Lithos is a glyphic sans-serif

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 thousands o ...

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 ...

in 1989 for Adobe Systems. Lithos is inspired by the unadorned, geometric letterforms of the engravings found on

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

public buildings. The typeface consists of only capital letters, no lowercase, and comes in five weights, without italics. According to Twombly, Lithos only used Greek inscriptions as inspiration, making Lithos more of a modern reinterpretation than a faithful reproduction. Twombly also designed

Trajan Trajan ( ; la, Caesar Nerva Traianus; 18 September 539/11 August 117) was Roman emperor from 98 to 117. Officially declared ''optimus princeps'' ("best ruler") by the senate, Trajan is remembered as a successful soldier-emperor who presi ...

and

Charlemagne Charlemagne ( , ) or Charles the Great ( la, Carolus Magnus; german: Karl der Große; 2 April 747 – 28 January 814), a member of the Carolingian dynasty, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first ...

based respectively on ancient Roman and Byzantine inscriptions. Those typefaces, unlike Lithos, were modeled more directly upon their historical counterparts. One example of Lithos' departure from historical accuracy is the inclusion of bold weights, which never existed in historical Greek inscriptions.

Lithos Pro

In 2000, Adobe released 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 ...

version called Lithos Pro, which included Adobe CE, Adobe Western 2, Greek character sets support, and small caps in the lowercase positions. OpenType features include alternates, case forms, proportional lining figures, small caps.

Lithos in popular culture

Lithos was the resident typeface of MTV during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Lithos is also used in the title typeface of the

Very Short Introductions ''Very Short Introductions'' (''VSI'') is a book series published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). The books are concise introductions to particular subjects, intended for a general audience but written by experts. Most are under 200 page ...

published by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

. Lithos is used in the

California State Parks The California Department of Parks and Recreation, more commonly known as California State Parks, manages the California state parks system. The system administers 279 separate park units on 1.4 million acres (570,000 hectares), with over 280 ...

logo. Lithos is used in the '' Banjo-Kazooie'' game logo.

References

{{reflist *Giampietro, Rob
"New Black Face"
''Giampietro+Smith Studio'' taken from ''Letterspace'' Fall/Winter 2004. Retrieved May 30, 2007. Archived February 4, 2012.

''Adobe.com''. Retrieved May 30, 2007. Adobe typefaces Sans-serif typefaces Incised typefaces Display typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1989 Typefaces designed by Carol Twombly