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Garamond Premier Pro

A new OpenType family modeled on the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon

Garamond Premier Pro had its genesis in 1988, when Adobe senior type designer Robert Slimbach visited the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, to study their collection of Claude Garamond's metal punches and type designs. Garamond, a French punchcutter, produced a refined array of book types in the mid-1500s which combine an unprecedented degree of balance and elegance, and stand as a pinnacle of beauty and practicality in typefounding. While fine-tuning Adobe^® Garamond^® (released in 1989) as a useful design suited to modern publishing, Slimbach started planning an entirely new interpretation of Garamond's designs based on the range of unique sizes he'd seen at the Plantin-Moretus, and on comparable italics cut by Garamond's contemporary, Robert Granjon.

By modeling Garamond Premier on these hand-cut type sizes, Slimbach has retained the optical characteristics and freshness of the original designs, while creating a practical 21st-century type family. Garamond Premier Pro contains an extensive glyph complement, including Central European, Cyrillic, and Greek sets, and is offered in five weights ranging from light to bold.

The roman typefaces by Claude Garamond and the italic types by Robert Granjon remain today's definitive letterforms for reading continuous text. As with the inscriptional capitals of Ancient Rome, the text typefaces of Garamond and Granjon have endured changes in culture and fashion, and embody the artistic ideals of the Renaissance masters who strove to realize a vision of an earthly and spiritual perfection in their work.

Although Garamond is recognized for his fine Greek and italic types, his primary contribution to typography is his masterful interpretation of his predecessors' roman typeface styles. Garamond spent much of his life refining his lettercutting skills to produce a series of sizes of roman type that approach an ideal form. Robert Granjon's life-long persistence and consummate skill led him, like Garamond, to create a large body of work – most notably a series of italics that define the French oldstyle cursive form. There is little left unresolved in either designer's work – Garamond's romans are elegant and staid, while Granjon's italics are lacy and energetic. The pairing of these distinctive styles results in a tense yet pleasing combination, ideally suited for complex roman and italic settings.

During Garamond's time, there was a movement toward more sophisticated typographic arrangements, resulting in the commission of new typefaces of varied size. Because a punchcutter works at actual size, each font possesses unique optical and stylistic variations. Subtle adjustments in weight, contrast, proportion, and design allow each size to be as readable and beautiful as possible. Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon were among the first punchcutters to produce a range of sizes of their roman and italic typefaces.

Garamond Premier includes a series of weights in four distinct size ranges – caption, text, subhead, and display – that are modeled on specific types within Garamond and Granjon's oeuvre. Each typeface has been designed and adjusted to work together harmoniously as a contemporary composition family.

Caption (less than 9 pt.)

Text (9 pt. up to 15 pt.)

Subhead (15 pt. up to 23 pt.)

Display (23 pt. and larger)

Since the creation of the Adobe Originals program in 1989, Adobe Systems has offered progressive new type families and cutting-edge type technology. As a greatly expanded and enhanced OpenType "Pro" family, Garamond Premier Pro includes extensive Latin and pan-European language coverage and a broad palette of weights and optically-sized fonts. Using OpenType's powerful layout features, the process of composing and fine-tuning text is greatly streamlined. Applications which enable these features – such as Adobe InDesign^®, Adobe Photoshop^®, and Adobe Illustrator^® – enable typographic refinements such as ligatures, small capitals, and oldstyle figures, bringing unprecedented control and sophistication to contemporary typography. OpenType fonts, coupled with the advanced typographic control offered by a program such as Adobe InDesign, also let type users take advantage of advanced justification, optical margin alignment, hanging punctuation, and optically sized masters.

View the examples of Garamond Premier Pro, shown below,
as a full-resolution PDF (124 KB).

© 2005 Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe, Adobe Garamond, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. OpenType is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.