Robert Slimbach

Infobox Person
name = Robert Slimbach


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birth_date = 1956
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death_date =
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known_for =
occupation = Principal Designer, Adobe Systems
nationality =

Robert Slimbach is a type designer, who has worked at Adobe Systems since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely-awarded Charles Peignot Award from the Association Typographique Internationale, and repeated TDC² awards from the Type Directors Club.

Biography

Slimbach was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1956. Shortly after, he moved to Southern California where he spent his childhood and his youth. After leaving college he developed an interest in graphic design and typefaces while running a small screen printshop for manufacturing posters and greeting cards. This work brought him into contact with Autologic Incorporated in Newbury Park, California. After training from 1983 to 1985, Slimbach worked as a type designer with Autologic Incorporation, where Sumner Stone also worked for a short time. There he received further training, not just as a type designer but also as a calligrapher. Slimbach was then self-employed for two years and developed the two fonts ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni for the International Typeface Corporation in New York.

In 1987 he joined Adobe Systems. Since then, he has concentrated primarily on designing typefaces for digital technology, drawing inspiration from classical sources. He has developed many new fonts for the Adobe Originals program. His time at Adobe Systems in California has seen the production of, among others, the Utopia (1988), Adobe Garamond (1989), Minion (1990) and Poetica (1992) font families. In 1991, he received the Charles Peignot Award from the Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design. More recently, Slimbach's own roman script calligraphy formed the basis for his Brioso.

Since 2000, the rate of Slimbach's new typefaces has slowed, as he has taken advantage of the new linguistic and typographic capabilities offered by the OpenType format. Where in the 1990s a given typeface design might be instantiated in one or two fonts, with 200-500 glyphs, a typical new Slimbach work post-2000 has 1500-3000 glyphs.

In 2004, Adobe released Garamond Premier Pro, a new take on the Garamond designs, which Slimbach had been working on for 15 years, since he first completed Adobe Garamond in 1989.

Slimbach has notable skills in several fields other than type design: he went to college on a gymnastics scholarship, and he is an accomplished calligrapher and photographer. His photographic work uses black & white film, and is mainly portraits that examine human foibles and idiosyncrasies.

List of designed typefaces

Here is a full list of Type 1 and multiple master Type 1 typefaces designed by Slimbach:
*Caflisch Script
*Cronos
*Adobe Garamond
*Adobe Jenson
*Kepler
*Minion
*Minion Cyrillic
*Myriad (co-designed with Carol Twombly)
*Poetica
*Sanvito
*Utopia

Slimbach's OpenType families include reworkings of his previous designs as well as all-new typefaces:
*Arno Pro [ [http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/landing/arno/arno.html Main page for Arno Pro at Adobe.com] ] — TDC2 2007 winning entry
*Brioso Pro [ [http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/landing/brioso.html Main page for Brioso Pro at Adobe.com] ] — TDC2 2002 winning entry
*Caflisch Script Pro (added many typographic alternates) — bukva:raz! 2001 winner
*Clean (unreleased, but used in current Adobe software icons [ [http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/images/wheel-o%27-icons.html Image of future Adobe software icons] from the blog of John Nack, Senior Product Manager, Adobe Photoshop] )
*Cronos Pro
*Garamond Premier Pro [ [http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/landing/garamond/garamond.html Main page for Garamond Premier Pro at Adobe.com] ] — TDC2 2006 winning entry
*Adobe Garamond Pro
*Adobe Jenson Pro
*Kepler Standard
*Minion Pro (added Greek) — bukva:raz! 2001 winner
*Myriad Pro (added Greek and Cyrillic, with Carol Twombly, Fred Brady and Christopher Slye) — TDC2 2000 winning entry and bukva:raz! 2001 winner
*Poetica Standard
*Sanvito Standard
*Utopia Standard (added optical size variants)
*Warnock Pro — TDC2 2001 winning entry

Notes

External links

* [http://www.adobe.com/type/typedesign/slimbach.html Adobe's biography of Robert Slimbach]
* [http://www.adobe.com/type/topics/opticalsize.html Optical Size and Typefounding at Adobe]
* [http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/C/C_adobe.html Adobe Originals]