Sabon - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Sabon is the name of an old style serif

Serif

In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface . A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”...

typeface designed by the German-born typographer and designer Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.-Life:Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy...

(1902–1974) in the period 1964–1967. The typeface was released jointly by the Linotype, Monotype

Monotype Corporation

Monotype Imaging Holdings is a Delaware corporation based in Woburn, Massachusetts and specializing in typesetting and typeface design as well as text and imaging solutions for use with consumer electronics devices. Monotype Imaging Holdings is the owner of Monotype Imaging Inc., Linotype,...

, and Stempel

Stempel

Stempel is the name of the following people:* Herbert Stempel, a television game show contestant* Robert Stempel, a Manager and Chairman- See also :Stempel may also refer to:* D Stempel AG type foundry* Stempel Garamond typeface...

type foundries in 1967.

Design of the roman is based on types by Claude Garamond

Claude Garamond

Claude Garamond was a French publisher from Paris. He was one of the leading type designers of his time, and is credited with the introduction of the apostrophe, the accent and the cedilla to the French language. Several contemporary typefaces, including those currently known as Garamond, Granjon,...

(c.1480–1561), particularly a specimen printed by the Frankfurt printer Konrad Berner. Berner had married the widow of a fellow printer Jacques Sabon

Jacques Sabon

Jacques Sabon was a French typefounder. He worked with Christian Egenolff in Frankfurt in 1555 and Christophe Plantin of Antwerp in 1565. He is associated with the forms of roman type which were being developed by Claude Garamond and others...

, the source of the face's name. The italics are based on types designed by a contemporary of Garamond's, Robert Grandjon. The typeface is frequently described as a Garamond revival.

A distinguishing feature of the typeface was that the roman, italic and bold weights all occupy the same width when typeset – an unusual feature, but this meant that the typeface then only required one set of copyfitting data (rather than three) when compositors had to estimate the length of a text prior to actual typesetting (a common practice before computer-assisted typesetting).

Distinctive Visual Identifiable Characteristics

Characteristics of this typeface are:

lower case:
square dot over the letter i.
double storey a.

upper case:
the capital Q's tail is centered under the figure, the uppercase J has a slight hook, and there are two versions of uppercase R, one with a straight tail and one with a curved tail.

figures:

Uses

An early first use of Sabon was the setting of the Washburn College

Washburn University

Washburn University is a co-educational, public institution of higher learning in Topeka, Kansas, USA. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as professional programs in law and business. Washburn has 550 faculty members, who teach more than 6,400 undergraduate students and...

Bible in 1973 by the American graphic designer Bradbury Thompson

Bradbury Thompson

Bradbury Thompson was an influential American graphic designer and art director of the twentieth century.-Life and work:Communication Arts said of Bradbury "When it came to the blending of photography, typography and color, nobody did it better than Bradbury Thompson.....

. All books of the King James biblical text were set by hand in a process called thought-unit typography, where Thompson broke the lines at their spoken syntactical breaks.

Sabon was also used as the typeface in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (United States), as well as all of that church's secondary liturgical texts (such as the Book of Occasional Services and Lesser Feasts and Fasts).

Sabon is used as the official logo typeface of Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

Sabon Next

Jean-François Porchez

Jean François Porchez is a French type designer. He was president of ATypI , the leading organisation of type designers from 2004 to 2007. He is probably best-known for releasing the new typefaces for Le Monde, the French evening newspaper in 1994...

designed the revival of Sabon known as Sabon Next. Sabon Next is based upon Tschichold's 1967 Sabon design for the Stempel foundry and Porchez' study of original Garamond models. The family consists of 6 weights, without Greek and Cyrillic support. It supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, Latin Extended characters.

OpenType features include Small caps (except in Black weight), Ligatures, Special ligatures, Alternates, Caps figures, Oldstyle figures, Tabular figures, Fractions, Superiors, Ornaments, Swash, Proportional Lining figures.

Sabon Next Ornaments

It is a collection of printers' ornaments and dingbat

Dingbat

A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character"....

s. The glyphs can also be found in the OpenType Sabon Next (except in Black weights) fonts.

Sabon Infant

This version of the typeface has single-story versions of the letters a and g, and is used in children's books but is very rare.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.