Robert Slimbach

Robert Slimbach
Born 1956 (age 58–59)
Occupation Principal Designer, Adobe Systems

Robert Slimbach is a type designer, who has worked at Adobe Systems since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Charles Peignot Award from the Association Typographique Internationale, and repeated TDC2 awards from the Type Directors Club.

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 leaving college 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, where Sumner Stone also worked for a short time. There he received further training, not just as a type designer but also as a calligrapher. Slimbach was then self-employed for two years and developed the two typefaces ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni for the International Typeface Corporation in New York.

In 1987 he joined Adobe Systems. Since then, he has concentrated primarily on designing typefaces for digital technology, drawing inspiration from classical sources. He has developed many new fonts for the Adobe Originals program. His time at Adobe Systems in California has seen the production of, among others, the Utopia (1988), Adobe Garamond (1989), Minion (1990) and Poetica (1992) font families. In 1991, he received the Charles Peignot Award from the Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design. More recently, Slimbach's own roman script calligraphy formed the basis for his typeface Brioso.

Since 2000, the rate of Slimbach's new typefaces has slowed, as he has taken advantage of the new linguistic and typographic capabilities offered by the OpenType format. Where in the 1990s a given typeface design might be instantiated in one or two fonts, with 200-500 glyphs, a typical new Slimbach work post-2000 has 1500-3000 glyphs.

In 2004, Adobe released Garamond Premier 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.

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 has designed the following fonts for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC):

Slimbach has created many notable typefaces for Adobe, such as Minion, Adobe Garamond, and Myriad. In addition to the fonts listed below, Slimbach has also designed Adobe Clean, which has become Adobe's corporate font.[1]

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).

Typeface families designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems[2]
Name First released OT re-release
(for Type 1 fonts)		 Supported scripts Weights Optical sizes for OT release Widths Notes
Arno 2007 (OT Pro) N/A Latin, Cyrillic, Greek Light (only at Display size),
Regular, Bold, Semibold 		Yes Normal
Brioso 2003 (OT Pro) N/A Latin Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold Yes Normal
Caflisch Script ? 2001 (OT Pro) Latin Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold No Normal
Cronos 1996 (Type 1) 2002 (OT Pro) Latin Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold Yes Normal
Adobe Garamond 1989 (Type 1) 2001 (OT Pro) Latin Regular, Semibold, Bold No Normal
Garamond Premier 2005 (OT Pro) N/A Latin, Cyrillic, Greek Light (only at Display size),
Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold 		Yes Normal
Adobe Jenson 1996 (Type 1) 2000 (OT Pro) Latin Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold Yes Normal
Kepler ? (Type 1) 2003 (OT Std) Latin Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Black Yes Condensed,
Semicondensed,
Normal, Extended
Minion 1990 (Latin), 1992 (Cyrillic)
(Type 1) 		2000 (OT Pro);
2002 (OT Std) 		Latin (1990); Cyrillic (1992) (Type 1);
Latin, Cyrillic, Greek (2000 OT Pro);
(2002 OT Std) 		Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold (2000);
Black (2002, no Italic variant) 		Yes (2000 release) Normal, Condensed
(2000 release)
Myriad
(with Carol Twombly) 		1992 (Type 1) 2000 (OT Pro);
2011 (OT) 		Latin (Type 1);
Latin, Cyrillic, Greek (2000 OT Pro);
Arabic, Hebrew (2011 OT) 		Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, Black No Condensed,
Semicondensed,
Normal, Extended
(2000 release)
Poetica 1992 (Type 1) 2003 (OT Pro) Latin Regular No Normal
Sanvito 1993 (Type 1) 2002 (OT Pro) Latin Light, Regular Yes Normal
Adobe Text 2009 (OT Pro) N/A Latin, Cyrillic, Greek Regular, Semibold, Bold No Normal
Trajan 3
(with Carol Twombly) 		2011 (OT Pro) N/A Latin, Cyrillic, Greek Extralight, Light, Regular, Bold, Black No Normal
Trajan Sans
(with Carol Twombly) 		2011 (OT Pro) N/A Latin, Cyrillic, Greek Extralight, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, Black No Normal
Utopia 1989 (Type 1) 2002 (OT Std) Latin Regular, Semibold, Bold,
Black (only at Headline size; no italic style) 		Yes Normal
Warnock 2000 (OT Pro) N/A Latin, Cyrillic, Greek Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold Yes Normal

Awards

Notes

  1. ↑ "A new face for Adobe". (2009). Adobe Typekit blog.
  2. ↑ Adobe Type
  3. ↑ Main page for Arno Pro at Adobe.com
  4. ↑ Main page for Brioso Pro at Adobe.com
  5. ↑ Main page for Garamond Premier Pro at Adobe.com

External links