Trebuchet MS

Trebuchet MS

Category	Sans-serif
Classification	Humanist sans-serif
Designer(s)	Vincent Connare
Foundry	Microsoft Corporation
Date released	1996

Examples of distinguishing characteristics

Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare for the Microsoft Corporation in 1996. It is named after the trebuchet, a medieval siege engine. The name was inspired by a puzzle question that Connare heard at Microsoft headquarters: "Can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically, is it possible and how?" Connare "thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the Internet".^[1]

Distinguishing characteristics

Trebuchet MS distinguishes itself from other common sans-serif typefaces through several characteristics, the most notable of which include:

The splayed edges of the uppercase "M" which form a 10° angle with a vertical line, reminiscent of a tighter version of Futura.
The shape of the tail of the uppercase "Q",
The bar of the capital "A" is low,
The shortened tails of the lowercase "e" and the numerals "6" and "9",
The hybrid open and looped tail of the lowercase "g",
The rounded dots above and the shapes of the lowercase "i" and "j",
The curved tail beneath the lowercase "l",
Like Calibri, The dollar sign symbol "$", in which the vertical strike only appears above the top and below the bottom curves of the S,
The ampersand "&" in the form of an "Et" ligature and
The exclamation point "!", whose dot is large and round.
Italic fonts incorporate italic type characteristics instead of just tilting roman glyphs, making it the first sans serif font family from Microsoft to use true italic features.
The en dash and hyphen are essentially indistinguishable^[2]
The greek letter xi "Ξ" has a vertical crossbar, reminiscent of its Phoenician root glyph samekh

Connare commented in 2011 that, "inspiration came from many sources such as the motorway sign-age in America and san serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk and Alternate Gothic."^[3] Type designer Erik Spiekermann and others have described it as an 'imitation' of his FF Meta, which was extremely successful in the period.^[4]

Availability

Microsoft refers to Trebuchet MS as "a good web design font", being one of their "Core fonts for the Web". Trebuchet MS is included with several products, including the Windows operating system, components of the Office productivity suite, and Internet Explorer.

In some versions of the font (those shipped with Windows 2000 and early versions of Internet Explorer), the opening quotation mark character was flipped vertically like so, ‟. This error was fixed in later versions.^[5]

Trebuchet MS has been released with the Microsoft Windows operating system since Microsoft Windows 2000. The typeface has been released with Internet Explorer since version 4.0 and Microsoft Word since Word 2000. It is also included with Mac OS X, iOS and Chrome OS.

The Trebuchet 2010 font family was introduced by Ascender Corp in July 2010 as part of the Ascender 2010 Font Pack. In addition to extensive OpenType typographic feature support, the family was extended with new black and black italic fonts. The new weights and OpenType features were developed by Ascender’s Steve Matteson and Terrance Weinzierl.^[6]