The Adobe Originals program is a series of digital typefaces created by Adobe Systems from 1989 for professional use, intended to be of extremely high design quality while offering a large feature set across many languages. Many are strongly influenced by research into classic designs from the past and calligraphy. Adobe Originals fonts are sold separately or with Adobe products such as

InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, bo ...

. Adobe Originals fonts tend to offer an extensive feature set through the

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

font format, such as

optical size In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

s, automatic

ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...

insertion,

small capitals In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...

, swashes,

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

and lining figures and kerning pair sets to fine-tune character spacing. They are accordingly common choices in fine printing and book design.

History

The Originals program was established in 1989, when

Sumner Stone Sumner Stone (born 9 June 1945 in Venice, Florida) is a typeface designer and graphic artist. He notably designed ITC Stone while working for Adobe. A specimen of ITC Stone is shown at his personal website. Career Stone studied at Reed College, g ...

hired font designers

Carol Twombly Carol Twombly (born June 13, 1959) is an American designer, best known for her type design. She worked as a type designer at Adobe Systems from 1988 through 1999, during which time she designed, or contributed to the design of, many typefaces, i ...

and

Robert Slimbach Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Inter ...

. This period saw the growth of

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

, at a point when printing and design was becoming more accessible. Adobe already had contracts to digitise and sell fonts by companies such as ITC, but felt that many of these designs had a somewhat dated appearance. Early typefaces released included

Utopia A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book ''Utopia (book), Utopia'', describing a fictional ...

and

Adobe Garamond Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and b ...

, a reinterpretation of the Roman types of

Claude Garamond Claude Garamont (–1561), known commonly as Claude Garamond, was a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter based in Paris. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal ty ...

and the italics of

Robert Granjon Robert Granjon (1513-November 16, 1589/March 1590) was a French type designer and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Frankfurt, Antwerp, and Rome for various printers. He is best known for having introduced the typeface Civilité and for his ita ...

. Slimbach developed the design to have a timeless, accurate appearance through visiting the

Plantin-Moretus Museum The Plantin-Moretus Museum ( nl, Plantin-Moretusmuseum) is a printing museum in Antwerp, Belgium which focuses on the work of the 16th-century printers Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. It is located in their former residence and printing esta ...

in Antwerp and seeing books and original printing equipment from the 16th century. A parallel Adobe Originals program was developed to provide Japanese-language fonts, including the works of such designers as Masahiko Kozuka and Ryoko Nishizuka.

Groups of fonts

A particularly large group of Adobe designs was inspired by the decorative

wood type In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. First used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was l ...

s of the nineteenth century. These were given names after types of wood and tree. The series also includes a large number of eccentric display designs, some resembling the

grunge typography Grunge (sometimes referred to as the Seattle sound) is an alternative rock genre and subculture that emerged during the in the American Pacific Northwest state of Washington, particularly in Seattle and nearby towns. Grunge fuses elements of p ...

movement of the 1990s, which used awkward and science-fiction style letterforms.

Recent activity

Adobe has published fewer original designs since around 2000, publishing other companies' designs through its Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit) online sales program for Web fonts (and more recently, desktop fonts as well). However, the company still does publish original designs, including Thomas Phinney's Hypatia Sans and Slimbach's recent Trajan Sans, Adobe Text, Arno and Acumin. Several of these are very large designs with complex character sets, Acumin reportedly having been in development for eight years and expanded in conception from four fonts to ninety. Adobe has also released a large group of fonts, the Source family, as an open-source project that can be freely redistributed.

List of Adobe Originals families

OpenType conversion

When

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

converted PostScript Type 1 and multiple master fonts to

Compact Font Format PostScript fonts are font files encoded in outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting. This system uses PostScript file format to encode font information. "PostScript fonts" may also separately ...

(CFF), they were based on the last Type 1/MM versions from the Adobe Type Library. In addition to file format change, there were numerous other changes: * For fonts designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe, some received major redesigns (notably Cronos), while most were re-spaced and re-kerned. * Some formerly all-capitals fonts such as

Lithos Lithos is a glyphic sans-serif typeface designed by Carol Twombly in 1989 for Adobe Systems. Lithos is inspired by the unadorned, geometric letterforms of the engravings found on Ancient Greek public buildings. The typeface consists of only cap ...

Pro and

Trajan Pro Trajan is a serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. The design is based on the letterforms of ''capitalis monumentalis'' or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column from which the ty ...

, received previously non-existent small-caps glyphs in the slots for lowercase characters. * All alphabetic fonts which did not already have a euro symbol had one added. * All alphabetic fonts added 16 extra characters: 14 Mac "symbol substitution" characters, the litre and estimated symbols. Symbol substitution was a scheme used on Mac OS, wherein for certain characters input using a Type 1 font with standard encoding, both screen and print would pull a generic version of the glyph in the Times style from the Symbol font. In OpenType, Adobe put customized versions of the formerly generic symbol substitution glyphs in every font, with a different appearance and metric in each font. The new glyphs include partialdiff, Delta (math), integral, pi (math), product (capital math pi), root, infinity, lozenge (diamond), summation (cap math Sigma), approxequal, ohm (capital math Omega), lessequal, greaterequal. * Unkerned accented characters received additional kerning to deal with accented characters. * Font families that formerly included separate Type 1 "Expert" fonts or Cyrillic fonts had these glyphs merged into the base fonts in their OpenType versions. * Multiple master fonts were converted to individual OpenType fonts; each font consists of a former multiple master instance. As a result of the changes, Adobe does not guarantee metric compatibility between Type 1 and OpenType fonts.

References

External links

Adobe Originals

Designers of Adobe Originals

{{DEFAULTSORT:Adobe, Originals Typography Lists of typefaces Typefaces with optical sizes Typefaces with text figures Adobe typefaces