29 Facts About 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's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by his punchcutter Francesco Griffo in 1495, and are in what is called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen, but with a slightly more structured, upright design.

Some distinctive characteristics in Garamond's letterforms are an 'e' with a small eye and the bowl of the 'a' which has a sharp turn at top left.

Garamond types have quite expansive ascenders and descenders; printers at the time did not use leading.

Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal type.

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Garamond cut types in the 'roman', or upright style, in italic, and Greek.

Roman designs of Garamond which are his most imitated were based on a font cut around 1495 for the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by engraver Francesco Griffo.

Period from 1520 to around 1560, encompassing Garamond's career, was an extremely busy period for typeface creation.

Garamond worked for a variety of employers on commission, creating punches and selling matrices to publishers and the government.

Garamond's typefaces were popular abroad, and replaced Griffo's original roman type at the Aldine Press in Venice.

Vervliet concludes that Garamond created thirty-four typefaces for which an attribution can be confidently made and another three for which the attribution is problematic (one each of roman, Greek and Hebrew).

Garamond cut more roman types than italics, which at the time were conceived separately to roman types rather than designed alongside them as complementary matches.

Garamond's italics were apparently not as used as widely as Granjon's and Haultin's, which spread widely across Europe.

Garamond died in 1561 and his punches and matrices were sold off by his widow.

Garamond's name was used outside France as a name for 10pt type, often in Dutch as 'Garmond'.

An engraver with a long and wide-ranging career, Granjon's work seems to have ranged much more widely than Garamond's focus on roman and Greek type, cutting type in italic, civilite, and for the Vatican type in exotic alphabets including Arabic, Armenian and Hebrew.

Garamond's career took in stops in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and finally for the last twelve years of his life Rome, where he ended his career in the service of the Vatican.

Jannon cut far more types than those surviving in the Imprimerie collection: before the misattribution to Garamond, he was particularly respected for his engraving of an extremely small size of type, known for his workplace as sedanoise, which was popular.

Garamond's reputation remained respected, even by members of the Didot family whose type designs came to dominate French printing.

Garamond discussed his concerns with ATF junior librarian Beatrice Warde, who would later move to Europe and become a prominent writer on printing advising the British branch of Monotype.

Slimbach started planning for a second interpretation of Garamond after visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in 1988, during the production of Adobe Garamond.

Garamond concluded that a digital revival of Garamond's work would not be definitive unless it offered optical sizes, with different fonts designed for different sizes of text.

Garamond Premier has 4 optical sizes and at least 4 weights (Regular, Medium, Semibold, and Bold, with an additional Light weight for Display), each with its respective italic, totalling 34 styles in the OpenType font format.

Stempel Garamond has relatively short descenders, allowing it to be particularly tightly linespaced.

Sabon is a Garamond revival designed by Jan Tschichold in 1964, jointly released by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel in 1967.

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EB Garamond, released by Georg Duffner in 2011 under the Open Font License, is a free software implementation of Garamond.

ITC Garamond was created by Tony Stan in 1975, and follows ITC's house style of unusually high x-height.

An open-source adaptation of Garamond intended for display sizes, designed by Christian Thalmann and co-released with Google Fonts.

Monotype Garamond compared to the more geometric transitional serif and Didone type that replaced old-styles during the eighteenth century.