GRA 1206 Principles of Typography: Lesson 10  Typeface Design

The Many Faces of Carol Twombly
By Elio L. Arteaga

When Carol Twombly set out to create a new font for Adobe in 1991 based on William Caslon's 18th Century designs, she was in for a challenge. In Caslon's day, handset movable type was made by hand. Each character of a font was cut from the same metal punch at a single size. Naturally, variations crept into the font designs at different sizes. Larger fonts have greater contrast of stroke weight and more refined details than smaller sizes. Caslon even compensated for ink spread by making his smaller-sized fonts lighter in weight than the larger sizes.
Twombly incorporated designs from various sizes of Caslon to create an archetypal version called Adobe Caslon, now accepted as one of the best of the digital Caslons. With Adobe Caslon, as well as Lithos, Charlemagne, Trajan, and many other popular fonts under her belt, it's easy to see why many graphic design professionals consider Twombly as a significant contributor to the field of typography.

Carol Twombly was born in Bedford, Massachusetts in 1959. The youngest of five children, she spent summers with her family at their house on a lake in New Hampshire. She enjoyed skiing, camping, swimming, and playing tennis. An "A" student throughout school, she studied very hard, but looked forward every day to her favorite subject—art class.

She followed her architect brother to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she wanted to study sculpture. Once there, however, graphic design and typography sparked her interest: "I discovered that the communication of ideas by positioning black shapes on a white page offered a welcome balance between freedom and structure. Graphic design seemed a more practical choice for me."

Twombly's typography professor, Charles Bigelow, asked her to assist him in the production of typeface designs for a German digital type foundry. Working summers at the firm of Bigelow & Holmes, she began to understand the intricate processes involved in designing type. Bigelow's studio partner, Kris Holmes, taught Carol how to draw outline letters by hand, and to work with the Ikarus system, an early computer program for producing graphic images.

After graduating from RISD and working for a year in a Boston graphic design studio, Carol accepted an invitation from Bigelow to join a small group of students in a newly formed digital typography program at Stanford University in Palo Alto. The program, since discontinued, awarded Carol and her colleagues masters of science degrees combining the art of graphics with the science of computers.

Soon afterward, Twombly completed her first typeface, Mirarae. It is an upright italic, with a slant of only 3 degrees from vertical, and a large x-height. She entered it into the 1984 International Typeface Competition sponsored by Morisawa & Company, Ltd., of Japan. To her surprise and delight, she won first prize in the Latin text category, and Morisawa licensed and marketed her design.

Carol began working part-time at Adobe Systems in Silicon Valley. Eventually gaining a full-time position in 1988, she joined the Adobe Type Originals Team, along with Robert Slimbach and Fred Brady. It was at Adobe that she began working with the Macintosh computer, Adobe Illustrator and FontStudio software. She prefers the simple, elegant drawing interface of FontStudio to the more common Macromedia Fontographer. When the design is fairly along, she transfers it to a Sun workstation running Adobe's proprietary FontEditor software, where she fine-tunes the letter shapes and their spacing.

Twombly starts her designs with paper and pencil before working on the computer and often returns to her sketchbook to refine her designs: "Drawing with a pencil often helps because my hand can usually make pleasing curves intuitively, and then I can go back to the screen to recreate what my hand has realized on paper… The shapes drawn with the hand are more organic and unpredictable, and therefore more lively."

Carol has designed a number of popular typefaces for Adobe starting in 1989. Her best-selling font is Lithos, a monoline sans serif typeface based on 5th Century BC Greek inscriptions.

She drew the lightest, middle, and heaviest of the five weights and used the computer to interpolate the weights in between. She found Lithos Extra-Light to be the most challenging of the five weights. Because it was so thin, imperfections stuck out like a sore thumb. Horizontal strokes had to be made thinner than vertical strokes in order to appear balanced. Lithos Black, the heaviest weight, turned out more cartoonish by contrast. Carol wanted to make it as heavy as possible and still maintain the openness of the counterforms. She found the diagonal stroke terminals became the major focus of the design.

Charlemagne and Trajan are two other popular fonts based on ancient inscriptions.

Charlemagne is based on the capitals found in 10th Century Carolingian manuscripts, such as The Benedictional of St. Aethelwold.

Trajan is based on the classic letterforms of the inscription on the Column of Trajan, erected in 133 AD in Rome. Her fonts are so successful because they are exceptionally well researched. She always starts with original specimens and redraws all her letters by hand.

Adobe Caslon, described earlier, was equally well researched. Carol meticulously studied type proofs printed in 1738 by William Caslon himself. Her font mimics Caslon's letters quite well at text sizes, but she stipulates that her font should never be used above 14-point—it is not meant to be a display face. She recommends Matthew Carter's Big Caslon, with its high contrast and sharp serifs for larger sizes.



In 1992, Twombly, along with Slimbach, produced Myriad, the first multiple master typeface. Myriad reintroduces the fine variations that used to be present in various sizes of metal type. Multiple master font technology represents the Adobe Type Original Team's greatest technological challenge.

         
In all, Twombly has designed over 15 typefaces including Viva, Nueva, Chaparral, FB Californian, Pepperwood, Rosewood and Zebrawood. Each font takes six months to a year to develop. Historical revivals take longer because more time is spent in research.

In 1994, Carol Twombly received the prestigious Charles Peignot award from the Association Typographique Internationale for outstanding contributions to type design. She was the first woman and only the second American to receive this honor. About her life's work, she says, "It seems that certain shapes resonate with me, and I express them whether I'm doing type design or other things."

Bibliography
Cantor, Margery. "Carol Twombly: Type Design and Other Sports," Fine Print. Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn 1990.

Crewdson, Andy. Lines and Splines. http://www.linesandsplines.com/2000_10_01_archive.html

Haley, Allan. Hot Designers Make Cool Fonts. Rockport Publishers; Gloucester, Massachusetts; 1998.

Type Designers: Carol Twombly Sculpting Type Designs from Classic Forms. http://www.adobe.com/type/typedesign/twomblybio/main.html