Oh my, another new bundled font that they have yet to announce. Looks pretty good. Let's see it bigger.

36 Points each.

Their names are optical sizes, i.e., Arno Regular 08pt = Arno Caption. Optical sizes are 08pt, 10pt, 12pt, 18pt and 36pt. Weights are Light, Regular, Semibold and Bold, all with Italics. The Light weight only comes in 36pt optical size.

The italics have swashes turned on for a bit of flair, and boy is it sweet.

72 Pt Arno Regular 12pt

Slimbach style. Looks like a calligraphic Minion to me, with better color an rythm.

Héctor

From Wikipedia on Robert Slimbach:

"Slimbach's OpenType® families include reworkings of his previous designs as well as all-new typefaces:

Arno Pro (expected in spring 2007)..."

Also from Wikipedia:

"Arno may refer to:the

[edit] People
Arno Breker, a German sculptor
Arno Hintjens, a Belgian singer
Arno of Salzburg, an 8th-century bishop
Madame Arno, a Parisian artist and fighter
Peter Arno, an American cartoonist
Arno Albertus Iskandar, a young Indonesian entrepreneur

[edit] Geography
Arno River in Italy
Arno Bay, South Australia
Arno Atoll, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
Arno may also be short for Arnold..."

Héctor

Ok, I've already learned that the Arno river in Italy goes across Florence, May this be the acutal naming motif?

Héctor

That was my thought.

But that doesn't answer why they didn't include Adobe Jenson Pro in the distro.

It's Slimbach's Requiem!

Yup. Less inscriptional, more calligraphic and swashy -- Incognito style.

I have been testing CS3 and also came across arno after doing a "pre new years purge" of my computer. . . Is this a new bundled font?

Arno Pro is a GORGEOUS typeface. I'm not sure how much more I can say. I'll have to check the NDA.

to me it looks like Brioso made into a text font.

You could say that about many font designers and their fonts. There are traces of Brioso in the display sizes, especially in the italic IMHO, but it is a wholly new design with many more uses.

Arno is what you might call a modernized Venetian oldstyle. I think of it as having the same relationship to Adobe Jenson that Minion has to Garamond Premier. It's an upcoming design from Robert Slimbach with the level of language support and typographic features you might expect from a new Adobe Original typeface these days.

Note: I don't think the version bundled with the Photoshop CS3 public beta was final. For now, consider it beta, like the application itself.

Regards,

T

Thomas Phinney
Product Manager
Fonts & Global Typography
Adobe Systems

Thomas, thanks for your note: I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates your comments.

I personally love the small caps and italics, and the caps for "P" and "Q," but find that the serif is rather intrusive on almost everything else, unlike Adobe Jenson. Anyone else find it uncomfortable?

(The cap "P" in particular reminds me of the current ad on our local transit for the DVD release of "The Devil Wears Prada" although I'm not enamoured of the rest of the ad.... )

Just a couple more notes:

- Note that Arno Pro is not being bundled "instead of" Adobe Jenson Pro. Photoshop CS2 had no bundled fonts.

- Linda, are you commenting on the upright capitals or the italics? The italic sample Dan posted has the swash alternates on, not the default italics. The roman sample was an enlarged version of the 12 point version of the font; the display version has much less obtrusive serifs, of course.

Cheers,

T

Really? I didn't know. I have the suite, so...

But the fonts bundled with the beta seem to be the regular core Adobe fonts, sans any version of Adobe Jenson Pro. I would rather have that in lieu of having two different Garamonds.

But what am I complaining about? I already have the font. I'm just really interested in Arno and curious about the choice to use it in this bundle over Adobe Jenson Pro.

Thanks Thomas!

Linda, are you commenting on the upright capitals or the italics?

The upright capitals, for the comment about the serif. I figured the italic was the alternates -- that Z gave it away. :-) I must admit that the Light version is quite elegant.

(One of the reasons I've always loved Poetica is the range of alternate characters and ligatures....)

Arno Pro Light Italic 36 set at 72pts

Thanks, Dan! Even the standards are beautiful, particularly the lc f, g x, y, and z....

There seems to be an influence of Trinité here, especially in the tops of the ascenders. The italic is exquisite--Slimbach is the grand wizard of italics. I'm wondering about the proportions of the roman lower case. I want to see some PDFs with text size....

[edit: link repaired]

[ > There seems to be an influence of Trinité here
broken link]

> There seems to be an influence of [...]

AFAIK, Slimbach only looks at other typefaces when he wants to make sure he's not doing something that someone else already did. That seems to be the only way other people's work influence his (unless he's doing a revival).

> I want to see some PDFs with text size….

Please don't do any judgement based on this (beta) version of the font. Much have changed since, and this version is not even properly hinted.

>not doing something that someone else already did. That seems to be the only way other people’s work influence his

I don't think that is true of any artist or designer, ever. I am a big admirer of Slimbach's work, but everyone is influenced by what they see. For example, above Thomas Phinney sees some relation of Garamond and Minion. I do too. I may be wrong about Trinité being an influence--it might be something else--but everybody is influenced.

This is not to deny that Arno is a new design. It's just that everyone is influenced by past ideas.

Slimbach certainly has a portfolio worthy of influence, and we've already noted a Brioso/Jenson connection, but at what point can an artist be influenced by himself, by his other works? Frutiger's later work is all clearly influenced by his earlier stuff, self admittedly. But is that looking at something you've done, or is it doing something you know instinctively?

at what point can an artist be influenced by himself, by his other works?

i think it's inevitable to rework your own stuff. i often find that i want to do at least 2 versions of of typeface and often more. sometimes the changes you want to make are enough to make the typeface into something entirely new. sometimes you want to go back to a typeface you've worked on in the past and apply accumulated experience to redoing a new version, and it turns out to be something significantly different, ala Proxima Nova, Maple or Apex New.

Influenced by the subconscious

Great typeface like anything Robert Slimbach has done.

May you have fun to key Arno Pro in "Google Images"? Its not what a typophile contributor can expect.

Oy vey! I just found Arno while disabling all the Apple display fonts I never use and it's fantastic!

That's similar to how I found it. It doesn't install into the normal Adobe font folder. It installs it in one of the system libraries. I thought that was weird. Never would have noticed it had I not been looking for what might have been installed!

Tricky, you Adobe! Tricky!

I just found it too. It is gorgeous! And I like how it has optimized weight by point size, clever! I just found a new workhorse text face!

I must say, of everyone I know who's into type, Robert Slimbach is the only one who spends zero time and effort looking at other people's stuff. What Miguel said. I'm sure occasionally one of us tries to show him something, but that's about it.

He has an amazing eye, though. "Move that top anchor point on the lower bowl about two units to the left," he'll suggest when looking at an outline in the typeface I'm working on....

Cheers,

T

So is this the new optical naming convention that Adobe is going to be using? Or will it change to the standard Caption, Regular, etc., when "released"?

I must say, I prefer it this way.

I do as well.

>I must say, of everyone I know who’s into type, Robert Slimbach is the only one who spends zero time and effort looking at other people’s stuff.

Thomas, surely you are not saying that Slimbach spent zero time and effort studying Garamond and Jenson. And if I read you rightly you acknowledge an influence of Garamond on Minion and Jenson on Arno. So you seem to be contradicting what Miguel said when he wrote that Slimbach is only influenced by other's work when "he's doing a revival".
Yet you say "what Miguel said."

I am puzzled.

I think he meant looking at other designer's current work like Hoefler and Frere-Jones' Requiem, as Arno was compared to above.

As to the Garamond and Jenson stuff, staring at those works just has to ingrain the letterforms and shapes in your head until that becomes the way you see things from then on.

I don't think that Stephen Coles was implying any influence of Hoefler on Slimbach, just that they were striving for the same kind of aesthetic quality--a highly elegant look, with a touch of calligraphic influence, or some such. And indeed I find it far-fetched that Hoefler has had any influence on Slimbach.

I do think Slimbach has had more recent influences than Garamond and Jenson, though. I find it hard to imagine that Myriad could have be created as it is without Frutiger's prior and ground-breaking creation of his self-named typeface. Though Myriad is a significantly different design, I think almost all type designers--probably including Slimbach and Frutiger--would agree that Frutiger's design had a significant influence on Myriad, and not just by reaction.

I don't think that acknowledging such influences takes away anything at all from Slimbach's greatness as a type designer. For me he is one of the handful of greatest at work today.

Yes, I was thinking of work from the last quarter-century in particular. And of course when I referred to the relationship of Garamond Premier and Minion, I wasn't saying that Minion was particularly directly inspired by Claude Garamond's work, just that I think of it as a modern typeface inspired by that period.

I think that acknowledging influences is a fine thing, and I don't think that being influenced is bad. I'm just saying that more of what Robert does (in non-revival faces) is coming from his own head. I don't know that this makes his work less similar to other typefaces, I'm just saying that he tends not to pay much attention to what other designers are currently doing. It's just one of his many quirks.

Cheers,

T

Slimbach is a wizard of italics? Perhaps, perhaps. But that doesn't explain why the lowercase italics are so similar to Palatino's. Am I alone of such opinion?

Of course, if I was Slimbach, Palatino's italics is what I'd try to improve upon in my ultimate text typeface.

>from the last quarter-century

So far as I have learned, in general creative work is strongly informed by the work of the previous generation in the field, both by direct influence and reaction. Once creative thinkers and workers are beyond their formative stages--in which they are indeed decisively influenced--they often are driven more by their own creative program for themselves, and the needs of the broader culture, rather than their peers. Hence Thomas's observation about Slimbach is plausible to me.

Still, people usually have an awareness of their peers and sometimes a competitiveness, though this varies with the person. And I think it is quite difficult even for a person himself or herself to be fully aware of influences, past or peers. As David noted, such influences may be unconscious, but none the less real.

>lowercase italics are so similar to Palatino’s

I don't see it. What are you seeing there that is particularly similar?

William, don't mind me. I think I was a bit too reactive in this case. It's just that to me Arno Pro Light lc italics in the picture posted by Dan have the same feel to it as Palatino. I haven't studied them enough to pinpoint how that comes about. They aren't too similar, no - I take that back.

Just forget it, okay?

Thomas, can you say anything about the optical size naming conventions used on Arno Pro? As we mentioned, some of us kinda like it. Is that where Adobe is leaning with future typefaces?

It was something we were experimenting with in pre-release versions, but it did not make it into the final fonts.

Although the new naming convention worked well for most typographers among our testers, to whom its usage was obvious, overall it caused increased confusion. Less typographically savvy users were particularly uncertain about how to deal with it.

For Adobe, it also introduced a legacy issue: what would we do with the existing fonts with the older optical-size naming convention? Either we change their style names - a major break in compatibility - or we live with two different standards.

In the end, we decided that simply keeping with the existing scheme was the best of the alternatives. For Arno, we minted a new size name of "small text" in between "caption" and "regular," for the 10 pt optical size. Although we might come up with new names, simply prefixing "small" or "large" in front of the existing labels would give us enough optical sizes to play with for pretty much any purpose.

Cheers,

T

I figured as much. Trying to spec "Arno Pro Light Italic 36 at 72pts" would confuse the heck out of a somebody. I'm glad that you guys are thinking of ways to make optical sizing more useful/understandable for average people as well as typographers.

It's not like the old days, not that I was even alive during the old days, when spec'ing 14pt automatically meant the 14pt optical because there wasn't a choice.

I tried to get someone to understand optical sizing, but they kept asking why Times New Roman wouldn't do that for them in MS Word. Oh well :)

Understandable. 'Tis unfortunate for the typopgraphers among us. For me its easier and involves less thought than "small text" (because the next question would be how small?). It was a novel idea though.

What a beautiful font! You guys know too much; x-heights and the Venetian influence are a distraction to identifying this font. In the dimension that is pure Slimbach, without historical precedent, I see "Arno" as a contraction of "Warnock", interpolating between that font and Minion.

I must confess to having downloaded the CS3 beta just to get a first look at Arno Pro. I use TeX and LaTeX for mathematical typesetting, so the digital equivalent of struggling to get the cellophane off the next Beatles LP is a half hour of shell scripting and writing font description files. My conclusion: I need to wait for the remaining light opticals, if they're coming. ArnoPro-Light36pt can't be intended for 11pt body text.

To my naive eye, light fonts seem to be in identity crisis now. Are they supposed to "look" light on the page, or offer a reasonable alternative to regular? One sees good examples of each view. I'm writing a textbook to either be viewed on screen or laser printed. After many experiments I've concluded that most regular fonts are too heavy, reflecting a historical traditon that predates high resolution screens and printing. The only font that I can stay with for more than an hour of writing is Warnock Pro Light.

So I'm dying of curiousity to see the rest of the ArnoPro light series. The regular has such an authority on the page, with its weight perfectly balancing the glyph shapes, that I fear the light series will opt to "look" light, and not vie for the same authority on the page.

In my mind, "Light" is a weight that can only be used at larger sizes. The details needed to maintain the design would disappear at smaller sizes. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have "Light" at the smaller optical sizes.

> So I’m dying of curiousity to see the rest of the ArnoPro light series.

Don't hold your breath. Arno Pro's Light weight is only intended for Display (above 22pt) sizes.

Tiffany is right. It'd be nonsense to have a "Light Caption" weight, for example.

The color is spot on...it looks perfect at very small sizes. I've been looking for an OpenType text face such as this to buy for some time and— quite frankly, this is the best I've seen thus far.

Here's part of a footnote set in WarnockPro-LightCapt. It has the authority I crave in Arno Pro light caption. I'm betting the rest of the light series simply wasn't ready.

> I’m betting the rest of the light series simply wasn’t ready.

I worked on the production of Arno Pro, and there was never a plan for a "Light series". Perhaps Robert thinks the design, design space or style doesn't lend itself to it. I can ask him, if you want.

Garamond Premier Pro, Robert's work prior to Arno Pro, only has Light Display as well.

I think the details and characteristics in Warnock were strong enough to withstand having a light caption weight. I don't think the same can be said of Arno.

Thanks all! While I think Arno Pro is an amazing font, I'll stay with Warnock Pro light for math typesetting, which harmonizes well with Hermann Zapf's Euler math fonts.

Even Warnock Pro light falls apart a bit on a 600 dpi laser printer. It looks great at 1200 dpi. Maybe in another decade fonts will be generally be a bit lighter, to match future displays and printers.

Hi...
it's my debut in typophile, and I'm happy that I start it speaking about Robert Slimbach.
As a graphic designer I must say Robert still surprises me after all those great typefaces he had done.
Arno is wonderful. Congratulations to him and to the ones who worked with him in Arno Pro.

Welcome to Typophile! An interesting thing about Arno Pro, as attested by Thomas Phinney, is that the version we see is only a beta version.

When I showed him a piece of work that I did with it, it took him a second to figure it out because the current version's lower case e is now totally different! Who would have thought that there could be more to work on that would totally change the appearance of a typeface, especially on a typeface that for anyone other than Slimbach would've been complete a long time ago...

I don't know about *totally* different. But it has been tweaked a bit, I think.

I really look forward to the actual release of the typeface. It will ship in the boxes with the next Creative Suite and the CS applications, so the March 27th launch should reveal the availability date.

Cheers,

T