Typeface Research (Garamond)
Category: Serif
Classification: Old-style
Designers: Claude Garamond & Jean Jannon
Garamond is a group of many old-style serif typefaces, originally those designed by Parisian craftsman Claude Garamond and other 16th century French engravers, and now many modern revivals. Though his name was written as ‘Garamont’ in his lifetime, the typefaces are generally spelled ‘Garamond’.
Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal type. He worked in the tradition of what is now called old-style serif letter design, that produced letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen but with a slightly more structured and upright design. Although Garamond himself remains considered an eminent figure in French printing of the sixteenth century, historical research over the last century has increasingly placed him in context as one artisan among several active at a time of rapid production of new typefaces in sixteenth-century France, operating within a pre-existing tradition defined by the work of printers of the preceding half-century, in particular Aldus Manutius and his punchcutter Francesco Griffo. Therefore, the term “Garamond” in modern use may be understood to mean typefaces based on the appearance of early modern French printing, not necessarily specifically Garamond’s work
