Georgia (typeface)
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Georgia is a
serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
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 ...
designed in 1993 by
Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is a British type designer.Christophe_Plantin.html" ;"title="y Christophe Plantin">y Christophe Plantin' in typography's golden age was in perfect condition (some muddle aside) long withPlantin's accoun ...
and hinted by
Tom Rickner Thomas Rickner (born October 8, 1966, Rochester, New York) is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at Apple Inc., supervised the production of the first TrueType fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s System 7 operating syst ...
for the
Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...
. It was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is inspired by
Scotch Roman Scotch Roman is a class of typefaces popular in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom. These typefaces were modeled on a design known as Pica No. 2 from the Edinburgh foundry of ...
designs of the 19th century and was based on designs for a print typeface on which Carter was working when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name
Miller A miller is a person who operates a Gristmill, mill, a machine to grind a grain (for example corn or wheat) to make flour. Mill (grinding), Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surname ...
the following year. The typeface's name referred to a tabloid headline, "Alien heads found in
Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...
."


Design

As a transitional serif design, Georgia shows a number of traditional features of "rational" serif typefaces from around the early 19th century, such as alternating thick and thin strokes,
ball terminal A ball terminal is a design feature of a 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 ...
s and a vertical axis. Speaking in 2013 about the development of Georgia and
Miller A miller is a person who operates a Gristmill, mill, a machine to grind a grain (for example corn or wheat) to make flour. Mill (grinding), Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surname ...
, Carter said: "I was familiar with Scotch Romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular... and then they disappeared completely." Its figure (numeral) designs are lower-case, or
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 ...
, designed to blend into continuous text; this was at the time a rare feature in computer fonts. Georgia was designed for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes. It features a large
x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...
(tall lower-case letters), and its thin strokes are thicker than would be common on a typeface designed for display use or the greater sharpness possible in print. Its reduced contrast and thickened serifs make it somewhat resemble Clarendon designs from the 19th century. The glyphs were manually hinted. Georgia's bold is also unusually bold, almost black. Carter noted that "
Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography ...
and Georgia... were all about binary
bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array A bit array (also known as bitmask, bit map, bit set, bit string, or bit vector) is an array data structure that c ...
s: every pixel was on or off, black or white... The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series." Given these unusual design decisions,
Matthew Butterick Matthew Coffin Butterick (born November 15, 1970) is an American typographer, lawyer, writer, and computer programmer. He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his book ''Typography for Lawyers'', which started ...
, an expert on document design, recommended that organizations using Georgia for onscreen display license
Miller A miller is a person who operates a Gristmill, mill, a machine to grind a grain (for example corn or wheat) to make flour. Mill (grinding), Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surname ...
to achieve a complementary, more balanced reading experience on paper. The Georgia typeface is similar to
Times New Roman Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration wit ...
, another reimagination of transitional serif designs, but as a design for screen display it has a larger x-height and fewer fine details. ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' changed its standard font from Times New Roman to Georgia in 2007. Georgia is a "Scotch Roman", a style that originated in types sold by Scottish type foundries of Alexander Wilson and William Miller in the period of 1810–1820. According to
Thomas Curson Hansard Thomas Curson Hansard (6 November 17765 May 1833) was an English pressman, son of the printer Luke Hansard. Life In 1803, he established a press of his own in Paternoster Row. In the same year, William Cobbett, a newspaperman, began to print th ...
, these were cut by London-based
punchcutter Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould sh ...
Richard Austin. Hansard was writing within Austin's lifetime, and this attribution is accepted by Austin's biographer Alastair Johnston, although historian
James Mosley James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design. The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, wher ...
has expressed caution on the attribution.


Releases

Microsoft publicly released the initial version of the font on 1 November 1996 as part of the
core fonts for the Web Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times Ne ...
collection, and later bundled it with the
Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
4.0 supplemental font pack: these releases made it available for installation on both Windows and Macintosh computers. This made it a popular choice for web designers, as pages specifying Georgia as a font choice would display identically on both types if users installed the core fonts package (or later Internet Explorer), simplifying development and testing. Its creators also produced
Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography ...
at the same time, the first Microsoft sans-serif screen font, for the same purposes. Some early public releases of Georgia included number designs between upper- and lower-case, similar to those later released with Miller. Carter was asked by Robert Norton, Microsoft's type director, to change these to text, a decision that Carter later considered an improvement.


Georgia Pro

New versions of Georgia, along with its sister sans-serif font Verdana, were released in 2011. The extension of the original font, named Georgia Pro, features a set of additional typefaces and designs, including: * Additional weights, including condensed versions. * Specialized
small caps 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 ...
designs. * Extensions to the character sets. * Extensions to the
kerning In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between Character (symbol), characters in a Typeface#Proportion, proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual le ...
. *
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 ...
typographic features, such as using ligatures and lining figures as default. The expanded font was designed for organisations that had made extensive use of Georgia and Verdana because of their availability but that desired additional versions for specific uses. Georgia Pro is available for purchase. However, users of Windows 10 or above can download Georgia Pro for free either from Microsoft Store or by enabling an optional feature called "Pan-European Supplemental Fonts".


Other Variants

Microsoft has commissioned a number of variants. Georgia Ref, a variant of Georgia consisting of a single weight, but with extra characters, was bundled with
Microsoft Bookshelf Microsoft Bookshelf is a discontinued reference collection introduced in 1987 as part of Microsoft's extensive work in promoting CD-ROM technology as a distribution medium for electronic publishing. The original MS-DOS version showcased the mass ...
2000,
Encarta ''Microsoft Encarta'' is a discontinued digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also available on the World Wide Web via an annual subscription, although later articles ...
Encyclopedia Deluxe 99 and Encarta Virtual Globe 99. MS Reference Serif, a derivative of Georgia Ref with a bold weight and italic, was also included in
Microsoft Encarta ''Microsoft Encarta'' is a discontinued digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also available on the World Wide Web via an annual subscription, although later articles ...
. However, Microsoft's font manager Bill Hill wrote, "I for one never felt totally comfortable with it as a book face. There's something very dark and 'vertical' about the way it feels." He also noted that Microsoft had commissioned an alternative, versions of the existing typefaces Berling and Frutiger, for its
Microsoft Reader Microsoft Reader is a discontinued Microsoft application for reading e-books, first released in August 2000, that used its own .LIT format. It was available for Windows computers and Pocket PC PDAs. The name was also used later for an unrelated a ...
e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...
product. Despite this, Georgia is included among the bundled book-reading fonts for several e-book applications.


Awards

The Cyrillic font won an award at Kyrillitsa in 1999.U&lc Online Issue: 25.4.1: The Winners


See also

*
Core fonts for the Web Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times Ne ...
*
Segoe Segoe ( ) is a typeface, or family of fonts, that is best known for its use by Microsoft. The company uses Segoe in its online and printed marketing materials, including recent logos for a number of products. Additionally, the Segoe UI font su ...
*
Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography ...


References and footnotes


External links

*Font Bureau page
Georgia Pro
*Type Network page
Georgia Pro
*Microsoft typography page
GeorgiaGeorgia ProGeorgia Ref
{{DEFAULTSORT:Georgia (Typeface) Transitional serif typefaces Typefaces with text figures Microsoft typefaces Windows XP typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1993 Computer-related introductions in 1996 Typefaces designed by Matthew Carter