Adobe Jenson is an old-style

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 a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

drawn for

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American software, computer software company based in San Jose, California. It offers a wide range of programs from web design tools, photo manipulation and vector creation, through to ...

by its chief type designer Robert Slimbach. Its Roman styles are based on a text face cut by

Nicolas Jenson Nicholas (or Nicolas) Jenson (c. 1420–1480) was a French engraver, pioneer, printer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice, Italy. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours and is credited with being the cr ...

in Venice around 1470, and its italics are based on those created by Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi fifty years later. Jenson is an organic design, with a low x-height. It is considered a highly readable typeface and is accordingly often used in book design for body text.

Development

Adobe Jenson was first released in 1996 as a multiple master font. It was created using sophisticated interpolation or multiple-master technology, to create a range of weights and optical sizes suitable for different text sizes. This partial automation of font creation was intended to allow a gradual trend in styles from solid, chunky designs for caption-size small print to more graceful and slender designs for headings. It is now sold in the standard OpenType font format under the name Adobe Jenson Pro. Jenson's type used an 'M' with two-way top serifs and a 'Q' with a curled tail, both now not commonly seen; the default characters are more contemporary forms but both were included as alternate characters.

Adobe Jenson Pro

Adobe Jenson Pro is an OpenType update of the original family. The font family supports Adobe CE, ISO-Adobe (later Adobe Western 2), dingbat character sets. The family comes with 4 weights each in roman and italic, and 4 optical sizes. Supported OpenType features include Stylistic alternates, ligatures, proportional numbers, old style figures, small caps, subscripts and superscripts, ordinals, and swashes (italic fonts only).

Related typefaces

Many other typefaces have been cut based on the work of Jenson. William Morris's Golden Type created the trend in the 1890s; his design is known for its emboldening of Jenson's original design, giving it something of the feel of

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter or black-letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for ...

. It is named for '' The Golden Legend'', which was intended to be the first book printed using it. Popular since the 1930s, Bruce Rogers'

Centaur A centaur ( ; ; ), occasionally hippocentaur, also called Ixionidae (), is a creature from Greek mythology with the upper body of a human and the lower body and legs of a horse that was said to live in the mountains of Thessaly. In one version o ...

is a much more slender revival in the same style.

American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typogr ...

' Cloister Old Style was created by its design team led by Morris Fuller Benton around 1915, during the same period as Centaur. Ludlow created another release with italic under the direction of Ernst F. Detterer and Robert Hunter Middleton in the 1920s.

also issued a very eccentric Jenson revival inspired by the work of Morris which is little-known today. Tobias Frere-Jones created a revival in 1994 named Hightower Text that is bundled with some Microsoft software, adding his own italic design.

References

{{notelist *''Adobe Jenson Specimen Book''. Adobe Systems Incorporated, 1996.

External links

Jenson ProAdobe Jenson Pro Opticals
Old style serif typefaces Typefaces with optical sizes Adobe typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1996 Typefaces designed by Robert Slimbach