Gentium — Design

Victor Gaultney, 2004-01-09; 47281 reads

Download main Gentium fonts | Download Gentium Basic fonts

‘distinctive, elegant and readable’ ‘a very warm look’

‘great consistency and legibility’ ‘lotion for the eyes’

‘Such lovely colour and attention to detail yet not encumbering readability. The italic has gracefully inclined, ingeniously contrived stems that impart a gentle rhythm that is not in the least overbearing. It’s going to be extremely gratifying to use.’

Gentium has been designed to balance the need for a compact, legible typeface with the need for an attractive, friendly one. The overall tensions that influenced the design are summarized by the following table:

Balancing forces in the design of Gentium

For full details on the unique design characteristics of Gentium, download the 20-page type specimen:

Gentium Type Specimen (A5 format)
Victor Gaultney, 2003-09-11
Download "Gentium_RU_spec.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 800KB [48991 downloads]

This publication was prepared for the University of Reading and was distributed to all attendees of the ATypI conference in Rome, September 2002. It also includes examples of the glyph set supported by Gentium and shows it in use for a variety of settings (Regular/Italic, Latin/Greek, Prose/Poetry, Display/Text).

An exhaustive set of proof sheets is also available that shows the complete glyph inventory of each font in a range of sizes:

Gentium Proofs (A3 format)
Victor Gaultney, 2003-09-11
Download "Gentium_RU_proofs.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 748KB [21893 downloads]

To review some of the research that influenced the design see the essay and dissertation on Victor Gaultney’s academic site.

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