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Typeface History

The first Garamond typeface was made by the Parisian printer Claude Garamond during the Renaissance in the first part of the sixteenth century.  Garamond died in 1561, after which his type punches were sent to the printing office of Christoph Plantin in Antwerp.  There the punches were used by Plantin for many decades.  They still exist in the Plantin-Moretus museum today.  However, the history of the Garamond typeface is not so simple.  Sixty years after Garamond’s death, the French printer Jean Jannon issued a set of typefaces that shared very similar characteristics to Garamond’s designs.  Jannon’s typefaces were lost for about two hundred years until they were rediscovered by the French national printing office in 1825.  The typefaces were wrongly attributed to Claude Garamond until 1927.  Many of the modern revivals of the “Garamond” typefaces are based on the wrongly attributed Jannon types. The Garamond typeface is a serif typeface that is very humanist, meant to mimic natural handwriting.  The letterforms have a sense of fluidity and consistency.

Serifa is a typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1966 for the Bauer foundry.  Its design is loosely based on his earlier typeface, Univers, as well as older slab serif designs. The design differs primarily with the addition of unbracketed serifs.  This typeface can be categorized as an Egyptian or slab serif font.  This type of font is typically difficult to read in blocks of text, however serifa contains enough humanist elements to make it more easily legible as text. Serifa uses the same two number identification system that Frutiger designed for Univers.

Platelet was designed by Conor Mangat to resemble the letters on a California license plate.  The restrictions for placing type on a license plate are similar to those of the typewriter.  The type must be monospaced not only in order for the plate’s manufacture, but also to fulfil the need of fitting a fixed number of characters onto each plate while maintaining legibility at a distance.  The platelet font meets these challenges in its own way.  For example, the central lines of the “M” and “W” are shortened to make the letters less dense.  The letters “I” and “L” fill their standard width by using a large curved lead-out, rather than a more traditional large slab serif.