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Adobe Serif Mm Font: Examples and Inspiration for Your Next Design



Sharp Sans is designed to look great in any context. Beneath the sleek and minimalist forms of our flagship geometric sans-serif, is a magnitude of fastidious design considerations. Sharp Sans is understated in its perfectionism, and warm in its neutrality. Designed for ultimate utility, Sharp Sans is our use-it-for-everything font.7 weights, 14 total fonts.


The Sharp Sans series is divided into three parts, Sharp Sans, Sharp Sans Display No.1, and Sharp Sans Display No.2. While most superfamilies are organized by a single differentiating principal between optical size (text, display, etc.), or style (serif, sans, slab, etc.), each family in the Sharp Sans series contain elements of both. There is a stylistic differentiation between the two display cuts of the family, Sharp Sans Display No.1 & Sharp Sans Display No.2, and an optical size differentiation between the display cuts and the latest edition, called Sharp Sans.Although the new naming convention of the Sharp Sans series would suggest a hierarchy of optical size (Sharp Sans and Sharp Sans Display No.1 & 2), their relationship is more complex than the traditional text and display relationship. Sharp Sans is not a text face; it is a one-size-fits-all use-it-for-everything face. While the original Display versions complement the new Sharp Sans beautifully when used in tandem, the choice to use one or the other at an appropriately large point size is a stylistic decision, as well as a practical one. Sharp Sans Display is edgy and provocative, while the new Sharp Sans finds grace and utility in its perfectionism.




Adobe Serif Mm Font




Fonts are classified into different types, such as serifs (fonts with decorative elements named serifs) and sans serifs (fonts without serifs). In the illustration, the first letter in blue is in a serif font, Bodoni. Here one of the four serifs is marked in red. The other letter in yellow is in a sans-serif font, Futura.


Other classifications divide fonts based on their historic origins: the old style or old face includes the oldest fonts; transitional types are the ones that historically followed the oldest ones; modern types are fonts that were designed after the transitional types and until about the 1820s; and modern types or modernized old-style types include modern fonts that imitate the true old style but are designed in the modern times. There are also other groups in this classification. Each group of fonts differs in several design elements such as in their thickness, contrast between thick and thin lines, and the shape of the serifs. Other classifications also exist.


Typography is concerned with manipulating size and font types to make pages with a pleasing and easy-to-read appearance. There are several conventions for specifying the size of letters. For some of these conventions, the same size of letters in two different fonts may not mean that they have the same linear dimensions, as described below. Despite these inconsistencies, size does help designers to know how much space a given text takes up on a page, and as such is a useful measure in desktop publishing.


While the units outlined above mainly denote the height of each letter, em and en are two typographic units that measure the width of letters. Em equals the size of the character in points, while en is half of an em. Historically, the size of em was defined as the width of the capital letter M. This is not an accurate definition anymore, because M is different for the numerous fonts that are in use today.


Another problem is that the letters of the same point size but from different fonts appear to have different sizes. This is because the size expressed in points corresponds to the body size, not to the size of the body of the letter, which is the x-height on the illustration above. This makes it difficult for the designer to keep consistency throughout the document. For example, in the illustration, all three words are written with the same size in points, yet their x-height is very different because different fonts are used for them. Some designers propose to use the x-height as the font size and to stop using the body size to address this issue.


Choosing typefaces for use on the web today is a practice of specifying static fonts with fixed designs. But what if the design of a typeface could be as flexible and responsive as the layout it exists within?


Beyond increased granularity for font-weight values, imagine the other stylistic values that could be harnessed with variable fonts by tying them to numeric values. Digital typographers could fine-tune typeface specifics such as x-height, descender length, or optical size, and even tie those values to media queries as desired to improve readability or layout.


And while such a thing would help improve typographic control, it could also improve a lot of technicalities related to serving fonts on the web. Currently, accessing variations of a typeface requires loading multiple files. With a variable font format, a set of masters could be packaged in a single file, allowing not only for more efficient files, but also for a vast increase in design flexibility.


**This table presumes 120 kB per master for both static and variable fonts. In actual implementation, the savings for variable fonts compared with static fonts would likely be even greater due to reduction in repeated/redundant data and increased efficiency in compression.


The most efficient variable fonts will be those that were designed from scratch with streamlined interpolation in mind. As David Jonathan Ross explained, some styles are better suited for interpolation than others.


It supports multiple variation axes, including weight, width, slant, and optical size. Glyphs are interpolated along these axes, allowing a fine degree of control. It even supports non-linear interpolation via the avar table. It also supports named variation instances, which allow the font designer to specify specific designs, for example, multiple weights that would normally be separate font files. Additionally, glyph hints can be adjusted to account for variations.


Be fond of variable fonts, most equipment that tells a website of the guest backgrounds is still in its immaturity. But latest HTML5 APIs and forthcoming CSS media inquiries make look tracking to verify viewing distance and responding to surrounding light a realism soon.


This is the seventh in a series of articles from Tamye Riggs, a longtime lover of type who is working with us to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Adobe Originals type design program. This post explores multiple master fonts and OpenType, and how the Adobe Type team continued to innovate in type design and font technology.


Inspired by the possibilities of the new font format, the Adobe Type team set to work developing MM fonts. Over the next six years, the majority of multi-font families by Twombly and Slimbach would be developed as multiple masters, including Caflisch Script, Adobe Jenson, and Warnock (Slimbach), and Chaparral, Nueva, and Viva (Twombly). A number of outside designers were also recruited to develop MM fonts: the late Michael Harvey (Mezz and Conga Brava), Lance Hidy (Penumbra), Richard Lipton (Bickham Script), Jim Parkinson (Jimbo), and Julian Waters (Waters Titling), among others.


Although the technology was exciting, multiple master fonts were daunting for end users to work with. Application developers were slow to show real support of multiple masters, and in software that could use MM fonts, working with the format was invariably a painful process. Users were forced to generate instances for each variation of a font they wanted to try, resulting in a hard drive littered with font files bearing such arcane names as MinioMM_578 BD 465 CN 11 OP. Rather than deal with such cumbersome logistics, users would often stick with the pre-generated instances that shipped with MM fonts, missing out on all that glorious technology.


In the mid-1990s, while the type team was still working to promote multiple master fonts to the masses, another font technology with far-reaching potential was peeking over the horizon. Font War alliances shifted when Adobe and Microsoft mended fences and announced their joint OpenType initiative in 1996.


The migration to OpenType was the kiss of death for multiple master fonts. The last Adobe Original MM font family was Reliq, designed by Carl Crossgrove and released in 1998. The OpenType revolution had begun in earnest. But would this new format succeed where multiple master technology had failed?


While earlier font interpolation technologies emerged from the font format wars of the early 1990s, and were developed and championed by individual, competing software companies, OpenType variable fonts are the product of a new collegiality aimed not only at defining a common standard but also interoperable implementations.


We need fonts. Type designers need to make and offer variable fonts. To encourage this, our multi-company working group sweated every detail of the new OpenType specification, and built tools to help convert existing type families into variable font files. Our own David Lemon demonstrated this conversion as part of the variable fonts announcement at ATypI, and representatives from all four companies are at ATypI this week to talk with type designers.


We need rendering engines that can show the fonts. For fonts to actually show up anywhere, software behind the scenes called a rendering engine has to make typesetting and rasterization calculations. Rendering engines are incredibly complex. They also take a long time to develop and test. But people who work on rendering engines are in this working group, and collaborating. This is very promising.


CSS already supports weight and width declarations, which will be the two most common variation axes (as we know from previous generations of MM and GX fonts doing the same things). More needs to be done, but we saw a demo of using CSS weight and width to get at font variations in shipping Chrome and Edge browsers on the latest Windows 10, today. I *think* that was shipping browser versions, but even if not, the CSS part used existing CSS. 2ff7e9595c


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