Arno, or Arno Pro, 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 ( ...

type family created by Robert Slimbach at Adobe intended for professional use. The name refers to the

river A river is a natural stream of fresh water that flows on land or inside Subterranean river, caves towards another body of water at a lower elevation, such as an ocean, lake, or another river. A river may run dry before reaching the end of ...

that runs through

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

, a centre of the Italian

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

. Arno is an old-style serif font, drawing inspiration from a variety of 15th and 16th century typefaces. Slimbach has described the design as a combination of the period's Aldine and Venetian styles, with

italics In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography. Owing to the influence f ...

inspired by the calligraphy and printing of Ludovico degli Arrighi. Arno was released in five optical sizes: separate fonts for different text sizes from captions to headings. In addition, Arno contains

alternate Alternative or alternate may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Alternative (''Kamen Rider''), a character in the Japanese TV series ''Kamen Rider Ryuki'' * Alternative comics, or independent comics are an alternative to mainstream superh ...

letter styles such as swash italics inspired by Renaissance calligraphy. Other supported OpenType features include proportional and tabular numbers, old style figures, subscripts and superscripts, and ordinals. Arno includes

small caps In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are grapheme, characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. Small caps are used i ...

, as well as

dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or a ...

and fleuron characters inspired by early printing. Arno supports the

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

alphabet, mono- and polytonic Greek, as well as Latin diacritics, including the Unicode Latin Extended character set. __TOC__

Availability

Part of the Adobe Originals programme, Arno is included with Adobe Creative Suite 3, Adobe Font Folio 11 and Adobe Typekit.

Inspiration

The font family is a multi-purpose type suitable for book design, inspired by the calligraphically-inspired humanistic types of the Italian Renaissance. Slimbach described his goal as giving it "a tangible style" to be "as readable as possible".

Reception

Arno has received positive reviews. Reviewing the font for ''Typographica'', designer Mark Simonson described it as "nicely sturdy" for body text and highlighted the sophistication of its italic alternate programming, noting that when enabled Arno "almost becomes a different typeface". Font expert Stephen Coles compared it to Requiem. Designer and calligrapher Paul Shaw suggested that its design represents a different, more "lively" approach to the neutral-looking Minion, and "yet not as loose and carefree as Brioso." In 2011, the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all ...

began using Arno Pro for the body text of several of its journals, including the flagship ''Journal of the American Chemical Society'' after decades of using Times Roman.

Optical sizes

A light weight is included only in the display style. Slimbach commented that he felt that using light styles at text sizes would be a mistake because they would be hard to read.

Awards

It was a winning entry in the Type Directors Club 2007 Type Design Competition (TDC²), under the ''Type System / Superfamily'' category. Document design expert Matthew Butterick used Arno in the print edition of his book ''Typography for Lawyers''.

References

{{reflist

External links

Contemporary discussion on typophile
Old style serif typefaces Adobe typefaces Typefaces with text figures Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2007 Typefaces with optical sizes Typefaces designed by Robert Slimbach