC American Typewriter for the monospaced family [instead of Courier]—it isn’t monospaced, of course,” Lemon said.

Sans Jobs’ quirky ITC Gorilla—Stone noted that Zapf Chancery and Dingbats were ultimately selected as the “fun” fonts—the bigger-and-better PostScript font set launched with Apple’s LaserWriter Plus, which debuted on New Year’s Day, 1986, and marked another turning point in the desktop publishing revolution.

“I think everyone knew what we were doing was going to be significant—it was already a hit and had just barely started,” Stone said. “In that atmosphere, first I hired Robert [Slimbach]. He immediately started working on original designs.”

The Adobe type team grew rapidly, with stellar talent continually added to the roster. Ads were placed in type and design publications, and the word about Adobe’s recruitment activities for typographic talent spread like wildfire. Lynne Garrell, Carol Toriumi-Lawrence, David Lemon, and Dan Mills had already joined Adobe by the time Slimbach came on board in March 1987. Fred Brady would sign on shortly thereafter. Carol Twombly joined the group in 1988, with Jim Wasco and Linnea Lundquist following in 1989 and 1990, respectively.

“Sumner had his own point of view about the type development,” Black said. “He had had some experience. He had read everything and had a very well-informed idea of the history of type and knew who [Monotype’s] Stanley Morison was and what his job was. I imagine that was his model—finding designers to work with that were really great.”

With the explosive growth of desktop publishing and the ensuing clamor for new PostScript fonts, Stone was more determined than ever to maintain quality and craftsmanship. Making a name for Adobe as a high-end type foundry was key to proving to serious typographers that digital type was a medium to embrace.

To that end, Stone formulated the concept of the Adobe Originals, embarking on an ambitious program of standard-setting type design that would far outshine anything on the market.

Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly

Up next: The first major designs from the Adobe Originals type program are unleashed. We’ll talk about critically important faces crafted by Slimbach, Twombly, and others under Stone’s direction, as well as the impact of an illustrious type advisory board put together by Stone.

Keep up with the Adobe Originals celebration via RSS by bookmarking this series.