Typography Tuesday
Women Type Designers: CAROL TWOMBLY
This week during Women’s History Month we examine some of the typefaces designed by American type designer Carol Twombly in her brief but remarkable career. She is noted for at least ten distinctive typefaces she designed for Adobe both on her own and in collaboration with other designes, particularly Robert Slimbach. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design and then Stanford University, Twombly became a full-time type designer for Adobe Systems in their Adobe Originals program. During her eleven years with Adobe, she designed a number of very popular text and display typefaces inspired by classic letterforms of the past, including Trajan, Charlemagne, Lithos, and Adobe Caslon.
In 1994, she received the Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Internationale for outstanding contributions to type design. She was the first woman and only the second American to receive this prestigious honor. Twombly had many art interests, but at RISD she decided to focus on graphic design for practical reasons: “I discovered that communicating through graphics - by placing black shapes on a white page - offered a welcome balance between freedom and structure.” Despite her great success at Adobe, she left the company in 1999 and completely retired from type design, citing a lack interest in designing fonts for onscreen display and a desire to engage in other artistic pursuits, which she does actively today.
