Introduction
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, Monotype casters, and also in hand-setting. Moreover, the appearance and functionality of the face in text was to be same in all of these media!
Sadly for Tschichold, all three of these mechanisms were quickly made obsolete by photo and digital typesetting. Yet his Sabon was converted into new formats, and is still available today: (link to both Linotype and Monotype Sabons here) Sabon, Monotype Sabon. Porchez set out to create a better digital version, and so Sabon Next was born.
The OpenType Update
Now available for the first time in OpenType format, Sabon Next is more useful to designers than ever before. A part of Linotype's bedrock Platinum Collection,, the Sabon Next family includes 12 component fonts, all filled with helpful OpenType features.
Large and versatile, Sabon Next includes optical sizes for both Text and Display setting. The text sizes offer roman and italic variants in five weights, from regular to black. All of the OpenType fonts also include small caps, oldstyle figures, alternate glyphs, swash forms, ligatures, and lovely fleurons. Sabon Next's lining figures are intentionally designed to be a little smaller than capitals. The character set supports all Latin-based languages found in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states and Turkey.
Proven legibility. Even in newspaper printing!
For over five years, the professional publishing community world-over has relied on Sabon Next. Two brilliant examples of the type in use hail from Japan and Germany. First, Sabon Next was recently selected as one of the house types for Suntory (the Japanese beverage giant) to employ in their new corporate identity system. Additionally, Sabon Next is used by the Frankfurter Neue Presse daily newspaper and their base text face. The FNP was the first newspaper to select Sabon Next for its text face.
How did Porchez go about reviving Tschichold's revival?
First he referred to the three original metal versions of Sabon: those for Linotype casting, Monotype machines, and hand-setting. The later was distributed by D. Stempel AG of Frankfurt. This version operated under less constraints than those for other platforms, so it seemed closer to Tschichold's pure interpretation of the Garamond ancestors. It was only natural that Porchez based Sabon Next on this particular version. However, he also referred to original 16th century printed specimens of Garamond's types, carefully improving the proportions of the existing digital Sabon as he went along.
Sabon Next, along with Avenir®Next, Compatil®, Frutiger® Next, Optima® nova, Linotype Univers®, Palatino® nova and Linotype Syntax® belongs to the typefaces of the Linotype Platinum Collection.
These fonts were carefully digitized and have the high quality demanded by professional typography. All fonts of the Platinum Collection were produced according to the Linotype tradition of quality.
Linotype and its authorized partners offer these fonts only as complete typeface families on Platinum Collections CDs.
