the HOEFLER TEXT

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designer: Jonathan Hoefler born in 1970



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typeface created in 1991

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Serif, old style

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transitional serif (sorry i lied before!)

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examples of transitional

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1991 -

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His work has included typefaces for the magazines Rolling Stone (The Proteus Project) and Sports Illustrated (The Champion Gothic family) and for Apple (the Hoefler Text family) 9.

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Jonathan Hoefler
Jonathan Hoefler refers to himself as an 'armchair type historian' but many know his name from his typeface designs, mainly the Hoefler Text. Named one of the forty most influential designers in America by I.D. Magazine, Hoefler's publishing work includes award-winning original typeface designs for Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire.
He was born in New York in 1970 where he always had a passion for type and typography. Instead of taking the traditional college route after highschool, Hoefler went straight into the workfield as a graphic designer. He found that graphic design didnt fulfill his love of type research or writing so he decided to create his own foundry, The Hoefler Type Foundry. Much of Hoefler's work has been influened by metal-found type. With inspiration from classical typography, his foundry brings together his fascination with the history of the craft with the creative aspect of designing new typefaces. Hoefler refers to his own work with type as 'experimental' The Hoefler Text was another type that he considered experimental but more in terms of technology. The Hoefler Text is now appearing everywhere as part of the Macintosh operating system. Hoefler's work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (Smithsonian Institution) in New York. In 2002, The Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) presented Hoefler with its most prestigious award, the Prix Charles Peignot for outstanding contributions to type design. Hoefler and Frere-Jones' collaboration has earned them profiles in The New York Times, Time, and Esquire.


Whats so Special about the Hoefler Text? When Jonathan Hoefler founded the company in 1989, few of the great type foundries had embraced electronic publishing and those that had were just beginning to remaster their most famous fonts for use on personal computers. Because they were just beginning to put digitalize type, they converted the most basic ones first. Digital type offered the potential for fonts to be not merely as good as traditional ones, but demonstrably better than anything that had gone before. Hoefler Text, designed in 1991, was impressive because it was an amazing looking font compared to others that were being digitalized at that time. Hoefler Text revived a number of other traditions that had once been central to fine printing: extended ligature sets, the engraved capitals of the early twentieth century, and the arabesques of the renaissance. Hoefler Text even invented a few traditions of its own, such as case-specific punctuation and italic small caps, and worked to expand the reach of digital typography beyond the United States by including a wealth of foreign symbols and accents. Hoefler Text’s caught the attention of the developers at Apple, where the technology “TrueType GX” was being created. Their goal was to make fine typography not only available to everyone but easy to use as well. Apple commissioned him to furthur expland the font and liscenced Hoefler Text to be included in the System 7 Macintosh Operating System. Even though GX never became a successful font format for designers, it did fulfill its original promise of turning Hoefler Text’s “advanced features” into a new baseline for digital typography. In the years since, small caps and old-style figures have become standard issue with the best text faces from all of the world’s great type foundries

characteristics of Hoefler Text
- medium contrast stroke width (A)
- subtly curved stems (hn)
- concave serif base with rounded ends to serifs (h)
- spur foot (b)
- high bar (e)
- full height ascender (f)
- crossed 'V's in the W
- serifed apex (w)
- single slightly stepped junction at stem (k)
- curved tail from center of base (Q)
- short triangular ascender (t)

The hoefler text has a unique inspiration in the range of its different styles and weights but still keeps a coherence between the 27 fonts including small caps, swash small caps, and swash italics. The letterforms are uniformly balanced making it a versitile text face. A tiltling face (for use at 36 pt. and above) was added to the family in 2002.

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“The worlds greatest typefaces, are quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts.” - Jonathan Hoefler
(during a time when type was just becoming digitalized, brought old styles to the new digital typeworld)

we just had to listen to Hoefler talking on "Please Explain: Typography" a few weeks ago for type
http://fontfeed.com/archives/please-explain-typography/



from... http://www.swiss-miss.com/2008/10/for-america-by.html
"This summer, the Obama campaign commissioned Jonathan Hoefler to design a typographic poster for the Artists for Obama series. It’s now available from the Obama for America website, in a numbered edition of 5,000."