Adobe Originals

Adobe Originals logo

The Adobe Originals program began in 1989, when Sumner Stone hired Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach to create a new series of type families for Adobe Systems. At the time, the desktop publishing revolution was in full swing, and designers had a growing need for high-quality digital fonts. The first typeface families arrived that same year: Slimbach's Utopia and Adobe Garamond. A reinterpretation of the Roman types of Claude Garamond and the italics of Robert Granjon, Adobe Garamond captured the essence of its models while offering all the advantages of contemporary typography. Versatile and beautiful, it would provide a blueprint for the many updated classics Slimbach and Twombly would add to the collection over the coming decade.

Slimbach and Twombly are not the only designers who have created Adobe Originals. The program also features typefaces from other award-winning designers, including Richard Lipton, Jovica Veljovic, and Michael Harvey. A parallel Adobe Originals program was even developed to provide Japanese-language fonts. Today, it includes the works of such designers as Masahiko Kozuka and Ryoko Nishizuka.

OpenType conversion

When Adobe converted PostScript Type 1 and Multi Master fonts to OpenType CFF format, 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 Pro and Trajan Pro, received previously non-existent small-caps glyphs in the slots for lowercase characters.
• All alphabetic fonts which did not already have it had the euro added.
• All alphabetic fonts added 16 extra characters, including 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 included in 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 no longer guarantees metric compatibility between Type 1 and OpenType fonts.^[1]

List of Adobe Originals families

References

External links

• Adobe Originals
• Designers of Adobe Originals
• Optical Size and Typefounding at Adobe