Retina is a

font 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 ...

by created by

Tobias Frere-Jones Tobias Frere-Jones (born Tobias Edgar Mallory Jones; August 28, 1970) is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program. Among his ty ...

for ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'', which used it for high density print in their newspapers from 2000 to 2007. It was created to be legible at very small font sizes, using

ink trap An ink trap is a feature of certain typefaces designed for printing in small sizes. At an ink trap, the corners or details are removed from the letterforms. When the type is printed, ink naturally spreads into the removed area. Without ink traps, t ...

s to stop smearing during the printing process.

History

In 1999

Jonathan Hoefler Jonathan Hoefler (; born August 22, 1970) is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989, a type foundry in New York. Early life Jonathan Hoefler was born on August 22, 1970, in New York City to Doreen Ben ...

and Tobias Frere-Jones's firm Hoefler & Frere-Jones was commissioned to create a font for ''The Wall Street Journal'' stock listings. The font was completed and began use in ''The Wall Street Journal'' stock listings in 2000. The small size of Retina allowed ''The Wall Street Journal'' to print the same amount of text on eight fewer pages per issue, which was estimated to have saved the newspaper $6 million to $7 million annually. ''The Wall Street Journal'' condensed the size of its pages in 2007, replacing Retina with another font that was also developed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones called Exchange. In 2011 Retina was one of twenty-three digital fonts acquired by MoMA for its Architecture and Design collection after being gifted to the museum by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, and the font is now used by many newspapers for high density texts such as stock information and classified ads. Retina was released for licence to the public in 2016.

Design

Retina was originally created specifically to be used at 5.5 point on newspaper. The resulting font is designed to be best used at 7 point or below. Unlike a

monospaced font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

, each letter has a unique width, but each character has the same width regardless of weight, meaning a bold letter will take up the same width as an italic letter or a regular letter. Retina is a

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

font designed for high-density texts and comes in a microplus and standard version. The microplus is meant for extremely small font, whereas the standard version is meant for larger point where the notches on the microplus version would be too visible. The notches in the microplus version are ink traps, designed to serve as wells for excess ink to pool into during the printing process to avoid smudging the tiny lettering. The font bears resemblance to older fonts such as

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 ...

and

Janson Janson is the name given to a set of old-style serif typefaces from the Dutch Baroque period, and modern revivals from the twentieth century. Janson is a crisp, relatively high-contrast serif design, most popular for body text. Janson is based o ...

References

{{reflist Digital typefaces Sans-serif typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2000