Corbel is a humanist

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 ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

Jeremy Tankard Jeremy Tankard is a British type designer. Tankard has designed retail fonts independently and for FontShop and Adobe. Corbel was designed for Microsoft and has been included in Microsoft Office and Windows since 2006. Tankard has also designed ...

for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

and released to consumers in 2007. It is part of the

ClearType Font Collection ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for additi ...

, a suite of fonts from various designers released with

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

. All start with the letter ''C'' to reflect that they were designed to work well with Microsoft's ClearType text rendering system, a text rendering engine designed to make text clearer to read on LCD monitors. The other fonts in the same group are

Calibri Calibri () is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2007, with Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista. In Office 2007, it ...

Cambria Cambria is a name for Wales, being the Latinised form of the Welsh name for the country, . The term was not in use during the Roman period (when Wales had not come into existence as a distinct entity). It emerged later, in the medieval period, a ...

Candara Candara is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Gary Munch and commissioned by Microsoft. It is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts from various designers released with Windows Vista, all starting with the letter ''C'' ...

, Consolas and Constantia.

Design

In a blurb for its use, Corbel was described as "designed to give an uncluttered, clean appearance on screen. The letter forms are open with soft, flowing curves. It is legible and clear at small sizes. At larger sizes the detailing and style of the shapes is more apparent." The italic style is a true italic, with influences from serif fonts and calligraphy, with many letters gaining a tail pointing to the right. Many aspects of its design are similar to Calibri and Candara, which are also humanist sans-serif designs; like them it is slightly more condensed than average. Font designer Raph Levien, reviewing it for ''Typographica'', described it as similar to Frutiger. Tankard described his aims in the family's design: “I wanted to move away from the round i-dot sans fonts we've seen a lot of recently. Less cuddly, more assertive. I wanted the italic to be expressive, not a sloped roman." Corbel by default renders numbers as

text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...

(''old style'' or ''lowercase'' numerals), which are preferred for integrating figures into running text. This is an uncommon choice in sans-serif faces, especially those designed for display on a screen, but several of the other ClearType fonts also make this the default option; lining figures can be suggested using an

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 o ...

stylistic alternates menu or

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

. Text figures are also found in Microsoft's serif Georgia typeface.

Releases

It is distributed with Microsoft

Excel Viewer Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Appli ...

Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoi ...

, the

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. For use in other operating systems, such as Linux, cross-platform use and web use it is not available as a freeware and is licensed and sold by Ascender.

References

External links

Microsoft Cleartype Font Collection
at Microsoft Typography * *http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/ClearType.html
Tankard's website
Humanist sans-serif typefaces Typefaces with text figures Windows Vista typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2005 Typefaces designed by Jeremy Tankard ClearType Font Collection {{Typ-stub