Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded

Prix Charles Peignot The Prix Charles Peignot (Charles Peignot Prize) is a major award in typeface design, given "to a designer under the age of 35 who has made an outstanding contribution to type design". It is awarded irregularly, typically every three to five years, ...

from the

Association Typographique Internationale The ATypI () or Association Typographique Internationale (the International Typography Association) is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to typography and type design. The primary activity of the association is an annual fall confe ...

, the SoTA Typography Award, and repeated TDC² awards from the

Type Directors Club The Type Directors Club (TDC) is an international organization devoted to typography and type design, founded in 1946 in New York City. TDC believes that type drives culture, and that culture drives type—and is dedicated to cataloging, showcas ...

. His typefaces are among those most commonly used in books.

Biography

Slimbach was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1956. Shortly after, he moved to Southern California where he spent his childhood and his youth. After attending

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

on an athletics scholarship, he developed an interest in graphic design and typefaces while running a small screen printshop for manufacturing posters and greeting cards. This work brought him into contact with Autologic Incorporated in Newbury Park, California. After training from 1983 to 1985, Slimbach worked as a type designer with Autologic Incorporation. There he received further training, not just as a type designer but also as a calligrapher. Slimbach was then self-employed for two years as a freelance type designer, during which developed the two typefaces ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni for the

International Typeface Corporation The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler. The company was one of the world's first type foundries to have no history in the production of ...

. He later commented of this period that "I wasn’t really making enough money to live on." In 1987 he joined

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the cre ...

. Since then, he has concentrated primarily on designing typefaces for digital technology, often drawing inspiration from classical sources. He has developed many new fonts for the

Adobe Originals The Adobe Originals program is a series of digital typefaces created by Adobe Systems from 1989 for professional use, intended to be of extremely high design quality while offering a large feature set across many languages. Many are strongly influ ...

program. Among his early projects at Adobe were the

Utopia A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book '' Utopia'', describing a fictional island soc ...

(1988),

Adobe 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 ...

(1989), Minion (1990) and Poetica (1992) families. In 1991, he received the

from the

for excellence in type design. More recently, Slimbach's own calligraphy formed the basis for his typeface Brioso. Slimbach has described himself as being particularly interested in humanist and serif projects, calling his work on the

neo-grotesque 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 ...

Acumin, in the Swiss modernist style, as being "outside of the design realm I normally prefer." Since 2000, the rate of Slimbach's (and Adobe's) new typefaces has slowed, as he has taken advantage of the new linguistic and typographic capabilities offered by 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 ...

format. Where in the 1990s a given typeface design might be instantiated in one or two fonts, with 200-500

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s, a typical new Slimbach work post-2000 has 1500-3000 glyphs. Reviewing Slimbach's 2007 project

Arno The Arno is a river in the Tuscany region of Italy. It is the most important river of central Italy after the Tiber. Source and route The river originates on Monte Falterona in the Casentino area of the Apennines, and initially takes a ...

, font designer

Mark Simonson Mark Simonson (born 1955) is an American independent type designer who works in Saint Paul, Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. Career Simonson has described his typefaces as often being inspired by lettering styles of the past, such as the graphic d ...

noted that it 'almost becomes a different typeface' when italic alternates are enabled. A hallmark of Slimbach's designs is his use of a 'Th' ligature. In 2004, Adobe released

Garamond Premier 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 ...

Pro, a new take on the Garamond designs, which Slimbach had been working on for 15 years, since he first completed Adobe Garamond in 1989. Outside of work for public use, Slimbach has designed Adobe's corporate font, Adobe Clean Sans and Adobe Clean Serif, which are used by Adobe in branding and user interfaces. He also designed Adobe Hand B, based on his handwriting, for use in Acrobat's digital signature feature. Slimbach has notable skills in several fields other than type design: he went to college on a gymnastics scholarship, and he is an accomplished calligrapher and photographer. His photographic work uses black & white film, and is mainly portraits that examine human foibles and idiosyncrasies.

Typefaces

Before Slimbach came to Adobe, he designed two fonts for the

(ITC): ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni. Slimbach typefaces designed before the 2000s were first released in the PostScript Type 1 format, and later re-released in the more capable OpenType format (abbreviated OT in the following table).

Awards

*Adobe Hand B — 2014 Modern Cyrillic winner *Adobe Text Pro — 2014 Modern Cyrillic winner * Arno Pro — TDC2 2007 winning entry *Brioso Pro — TDC2 2002 winning entry *Caflisch Script Pro (added many typographic alternates) — bukva:raz! 2001 winner * Frederick W. Goudy Award — 2018 *Garamond Premier ProMain page for Garamond Premier Pro at Adobe.com
/ref> — TDC2 2006 winning entry * Minion Pro (added Greek) — bukva:raz! 2001 winner *Myriad Pro (added Greek and Cyrillic, with Carol Twombly, Fred Brady and Christopher Slye) — TDC2 2000 winning entry and bukva:raz! 2001 winner *Trajan Sans Pro — 2014 Modern Cyrillic winner *Warnock Pro — TDC2 2001 winning entry

Notes

External links

Adobe's biography of Robert Slimbach

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Luc Devroye Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye specializes in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms ...

's collection of information on Slimbach and his work {{DEFAULTSORT:Slimbach, Robert 1956 births Living people American typographers and type designers Artists from Evanston, Illinois University of California, Los Angeles alumni Adobe Inc. people