Adobe Jenson- Austin Beavers

Adobe Jenson

Adobe Jenson typeface created by Robert Slimbach. Robert Slimbach first began his designing career as a screen-printer running his own shop printing mostly greeting cards and business cards. After some training in Calligraphy, he began to work for the International Typeface Corporation in New York. Here he created two typefaces ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni, but he would become more known for his work with Adobe. Slimbach has created many typefaces while working with adobe like Garamond, Myrid, Minion and Utopia, but one of his most famous typefaces is Adobe Jenson. It took Robert Slimbach about five years to create Adobe Jenson. Jenson’s uppercase letters is based on inscriptions found on Roman ruins, and its lowercase letters came from Italian scholars as a way of copying books. When Robert Slimbach created this typeface in 1995 he was looking at an earlier ancient moveable print type that was created by Nichols Jenson during the mid-15^th century. He would take Hundreds of photos of Nichols Jenson’s Books and enlarge the type and compare the different letters. Nichols Jenson’s books where pressed so each letter would come out somewhat different because ink would bleed differently around each letter. Robert Slimbach would then compile his sketches, and create a digital copy.