Search the Community

It is with profound sadness that Adobe shares the passing of the company’s beloved co-founder Dr. John Warnock. Dr. Warnock passed away on Saturday surrounded by his family.

Over 100 fonts were made available including a new website interface to see the design space of the variable fonts.

Scalable outline fonts as we use them today became widely available with the introduction of PostScript and PostScript-enabled printers in the middle of the 1980s. But the high-quality output was only created on the printer itself. Screens and printers without PostScript support continued to use bitmap fonts. Mac OS didn’t gain native support for scalable fonts until the introduction of TrueType in Mac OS 7 in 1991. In order to render PostScript fonts from the actual outline on screen or to print them on printers without PostScript support, Adobe released the Adobe Type Manager product.

Adobe announced key updates to Dimension, its 3D rendering and design tool, including customizable 3D text.

“Access your own fonts across Adobe apps and other desktop applications (such as Microsoft Office) by uploading them to the Creative Cloud desktop app. You can then use these fonts in your creative designs and projects.”

“For the first time, all fonts included with Creative Cloud can be used on mobile on iOS13.1 or later.”

This study is a fascinating inside look at digital type design, the rather mysterious career of one of its most important practitioners, and the history and culture of Adobe Type, with additional insight into other type designers of the digital era. It is difficult to imagine a graphic designer in the last quarter century who is not familiar with at least some of Carol Twomblys typefaces. Yet many of those who use her fonts today would be hard pressed to name their designer. Twombly studied at the Rhode Island School of Design under professor Charles Bigelow, and she also studied at the Bigelow & Holmes studio. She joined Adobe Systems in 1988, when the company was hiring young designers for the newly launched type department. During her ten years at Adobe, she designed some of the most recognizable and popular typefaces on the market today, including Trajan (1989), Charlemagne (1989), Lithos (1989), Adobe Caslon (1990), Myriad (1991, with Robert Slimbach), Viva (1993), Nueva (1994), and Chaparral (1997). In 1994, Twombly won the Prix Charles Peignot, given by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI)the first woman, and second American, to receive the award. Having achieved international recognition, Twombly was uncomfortable being in the public eye at conferences and in Adobe marketing materials. She also grew dissatisfied with changes at Adobe and with her evolving role at the company. In 1999 she left both Adobe and her career to pursue other artistic interests. Nancy Stock-Allen is a graphic designer and a blogger on subjects related to design, type, and women in design history. She was formerly Professor of Graphic Design and department chair at the Moore College of Art and Design. She interviewed and corresponded extensively with Carol Twombly and many of her associates and colleagues in writing this profile of a woman who rose to the top of a field historically dominated by men, at a time of barrier-breaking and technological revolution. Illustrated throughout with halftones, examples of Twomblys design process, and type specimens, this book will be of great interest to anyone involved or interested in type design, typography, and computer-aided graphic design. Available from Oak Knoll Press