Robert Slimbach

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Robert Slimbach (* 1956 in Evanston, Illinois ) is an American type designer and head of type development at Adobe Inc. His work has received numerous awards.

Slimbach grew up in Southern California . After graduating from college , which he attended with a sports scholarship as an artistic gymnast , he first ran a small screen printing company for posters and greeting cards and developed an interest in graphic design and typography . From 1983 to 1985 he worked for Autologic Inc. in Newbury Park, California, as a type designer and deepened his knowledge of calligraphy and type design. During this time he got to know Sumner Stone (* 1945), who later became the typographical director at Adobe, who brought Slimbach to Adobe. From 1985 to 1987 Slimbach worked as a freelance type designer and designed the ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni typefaces for the International Typeface Corporation in New York . He has been with Adobe Systems since 1987 and has designed a number of very successful fonts for the Adobe Originals program. One focus of Slimbach's work is on text fonts with a classic look, often based on traditional metal type fonts .

As head of font development at Adobe, Slimbach advocated the multilingualism of fonts and the use of different optical sizes and context-dependent glyphs in OpenType fonts. Since the turn of the millennium, Slimbach's hand has appeared at greater intervals because he is increasingly devoting himself to the further development of his older fonts for the much more complex OpenType format. While a Type 1 font typically consists of around 200 to 500 glyphs, an OpenType font has 1500 to 3000 glyphs. For example, Adobe Garamond Pro (OpenType) emerged from Adobe Garamond (Type 1), to which the even more sophisticated Garamond Premier Pro was added in 2004.

In 1991 Slimbach was awarded the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot of the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), which is awarded at irregular intervals to type designers under the age of 35 who have made an extraordinary contribution to type design. Several of his writings won the Type Directors Club's annual TDC 2 competition .

In addition to his work as a type designer, Slimbach has also emerged as a photo artist, especially with black and white portraits.

Font designs by Slimbach

  • OpenType fonts (revised and new fonts)
    • Arno Pro (2007) - TDC 2 winner 2007
    • Brioso Pro - TDC 2 winner 2002
    • Caflisch Script Pro (with numerous new glyphs) - awarded in the bukva: raz! Competition of ATypI 2001
    • Cronos Pro
    • Garamond Premier Pro (2004) - TDC 2 winner 2006
    • Adobe Garamond Pro
    • Adobe Jenson Pro
    • Kepler standard
    • Minion Pro (extended to include Greek character set) - awarded in the bukva: raz! Competition of ATypI 2001
    • Minion 3 (extended to include Armenian and IPA character sets)
    • Myriad Pro (with Greek and Cyrillic character sets, together with Carol Twombly, Fred Brady and Christopher Slye) - TDC 2 winner 2000, awarded in the bukva: raz! Competition at ATypI 2001
    • Poetica standard
    • Sanvito standard
    • Utopia Standard (in various optical sizes)
    • Warnock Pro - TDC 2 winner 2001

Furthermore Slimbach designed the not commercially available new Adobe typeface Adobe Clean .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Presentation in the Adobe company blog
  2. ^ Official site of Arno Pro at Adobe.com
  3. ↑ Official Site of Brioso Pro at Adobe.com
  4. ^ Official site of Garamond Premier Pro at Adobe.com
  5. ↑ A new face for Adobe , published in the company blog on May 5, 2009.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Slimbach, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American type designer
DATE OF BIRTH 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Evanston, Illinois