In creating Sabon® Next, Jean François Porchez revived a revival. The original Sabon typeface, designed by Jan Tschichold was itself a contemporary revival of Claude Garamond’s 16th century types for the 1960s.
With Sabon, Tschichold not only created one of the best Garamond revivals to date, he also built what you might term on of the first “system fonts.” Commissioned by a German book printers’ guild, Sabon was intended for use on Linotype machines,
[...]Claude Garamond – born c. 1480 in Paris, France, died 1561 in Paris, France – type founder, publisher, punch cutter, type designer.
1510: trains as a punch cutter with Simon de Colines in Paris. 1520: trains with Geoffroy Tory. 1530: Garamond’s first type is used in an edition of the book "Paraphrasis in Elegantiarum Libros Laurentii Vallae" by Erasmus. It is based on Aldus Manutius’ type De Aetna, cut in 1455. 1540: King Francis I commissions Garamond to cut a Greek type. Garamond’s ensuing
[...]Jan Tschichold – born 2.4.1902 in Leipzig, Germany, died 11.8.1974 in Locarno, Switzerland – typographer, calligrapher, author, teacher.
1919–21: studies at the Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig. 1921–23: is one of Walter Tiemann’s master pupils and assistant to Hermann Delitsch.
1925: publication of Tschichold’s special issue of "Typographische Mitteilungen" magazine, entitled "elementare typographie". 1926–33: teaches typography and callygraphy at the
[...]Jan Tschichold in different phases of life
OpenType is a font format that was collaboratively developed by Adobe and Microsoft during the 1990s. The first specifications were published in 1997, and the first OpenType fonts came onto the market in 2000. Today, most new fonts are released in OpenType format, which can safely be considered the new industry standard.
The OpenType format supports Unicode™, which is why OpenType fonts can contain large character sets. In fact, an OpenType font can contain more than 65,000 glyphs! This is a
[...]Find further Font Features in our Font Feature Archive.
Typographic Tip of the Month from Linotype’s Type Director Akira Kobayashi!
October 2007: A few words on letter spacing
Optical Spacing Option in Adobe InDesign
In Adobe InDesign, there is an Optical Spacing option available for the spacing between individual glyph pairs, or kerning. The Optical Spacing selection overrides the metrics information stored in the font file itself, or specific values that one enters
[...]The OpenType font format is an enhancement to TrueType™ and PostScript® which was jointly developed by Adobe Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corporation. OpenType combines these two technologies and extends their capabilities. The result is a new generation of OpenType fonts with better typographic and layout features as well as the possibility for fully Unicode™ conform extended character sets.
Hint: For a listing of available OpenType Fonts type OPENTYPE in the QuickSearch
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Font Designer: Claude Garamond, 1499–1561
Opinion varies regarding the role of Claude Garamond (ca. 1480–1561) in the development of the range of contemporary typefaces that bear his name. What is accepted is the influence his work had on other typefaces from the late Renaissance to the present. Fonts named Garamond, or Garamont, are related to the alphabets of Claude Garamond as well as to the work of Jean Jannon (1580–1635 or 1658), much of which was attributed to Garamond. In
[...]
Font Designer: Jan Tschichold, 1967
Jan Tschichold created the font Sabon® and based his typeface design on a version of Garamond™ designed by Jakob Sabon and Conrad Berner. Sabon was similar produced for three foundrys: D.Stempel AG, Linotype and Monotype. Classic, elegant, and extremely legible, the font Sabon is one of the most beautiful Garamond variations.
The font Sabon is particularly good for text and headlines in: books/text, magazines, advertisements,
[...]
Font Designer: Claude Garamond, 1499–1561
Opinion varies regarding the role of Claude Garamond (ca. 1480–1561) in the development of the range of contemporary typefaces that bear his name. What is accepted is the influence his work had on other typefaces from the late Renaissance to the present. Fonts named Garamond, or Garamont, are related to the alphabets of Claude Garamond as well as to the work of Jean Jannon (1580–1635 or 1658), much of which was attributed to Garamond. In
[...]Porchez has ensured that Sabon Next’s OpenType features meet every typographic desire. Below is an exhaustive list of what is included!
1.
Case forms: parentheses, brackets, and some punctuation marks change their vertical position when appearing with only capital letters
2.
Ligatures (fb, ffb, ff, fh, ffh, fi, ffi, fj, ffj, fk, fl, ffl, ft, and fft, plus long-s ligatures)
3.
[...]
Claude Garamond
Claude Garamond (ca. 1480–1561) cut types for the Parisian scholar-printer Robert Estienne in the first part of the sixteenth century, basing his romans on the types cut by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1495. Garamond refined his Romans in later versions, adding his own concepts as he developed his skills as a punchcutter. After his death in 1561, the Garamond punches made their way to the printing office of Christoph Plantin in Antwerp, where they
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Jan Tschichold designed Sabon™ in 1964, and it was produced jointly by three foundries: D. Stempel AG, Linotype and Monotype. This was in response to a request from German master printers to make a font family that was the same design for the three metal type technologies of the time: foundry type for hand composition, linecasting, and single-type machine composition. Tschichold turned to the sixteenth century for inspiration, and the story has a complicated family thread that connects his Sabon design to the Garamond lineage.
Jakob Sabon, who the type is named for, was a student of the great French punchcutter Claude Garamond. He completed a set of his teacher's punches after Garamond's death in 1561. Sabon became owner of a German foundry when he married the granddaughter of the Frankfurt printer, Christian Egenolff. Sabon died in 1580, and his widow married Konrad Berner, who took over the foundry. Tschichold loosely based his design on types from the 1592 specimen sheet issued by the Egenolff-Berner foundry: a 14-point roman attributed to Claude Garamond, and an italic attributed to Robert Granjon. Sabon was the typeface name chosen for this twentieth century revival and joint venture in production; this name avoided confusion with other fonts connected with the names of Garamond and Granjon.
Classic, elegant, and extremely legible, Sabon is one of the most beautiful Garamond variations. Always a good choice for book typography, the Sabon family is also particularly good for text and headlines in magazines, advertisements, documentation, business reports, corporate design, multimedia, and correspondence.
Sabon combines well with:
Sans serif fonts such as Frutiger, Syntax.
Slab serif fonts such as PMN Caecilia, Clairvaux.
Fun fonts such as Grafilone, Animalia, Araby Rafique.
See also the new revised version
Sabon Next from the
Linotype Platinum Collection.
