Body-text fonts, pt. 17: Robert Slimbach’s fonts: Adobe Garamond, Minion, and, especially, ITC Slimbach
We live during Robert Slimbach’s benevolent reign, or Adobe’s. It’s stale. Good as Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond and Minion have been, it’s tedious to see them still used so often.
Slimbach has created other fine typefaces for Adobe – Adobe Ten Oldstyle, Adobe Text (see Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government), etc. – but, for whatever reason, book designers haven’t warmed to them. Arno and Warnock are good, too, but only on certain days of the week.
What I really like by Slimbach is his early, Zapf-inspired eponymous font for ITC. I first noticed it in NIV Study Bibles from the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s also in Bruce Cumings’s history, Korea’s Place in the Sun, and in the anthology Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century; lately, it’s been shared all over the Internet in the body text of Ross McCammon’s book, Works Well with Others: An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You.
(I seldom read self-help books. But I read all of this one. It’s painless, and it gives tips about how and when to write curt emails and use curse words and drink after the job and on the job, and how to tell your dining partner you’re not going to drink if you aren’t going to. And how to pronounce the names of alcoholic drinks from Scotland. It’s a very pro-drink book. The author’s dissimulations to the contrary, it’s the douchiest self-help book I’ve read. [I know, there are much worse ones.] After I finished the book, I looked up some of McCammon’s Esquire articles, and wow, that was like landing on a different planet. I shut the computer and fled the room. … By the way, I learned from At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig [Adobe Garamond] that the country that imports by far the most Scotch, or that used to, is tariff-free Paraguay; the booze is then smuggled into Argentina and Brazil.)
As for Minion itself, I like it – but not tiny, and not in lines of interminable length, which is how Oxford University Press uses it.
Wanna see Minion used well? Look at a Vintage paperback of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Slimbach has created other fine typefaces for Adobe – Adobe Ten Oldstyle, Adobe Text (see Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government), etc. – but, for whatever reason, book designers haven’t warmed to them. Arno and Warnock are good, too, but only on certain days of the week.
What I really like by Slimbach is his early, Zapf-inspired eponymous font for ITC. I first noticed it in NIV Study Bibles from the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s also in Bruce Cumings’s history, Korea’s Place in the Sun, and in the anthology Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century; lately, it’s been shared all over the Internet in the body text of Ross McCammon’s book, Works Well with Others: An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You.
(I seldom read self-help books. But I read all of this one. It’s painless, and it gives tips about how and when to write curt emails and use curse words and drink after the job and on the job, and how to tell your dining partner you’re not going to drink if you aren’t going to. And how to pronounce the names of alcoholic drinks from Scotland. It’s a very pro-drink book. The author’s dissimulations to the contrary, it’s the douchiest self-help book I’ve read. [I know, there are much worse ones.] After I finished the book, I looked up some of McCammon’s Esquire articles, and wow, that was like landing on a different planet. I shut the computer and fled the room. … By the way, I learned from At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig [Adobe Garamond] that the country that imports by far the most Scotch, or that used to, is tariff-free Paraguay; the booze is then smuggled into Argentina and Brazil.)
As for Minion itself, I like it – but not tiny, and not in lines of interminable length, which is how Oxford University Press uses it.
Wanna see Minion used well? Look at a Vintage paperback of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.