A Specimen, a broadsheet with examples of typefaces and fonts available. Printed by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.

In typography, a typeface is a set of characters that share common design features. Each typeface is designed, and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.

The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers. In digital typography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers.

Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase А and Greek uppercase alpha. There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as map-making or astrology and mathematics.

The term typeface is frequently confused with the term font. Before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing, the two terms had a more clearly understood meanings. See font for a complete definition of that term.

Terminology[link]

In professional typography, the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font, which was historically defined as a given alphabet and its associated characters in a single size. For example, 8-point Caslon Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslon Italic was another. Historically, fonts came in specific sizes determining the size of characters, and in quantities of sorts or number of each letter provided. The design of characters in a font took into account all these factors.

As the range of typeface designs increased and requirements of publishers broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (blackness or lightness) and stylistic variants (most commonly regular or roman as distinct to italic, as well as condensed) have led to font families, collections of closely related typeface designs that can include hundreds of styles. A font family is typically a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc., but not design. For example, Times is a font family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are individual fonts making up the Times family. Font families typically include several fonts, though some, such as Helvetica, may consist of dozens of fonts.

The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or related set of fonts. For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include roman, bold, and italic fonts.^[1] In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size.

The first "extended" font families, which included a wide range of widths and weights in the same general style emerged in the early 1900s, starting with ATF's Cheltenham (1902–1913), with an initial design by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and many additional faces designed by Morris Fuller Benton.^[2] Later examples include Futura, Lucida, ITC Officina. Some became superfamilies as a result of revival, such as Linotype Syntax, Linotype Univers; while others have alternate styling designed as compatible replacements of each other, such as Compatil, Generis.

Typeface superfamilies began to emerge when foundries began to include typefaces with significant structural differences, but some design relationship, under the same general family name. Arguably the first superfamily was created when Morris Fuller Benton created Clearface Gothic for ATF in 1910, a sans serif companion to the existing (serifed) Clearface. The superfamily label does not include quite different designs given the same family name for what would seem to be purely marketing, rather than design, considerations: Caslon Antique, Futura Black and Futura Display are structurally unrelated to the Caslon and Futura families, respectively, and are generally not considered part of those families by typographers, despite their names.

Additional or supplemental glyphs intended to match a main typeface have been in use for centuries. In some formats they have been marketed as separate fonts. In the early 1990s, the Adobe Systems type group introduced the idea of expert set fonts, which had a standardized set of additional glyphs, including small caps, old style figures, and additional superior letters, fractions and ligatures not found in the main fonts for the typeface. Supplemental fonts have also included alternate letters such as swashes, dingbats, and alternate character sets, complementing the regular fonts under the same family.^[3] However, with introduction of font formats such as OpenType, those supplemental glyphs were merged into the main fonts, relying on specific software capabilities to access the alternate glyphs.

Since Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems supported different character sets in the platform related fonts, some foundries used expert fonts in a different way. These fonts included the characters which were missing on either Macintosh or Windows computers, e.g. fractions, ligatures or some accented glyphs. The goal was to deliver the whole character set to the customer regardless of which operating system was used.

The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points;^[4] point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the Desktop Publishing point of ¹⁄₇₂ in (0.0139 in/0.35 mm). When specified in typographic sizes (points, kyus), the height of an em-square, an invisible box which is typically a bit larger than the distance from the tallest ascender to the lowest descender, is scaled to equal the specified size. ^[5] For example, when setting Helvetica at 12 point, the em square defined in the Helvetica font is scaled to 12 points or ¹⁄₆ in (0.17 in/4.3 mm). Yet no particular element of 12-point Helvetica need measure exactly 12 points.

Frequently measurement in non-typographic units (feet, inches, meters) will be of the cap-height, the height of the capital letters. Font size is also commonly measured in millimeters (mm) and qs (a quarter of a millimeter, kyu in romanized Japanese) and inches.

History[link]

Type foundries have cast fonts in lead alloys from the 1450s until the present, although wood served as the material for some large fonts called wood type during the 19th century, particularly in the United States. In the 1890s the mechanization of typesetting allowed automated casting of fonts on the fly as lines of type in the size and length needed. This was known as continuous casting, and remained profitable and widespread until its demise in the 1970s. The first machine of this type was the Linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler.

During a brief transitional period (c. 1950s – 1990s), photographic technology, known as phototypesetting, utilized tiny high-resolution images of individual glyphs on a film strip (in the form of a film negative, with the letters as clear areas on an opaque black background). A high-intensity light source behind the film strip projected the image of each glyph through an optical system, which focused the desired letter onto the light-sensitive phototypesetting paper at a specific size and position. This photographic typesetting process permitted optical scaling, allowing designers to produce multiple sizes from a single font, although physical constraints on the reproduction system used still required design changes at different sizes; for example, ink traps and spikes to allow for spread of ink encountered in the printing stage. Manually operated photocomposition systems using fonts on filmstrips allowed fine kerning between letters without the physical effort of manual typesetting, and spawned an enlarged type design industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

The mid-1970s saw all of the major typeface technologies and all their fonts in use: letterpress, continuous casting machines, phototypositors, computer-controlled phototypesetters, and the earliest digital typesetters—hulking machines with tiny processors and CRT outputs. From the mid-1980s, as digital typography has grown, users have almost universally adopted the American spelling font, which nowadays nearly always means a computer file containing scalable outline letterforms (digital font), in one of several common formats. Some typefaces, such as Verdana, are designed primarily for use on computer screens.

Digital type[link]

Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap in a bitmap font, or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font, also called a vector font. When an outline font is used, a rasterizing routine (in the application software, operating system or printer) renders the character outlines, interpreting the vector instructions to decide which pixels should be black and which ones white. Rasterization is straightforward at high resolutions such as those used by laser printers and in high-end publishing systems. For computer screens, where each individual pixel can mean the difference between legible and illegible characters, some digital fonts use hinting algorithms to make readable bitmaps at small sizes.

Digital fonts may also contain data representing the metrics used for composition, including kerning pairs, component creation data for accented characters, glyph substitution rules for Arabic typography and for connecting script faces, and for simple everyday ligatures like fl. Common font formats include TrueType, OpenType and PostScript Type 1, while METAFONT is still used by TeX and its variants. Applications using these font formats, including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple Computer operating systems, Adobe Systems products and those of several other companies. Digital fonts are created with font editors such as FontForge, RoboFont, Glyphs, Fontlab's TypeTool, FontLab Studio, Fontographer, or AsiaFont Studio.

Typeface anatomy[link]

Typographers have developed a comprehensive vocabulary for describing the many aspects of typefaces and typography. Some vocabulary applies only to a subset of all scripts. Serifs, for example, are a purely decorative characteristic of typefaces used for European scripts, whereas the glyphs used in Arabic or East Asian scripts have characteristics (such as stroke width) that may be similar in some respects but cannot reasonably be called serifs and may not be purely decorative.

Serifs[link]

	Sans serif font
	Serif font
	Serif font with serifs highlighted in red

Typefaces can be divided into two main categories: serif and sans serif. Serifs comprise the small features at the end of strokes within letters. The printing industry refers to typeface without serifs as sans serif (from French sans, meaning without), or as grotesque (or, in German, grotesk).

Great variety exists among both serif and sans serif typefaces. Both groups contain faces designed for setting large amounts of body text, and others intended primarily as decorative. The presence or absence of serifs forms is only one of many factors to consider when choosing a typeface.

Typefaces with serifs are often considered easier to read in long passages than those without. Studies on the matter are ambiguous, suggesting that most of this effect is due to the greater familiarity of serif typefaces. As a general rule, printed works such as newspapers and books almost always use serif typefaces, at least for the text body. Web sites do not have to specify a font and can simply respect the browser settings of the user. But of those web sites that do specify a font, most use modern sans serif fonts, because it is commonly believed that, in contrast to the case for printed material, sans serif fonts are easier than serif fonts to read on the low-resolution computer screen.

[edit] Proportion

A proportional typeface contains glyphs of varying widths, while a monospaced (non-proportional or fixed-width) typeface uses a single standard width for all glyphs in the font.

Most people generally find proportional typefaces nicer-looking and easier to read, and thus they appear more commonly in professionally published printed material. For the same reason, GUI computer applications (such as word processors and web browsers) typically use proportional fonts. However, many proportional fonts contain fixed-width (tabular) figures so that columns of numbers stay aligned.

Monospaced typefaces function better for some purposes because their glyphs line up in neat, regular columns. No glyph is given any more weight than another. Most manually operated typewriters and text-only computer displays use monospaced fonts. Most computer programs which have a text-based interface (terminal emulators, for example) use only monospaced fonts (or add additional spacing to proportional fonts to fit them in monospaced cells) in their configuration. Monospaced fonts are commonly used by computer programmers for displaying and editing source code so that certain characters (for example parentheses used to group arithmetic expressions) are easy to see.^[6] Monospaced fonts may also come as a benefit to machines doing automatic recognition of text (cf. Optical Character Recognition).

ASCII art usually requires a monospaced font for proper viewing, with the exception of Shift JIS art which takes advantage of the proportional characters in the MS PGothic font.. In a web page, the <tt> </tt>, <code> </code> or <pre> </pre> HTML tags most commonly specify monospaced fonts. In LaTeX, the verbatim environment or the Teletype font family (e.g., \texttt{...} or {\ttfamily ...}) uses monospaced fonts (in TeX, use {\tt ...}).

Any two lines of text with the same number of characters in each line in a monospaced typeface should display as equal in width, while the same two lines in a proportional typeface may have radically different widths. This occurs because in a proportional font, glyph widths vary, such that wider glyphs (typically those for characters such as W, Q, Z, M, D, O, H, and U) use more space, and narrower glyphs (such as those for the characters i, t, l, and 1) use less space than the average.

In the publishing industry, it was once the case that editors read manuscripts in monospaced fonts (typically Courier) for ease of editing and word count estimates, and it was considered discourteous to submit a manuscript in a proportional font. This has become less universal in recent years, such that authors need to check with editors as to their preference, though monospaced fonts are still the norm.

Font metrics[link]

The word Sphinx, set in Adobe Caslon Pro to illustrate the concepts of baseline, x-height, body size, descent and ascent.

Most scripts share the notion of a baseline: an imaginary horizontal line on which characters rest. In some scripts, parts of glyphs lie below the baseline. The descent spans the distance between the baseline and the lowest descending glyph in a typeface, and the part of a glyph that descends below the baseline has the name descender. Conversely, the ascent spans the distance between the baseline and the top of the glyph that reaches farthest from the baseline. The ascent and descent may or may not include distance added by accents or diacritical marks.

In the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic (sometimes collectively referred to as LGC) scripts, one can refer to the distance from the baseline to the top of regular lowercase glyphs (mean line) as the x-height, and the part of a glyph rising above the x-height as the ascender. The distance from the baseline to the top of the ascent or a regular uppercase glyphs (cap line) is also known as the cap height.^[7] The height of the ascender can have a dramatic effect on the readability and appearance of a font. The ratio between the x-height and the ascent or cap height often serves to characterize typefaces.

Typefaces with the same metrics (i.e., with the same glyph dimensions) are said to be "metric-compatible", that is, they can be substituted for one another in a document without changing the document's text flow. Several typefaces have been created to be metric-compatible with widely used proprietary typefaces to allow the editing of documents set in such typefaces in digital typesetting environments where these typefaces are not available.^[8] For instance, the open-source Liberation fonts have been designed as metric-compatible substitutes for widely used Microsoft fonts.

Types of typefaces[link]

Because an abundance of typefaces have been created over the centuries, they are commonly categorized according to their appearance. At the highest level (in the context of Latin-script fonts), one can differentiate Roman, Blackletter, and Gaelic types. Roman types are in the most widespread use today, and are sub-classified as serif, sans serif, ornamental, and script types. Historically, the first European fonts were blackletter, followed by Roman serif, then sans serif and then the other types. The use of Gaelic faces was restricted to the Irish language, though these form a unique if minority class. Typefaces may be monospaced regardless of whether they are Roman, Blackletter, or Gaelic. Symbol typefaces are non-alphabetic. The Cyrillic script comes in two varieties, Roman type (called гражданский шрифт graždanskij šrift) and traditional Slavonic type (called славянский шрифт slavjanskij šrift).

Roman typefaces[link]

Serif typefaces[link]

Serif, or Roman, typefaces are named for the features at the ends of their strokes. Times Roman and Garamond are common examples of serif typefaces. Serif fonts are probably the most used class in printed materials, including most books, newspapers and magazines. Serif fonts are often classified into three subcategories: Old Style, Transitional, and Modern. Old Style typefaces are influenced by early Italian lettering design.^[9] Though some argument exists as to whether Transitional fonts exist as a discrete category among serif fonts, Transitional fonts lie somewhere between Old Style and Modern style typefaces. Transitional fonts exhibit a marked increase in the variation of stroke weight and a more horizontal serif compared to Old Style, but not as extreme as Modern. Lastly, Modern fonts often exhibit a bracketed serif and a substantial difference in weight within the strokes.

Sample text in Baskerville font

Examples of these are Times, New Baskerville, and Bodoni, respectively.

Roman, italic, and oblique are also terms used to differentiate between upright and italicized variations of a typeface. The difference between italic and oblique is that the term italic usually applies to serif faces, where the letter forms are redesigned.^[10]

Sans serif typefaces[link]

Sans serif (lit. without serif) designs appeared relatively recently in the history of type design. The evolution of the sans serif font very likely stemmed from the slab serif font. The earliest slab serif font, Antique, later renamed Egyptian, designed in 1815 by the English typefounder Vincent Figgins^[11] was succeeded one year later by the first sans serif font, created by William Caslon IV. The evidence of this is clearly shown in the uniform strokes in the letter forms. Sans serif fonts are commonly but not exclusively used for display typography such as signage, headings, and other situations demanding legibility above high readability. The text on electronic media offers an exception to print: most web pages and digitized media are laid out in sans serif typefaces because serifs often detract from readability at the low resolution of displays.^{[citation needed]}

A well-known and popular sans serif font is Max Miedinger's Helvetica, popularized for desktop publishing by inclusion with Apple Computer's LaserWriter laserprinter and having been one of the first readily available digital typefaces. Arial, popularized by Microsoft, is a widely used sans serif font that is often compared to and substituted for Helvetica. Other fonts such as Futura, Gill Sans, Univers and Frutiger have also remained popular over many decades.

Script typefaces[link]

Script typefaces imitate handwriting or calligraphy. They do not lend themselves to quantities of body text, as people find them harder to read than many serif and sans-serif typefaces; they are typically used for logos or invitations. Examples include Coronet and Zapfino.

Ornamental typefaces[link]

Ornamental (also known as novelty or sometimes display) typefaces are used exclusively for decorative purposes, and are not suitable for body text. They have the most distinctive designs of all fonts, and may even incorporate pictures of objects, animals, etc. into the character designs. They usually have very specific characteristics (e.g., evoking the Wild West, Christmas, horror films, etc.) and hence very limited uses. See below for the historical definition of display typeface.

Mimicry typefaces[link]

Simulated Hebrew.

A group of decorative typefaces, sometimes called simulation typefaces, have been designed that represent the characters of the Roman alphabet but evoke another writing system. This group includes typefaces designed to appear as Arabic, Chinese characters, Cyrillic, Indic scripts, Greek, Hebrew, Kana, or Thai. These are used largely for the purpose of novelty to make something appear foreign.

Blackletter typefaces[link]

Blackletter fonts, the earliest typefaces used with the invention of the printing press, resemble the blackletter calligraphy of that time. Many people refer to them as gothic script. Various forms exist including textualis, rotunda, schwabacher, and fraktur.

Gaelic typefaces[link]

Gaelic fonts were first used for the Irish language in 1571, and were used regularly for Irish until the early 1960s, though they continue to be used in display type and type for signage. Their use was effectively confined to Ireland, though Gaelic typefaces were designed and produced in France, Belgium, and Italy. Gaelic typefaces make use of insular letterforms, and early fonts made use of a variety of abbreviations deriving from the manuscript tradition. Early fonts used for the Anglo-Saxon language, also using insular letterforms, can be classified as Gaelic typefaces, distinct from Roman or Antiqua typefaces.^[12][13] Various forms exist, including manuscript, traditional, and modern styles, chiefly distinguished as having angular or uncial features.^[14]

Monospaced typefaces[link]

Monospaced fonts are typefaces in which every glyph is the same width (as opposed to variable-width fonts, where the w and m are wider than most letters, and the i is narrower). The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. Their use continued with early computers, which could only display a single font. Although modern computers can display any desired typeface, monospaced fonts are still important for computer programming, terminal emulation, and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents. Examples of monospaced typefaces are Courier, Prestige Elite, Fixedsys, and Monaco. There exist Roman, Blackletter, and Gaelic monospaced typefaces.

Symbol typefaces[link]

Symbol, or Dingbat, typefaces consist of symbols (such as decorative bullets, clock faces, railroad timetable symbols, CD-index, or TV-channel enclosed numbers) rather than normal text characters. Examples include Zapf Dingbats, Sonata, and Wingdings.

CJK typefaces[link]

CJK, or Chinese, Japanese and Korean typefaces consist of wide ranging sets of glyphs. They include all of the ASCII, European Roman glyphs and Cyrillic glyphs and often Persian, Hebrew and Arabic. Most uniquely, however their native character sets' glyphs are designed to fit within a square. This is somewhat similar to monospaced type faces, but allows for vertical, horizontal, right-to-left and left-to-right orientation. They also include a set of Extended Latin characters with glyphs and metrics redesigned for the square in addition to the standard variety. This commonly results in complex, often conflicting rules and conventions of mixing languages in type.

Mincho[link]

With CJK typefaces, Mincho style tends to be something like Serifs for the end of stems, and in fact includes Serifed glyphs for Extended Latin and Cyrillic sets within a typeface.

Gothic[link]

With CJK typefaces, Goth style tends to be something like Sans Serifs with squarish, cut off end-caps for the end of stems, and in fact includes Sans Serif glyphs for Extended Latin and Cyrillic sets within a typeface.

Maru[link]

With CJK typefaces, Maru style tends to be something like Sans Serifs with rounded end-caps for the end of stems, and in fact includes Rounded Sans Serif glyphs for Extended Latin and Cyrillic sets within a typeface.

Display type[link]

Display type refers to the use of type at large sizes, perhaps 30 points or larger. Some typefaces are considered useful solely at display sizes, and hence are known as display faces. For typefaces used across a wide range of sizes, in the days of metal type, each size was cut individually, or even if pantographically scaled would often have adjustments made to the design for larger or smaller sizes, making a "display" face have distinct differences.

In metal type, if present in smaller sizes, ink traps (small indentations at the junctions of letter strokes) would be eliminated at display sizes. In smaller point sizes, these ink traps were intended to fill up when the letterpress was over-inked, providing some latitude in press operation while maintaining the intended appearance of the type design. At larger sizes, these ink traps were not necessary, so display faces did not have them. Today's digital typefaces are most often used for offset lithography, electrophotographic printing or other processes that are not subject to the ink supply variations of letterpress, so ink traps have largely disappeared from use.

When digital fonts feature a display variation, it is to accommodate other stylistic differences that may benefit type used at larger point sizes. Such differences, which were standard in metal type, are rare in digital type, outside of the very high end of type design. They can include: a lower x-height, higher contrast between thick and thin strokes, less space between letters, and slightly more condensed letter shapes.^[15]

Decades into the desktop publishing revolution, few typographers with metal foundry type experience are still working, and few digital typefaces are optimized specifically for different sizes, so the misuse of the term display typeface as a synonym for ornamental type has become widespread; properly speaking, ornamental typefaces are a subcategory of display typefaces.

Texts used to demonstrate typefaces[link]

A sentence that uses all of the alphabet (a pangram), such as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", is often used as a design aesthetic tool to demonstrate the personality of a typeface's characters in a setting (because it displays all the letters of the alphabet). For extended settings of typefaces graphic designers often use nonsense text (commonly referred to as greeking), such as lorem ipsum or Latin text such as the beginning of Cicero's In Catilinam. Greeking is used in typography to determine a typeface's colour, or weight and style, and to demonstrate an overall typographic aesthetic prior to actual type setting.

Intellectual property[link]

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (June 2010)

In Eltra Corp. v. Ringer,^[16] the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that typeface designs are not subject to copyright. However, novel and non-obvious typeface designs are subject to protection by design patents.^[17] Digital fonts that embody a particular design are often subject to copyright as computer programs.^[18][19] The names of the typefaces can become trademarked. As a result of these various means of legal protection, sometimes the same typeface exists in multiple names and implementations.

Some elements of the software engines used to display fonts on computers have or had software patents associated with them. In particular, Apple Inc. patented some of the hinting algorithms for TrueType, requiring open source alternatives such as FreeType to use different algorithms until Apple's TrueType hinting patents expired in May 2010.^[20]

Although typeface design is not subject to copyright in the United States under the 1976 Copyright Act, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc. (No. C95-20710 RMW, N.D. Cal. January 30, 1998)^[21] found that there was original authorship in the placement of points on a computer font's outline; i.e., because a given outline can be expressed in myriad ways, a particular selection and placement of points has sufficient originality to qualify for copyright.

Some western countries, including the United Kingdom, extend copyright protection to typeface designs.^[22] However, this has no impact on protection in the United States, because all of the major copyright treaties and agreements to which the U.S. is a party (such as the Berne Convention, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and TRIPS) operate under the principle of national treatment, under which a country is obligated to provide no greater or lesser protection to works from other countries than it provides to domestically produced works.

See also[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Garfield, Simon (2010), Just my Type: a Book About Fonts, Profile 

External links[link]

Look up typeface in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• ABC typography - Introduction to the most famous typefaces
• Named parts of a letter: Type Anatomy 1.0
• Nwalsh.com, comp.fonts FAQ

v t e Typography terminology Page Column Canons of page construction Margin Page numbering Pagination Pull quote Recto and verso Paragraph Alignment Justification Leading River Sentence spacing Widows and orphans Character Typeface anatomy Counter Diacritics Dingbat Glyph Initial Kerning Letter-spacing Ligature Subscript and superscript Swash Text figures Capitalization Letter case Small caps CamelCase Petite caps All caps Vertical aspects Ascender Descender Baseline Cap height Median Overshoot x-height Classifications Roman type Antiqua (Old Style) Transitional Didone (Modern) Serif Slab serif Sans-serif Script Blackletter type Textualis Rotunda Schwabacher Fraktur Gaelic type Angular Uncial Punctuation Dashes Hanging punctuation Hyphenation Quotation mark Prime mark Typesetting Calligraphy ETAOIN SHRDLU Font Computer font Font catalog Letterpress Lorem ipsum Movable type Pangram Phototypesetting Punchcutting Type design Typeface Type foundry Microtypography Typographic units Point Pica Cicero Em En Figure space Thin space Paren space Agate Measure Digital typography Font formats Typesetting software Character encoding Rasterization Hinting

This article or section needs attention from an expert on the subject. The following WikiProjects or Portals may be able to help recruit one: • WikiProject Biography • WikiProject Typography If another appropriate WikiProject or portal exists, please adjust this template accordingly. (August 2008)

A type designer, sometimes mistakenly called a typographer, is a person who designs typefaces. Some type designers are employed by type foundries, or operate them. Others work independently. A partial list of type designers follows by country, with a signature typeface or two for significant designers. Schools of type design sometimes developed in specific western nations, but type design generally has not been defined by nationality.

Australia[link]

• Stephen Banham
• Dan Milne

Wayne Thompson

Brazil[link]

• Eduardo Recife

Colombia[link]

• Carlos Fabián Camargo (Modelia)
• Manuel Corradine (Legendaria, Mússica)
• Julián Moncada (Lemona)
• Viviana Monsalve (Enriqueta, Magra)
• César Puertas (Bolívar, Buendía, Obliqua, Robofan, Urbana)
• Sergio Ramírez (Sra. Stencil)
• John Vargas Beltrán (Muisca)

Canada[link]

• Gerald Giampa
• Ray Larabie
• Jim Rimmer
• Nick Shinn (Brown, FF Fontesque, Walburn)

Czech Republic[link]

• Oldřich Menhart, (Ceska Unciala)
• František Štorm
• Jan Rambousek, (Brno Z)
• Josef Týfa

France[link]

• Antoine Augereau
• George Auriol, (Auriol)
• Alexandre de Berny
• Pierre Bézier
• Albert Boton
• Louis Braille
• Camut
• Adolphe Mouron Cassandre (Peignot, 1937)
• Charles Nicolas Cochin
• Simon de Colines
• Jean-Renaud Cuaz
• Firmin Didot
• François Didot
• François-Ambroise Didot
• Henri Didot
• Pierre Didot
• Xavier Dupré
• Roger Excoffon
• François Fournier
• Jean Claude Fournier
• Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune
• Claude Garamond (Garamond)
• Raymond Gid
• Robert Granjon
• Hector Guimard
• François Guyot
• Pierre Haultin
• Franck Jalleau
• Jean Jannon
• Nicolas Jenson
• Molé-le-Jeune
• Charles Peignot
• Gustave Peignot
• Louis Perrin
• Christophe Plantin
• Jean-François Porchez
• Charles Plumet
• Thierry Puyfoulhoux
• Jacques Sabon
• Wynkyn de Worde
• Christophe Féray

Germany[link]

• Otto Arpke (Taiko)
• Johann Christian Bauer (Fette Fraktur)
• Konrad Friedrich Bauer (Fortune)
• Walter Baum (Fortune)
• Lucian Bernhard (Bernhard Gothic)
• Peter Behrens (Bahrens-Schrift)
• Georg Belwe (Belwe Roman)
• Jakob Erbar (Erbar, Candida, Feder Grotesk, Koloss)
• Johann Michael Fleischman (Fleischman)
• Johann Gutenberg
• Karlgeorg Hoefer (Elegance, Permanent)
• Heinrich Jost (Aeterna)
• Erhard Kaiser (DTL Fleischmann, DTL Prokyon)
• Rudolf Koch (Kabel, Neuland, Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch)
• Helmut Matheis (Charme, Compliment, Mathies Mobil, Primadonna, Slogan)
• Friedrich Poppl (Poppl-Pontifex, 1974; Laudatio, 1982)
• Paul Renner (Futura, 1927)
• Johannes Schweitzer (Dominante)
• K. Sommer (Dynamo)
• Erik Spiekermann (FF Meta, ITC Officina, FF Info, FF Unit and others)
• Herbert Thannhaeuser (Adastra)
• Georg Trump (Trump Mediaeval)
• Jan Tschichold (Sabon)
• Kurt Weidemann (ITC Weidemann, Biblica, Corporate ASE)
• Hans Wagner (Welt, Wolfram)
• Carlos Winkow designer for the Nacional Typefoundry of Madrid
• Berthold Wolpe (Albertus)
• Gudrun Zapf von Hesse (Diotima, Alcuin)
• Hermann Zapf (Palatino, Optima, Zapf Chancery, Zapf Dingbats, Zapfino)

India[link]

• R K Joshi (Indic Scripts for Microsoft)
• S K Mohanty (Indic Scripts Type Design)
• Hashim P M (25 Typeface designs in Malayalam, 1 in Roman and 5 Symbol typefaces)
• Hussain K H (Malayalam Unicode fonts named Rachana and Meera)
• Hiran Venugopalan (Dyuthi, Ornamental Malayalam Unicode font, 2 Latin fonts named Perizia and Rufscript)
• Satya Rajpurohit (Fedra Hindi, 2009; Kohinoor Devanagari, 2010; Kohinoor Latin, 2010; Kohinoor Tamil, 2010; ITF Devanagari, 2011; Kohinoor Gurmukhi, 2011)
• Karambir Singh Rohilla ( Font Leader at Artech info system )
• Manoj Kumar Choudhury ( Lead Font Designer, Type Design at MonotypeImaging )

Italy[link]

• Raffaello Bertieri (Inkunabula, Paganini)
• Giambattista Bodoni (Bodoni)
• Alessandro Butti (Microgramma, Rondine)
• Francesco Griffo (Bembo, Poliphilus)
• Aldus Manutius
• Giulio da Milano (Neon, Razionale, Veltro)
• Aldo Novarese (Novarese, Eurostile, Fenice, Recta, Microgramma, Stop, Expert, Magister, Garaldus, Normandia, Recta, Estro, ...)
• Piero De Macchi (Pancarré, Nomina, Norberto, Iveco, Paloma, ...)
• Giangiorgio Fuga (GFT Venexiano, GFT Murrina, GFT Murano Glass, GFT Lespresso Sans, GFT Yamaha Motors, ...)

Netherlands[link]

• Evert Bloemsma (FF Balance, FF Cocon, FF Avance, FF Legato)
• Erik van Blokland (FF Beowolf, FF Erikrighthand, FF Trixie, FF Kosmik, FF Zapata)
• Petr van Blokland (Proforma, Productus)
• Jos Buivenga (Anivers, Calluna, Delicious, Fontin, Museo, Tallys)
• Wim Crouwel (Catalogue, Fodor, Gridnik, New Alphabet, Stedelijk)
• Christoffel van Dijck (Monotype Van Dijck, Hollander and DTL Elzevir are based on his designs)
• Bram de Does (TEFF Trinité, TEFF Lexicon)
• Gerben Dollen (Actium)
• Cas van de Goor (Phi)
• Lucas de Groot (Thesis, TheAntiqua, Corpid, Calibri)
• Sem Hartz (Monotype Juliana)
• Jan van Krimpen (Spectrum, Romanée, Romulus, Haarlemmer, Lutetia, Cancellaresca Bastarda)
• Martin Majoor (FF Scala, FF Scala Sans, Telefont, FF Seria, FF Seria Sans, FF Nexus Serif, FF Nexus Sans, FF Nexus Mix)
• Christoph Noordzij (TEFF Collis)
• Gerrit Noordzij (TEFF Burgundica, TEFF Ruse)
• S.H. de Roos (aka Sjoerd de Roos (Hollandsche Mediæval, Grotius, Egmont, Libria, De Roos, Zilvertype)
• Artur Schmal (OT Parry, OT Parry Grotesque)
• Fred Smeijers (OurType Arnhem, Fresco, Sansa, DTL Nobel, TEFF Renard, FF Quadraat)
• Gerard Unger (Allianz, Amerigo, ANWB fonts, DTL Argo, Big Vesta, Capitoleum, Capitoleum News, Coranto, Decoder, Delftse Poort, Demos, Flora, Gulliver, Hollander, Markeur, M.O.L., Oranda, DTL Paradox, Praxis, Swift, Swift 2.0, Vesta)
• Albert-Jan Pool (FF DIN, URW Imperial, URW Linear, Mauritius I, FF OCR-F, Jet Set Sans, DTL HEIN GAS, Regenbogen Bold)

New Zealand[link]

• Joseph Churchward
• Kris Sowersby
• Jack Yan

Poland[link]

• Dariusz Nowak-Nova (Linotype Fresh Ewka, Linotype NoweAteny)

Portugal[link]

• Mário Feliciano (Morgan, Flama, Rongel, Merlo, Stella...)
• Dino dos Santos (Andrade, Apud, Dobra, Glosa, Leitura, Prelo, Velino,...)
• Ricardo Santos (Van, Atlantica, Focus, Lab, Lisboa,...)
• Rui Abreu (Foral, Catacumba, Orbe...)
• Hugo D'Alte (Rolland)
• Miguel Sousa (Calouste)
• Rúben Dias (Oban)
• Olinda Martins (Bazar)

Russia[link]

• Galina Bannikova (1901-1972) ^{[ru 1][ru 2]}
• Alexey Chekulaev (b.1949) ^{[ru 3]}
• Valery Golyzhenkov ^{[ru 4]}
• Yuri Gordon (b.1958) ^{[ru 5]}
• Ilya Davidovich Krichevsky (b.1907) ^{[ru 1][ru 6]}
• Nikolai Kudryashev (1909-1991) ^{[ru 7]}
• Anatoliy Kudryavtsev (b.1946) ^{[ru 1][ru 8]}
• Pavel Kuzanyan (1901-1992) ^{[ru 1][ru 9]}
• Vadim Lazursky (1909-1994) ^{[ru 1][ru 10]}
• Mikhail Rovensky (1902-1996) ^{[ru 1][ru 11]}
• Ilya Ruderman (b.1979) ^{[ru 12]}
• Tagir Safayev (b.1950) ^{[ru 13]}
• Isay Slutsker (1924-2002) ^{[ru 1][ru 14]}
• Alexander Tarbeev (b.1965) ^{[ru 1][ru 15]}
• Solomon Telingater (1903-1969) ^{[ru 1][ru 16]}
• Vladimir Yefimov (b.1949-2012) ^{[ru 1][ru 17]}

Serbia[link]

• Hieromonk Makarije

Slovakia[link]

• Zuzana Licko (Mrs Eaves)

South Africa[link]

• Margaret Calvert (Transport)

Spain[link]

• Eudald Pradell, punchcutter.

Sweden[link]

• Akke Kumlien (Kumlien Medieval)
• Karl-Erik Forsberg (Berling, Lunda, Carolus, Ericus, Gustavus, Polhem, Carolina Script, Aros Antiqua, and more)
• Bo Berndal (Sispos and Sisneg. Old Swedish standard (SIS 030011, 1973) for public road signs, displays, etc.)
• Franko Luin

Switzerland[link]

• Adrian Frutiger (Frutiger, Univers)
• Max Caflisch (Columna)
• Max Miedinger (Helvetica)
• Christian Mengelt (Sinova)

Thailand[link]

• Anuthin Wongsunkakon

United Kingdom[link]

• Charles Robert Ashbee (Endevour, Prayer Book)
• Richard Austin (Bel, Porson)
• Phil Baines (Can You?, Vere Dignum)
• Paul Barnes (Guardian Egyptian, with Christian Schwartz, 2005)
• Jonathan Barnbrook (Mason, Exocet, 1996 released through Emigre fonts, Nylon, Prototype, Bastarda)
• John Baskerville
• Neville Brody (Arcadia, 1986, Blur, Auto-Suggestion))
• Christopher Burke (type designer) (Pragma)
• Matthew Carter (Snell Roundhand, 1965; Shelley Script, 1972; Galliard, 1978; Skia, Georgia, Mantinia, all 1993; Verdana, 1996; Tahoma, 1999)
• William Caslon (Caslon)
• Roy Cole (Lina, 2004)
• Timothy Donaldson (Humana, Postino)
• Phil Garnham (FS Rufus FS Conrad FS Sally) Fontsmith
• Eric Gill (Gill Sans, Perpetua, both 1928; Joanna, 1937)
• Gareth Hague (August, Elephant, Jackdaw, Metsys, Sister) Alias
• Robert Harling
• Ashley Havinden (Ashley Script, 1955, Ashley Inline, 1993)
• Justin Howes (Founder's Caslon, 1998)
• Rian Hughes (Blackcurrant, Custard and numerous others released through Device)
• Edward Johnston (Johnston, 1916)
• Khosro Khosrovani (GrafEast Farsi & Arabic Typefaces) since 1982
• Marcus Leis Allion (Priori and Priori Acute (Emigre) Hopeless Diamond, Regime, (Virus) Pleasure, Pukka, Puritan) UNDT Type Design
• Seb Lester (Scene, Soho, Neo Sans and Neo Tech)
• Bruno Maag (Tesco, Tottenham Hotspur, Telewest, Urban Splash, BT, BMW, Vodafone, Nokia Pure) Dalton Maag Type Design
• Stanley Morison (Times New Roman)
• Miles Newlyn (Ferox, Frank, Modena, Luvbug, Missionary (Emigre))
• Luke Prowse (Times Modern)
• David Quay (Coptek, Kade, Vegas) The Foundry
• Freda Sack (Ignatius, Proteus) The Foundry
• Darren Scott (Berliner, Mechanic Gothic, Aggregate, Rub On, Press On) Darren Scott Typographics & Truth Design
• Jason Smith (FS Kitty FS Clerkenwell FS Alvar FS Sophie FS Ingrid FS Albert) Fontsmith
• Jeremy Tankard (Corbel, Blue Island)
• Scot Williams (Archi, Typewriter) A2 Type
• Walter Tracy (Jubilee, Adsans, Telegraph Modern, 1969 Times Europa, 1972)

United States[link]

• Jill Bell (Gigi, Smack, Carumba, Hollyweird, Bruno, Swank)
• Linn Boyd Benton (Century)
• Morris Fuller Benton (America's most prolific type designer, having completed 221 total typefaces, including: Franklin Gothic, Century Schoolbook, News Gothic, Bank Gothic)
• David Berlow (Charcoal, Bureau Grotesque)
• Lucian Bernhard (Bernhard Gothic, Bernhard Modern)
• Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, partners in design (Lucida family)
• Roger Black Digital Type Designer Industry Pioneer
• Joseph Blumenthal, (Spiral, Emerson)
• Brian J. Bonislawsky
• Alfred R. Bosco (Romany)
• Philip Bouwsma
• William H. Bradley
• Mark van Bronkhorst (ITC Conduit, MVB Verdigris, MVB Embarcadero)
• Jackson Burke (Trade Gothic, 1948)
• Leslie Cabarga
• Tom Carnase (Busorama, 1970)
• Jason Castle (Goudy Trajan, Carisma, Dionisio, Sonrisa)
• Rodrigo Xavier Cavazos (Alembic, Eidetic Neo, Faceplate Sans)
• Warren Chappell, (Lydian series)
• Thomas Maitland Cleland (Della Robbia)
• Elizabeth Colwell (Colwell Handletter)
• Vincent Connare (Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Magpie)
• Oswald Bruce 'Oz' Cooper (Cooper Black, 1921)
• Freeman Craw (Ad Lib, Craw Clarendon)
• Carl Crossgrove (Mundo Sans, Biome, Beorcana)
• Nick Curtis (ITC Beeswax)
• Rick Cusick (Nyx)
• Joshua Darden
• Chuck Davis
• Whedon Davis (Franklin Gothic Condensed Italic)
• Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
• Chank Diesel
• Devon DeLapp
• Matt Desmond (Stomper)
• Ernest F. Detterer (Eusebius)
• Peter Dombrezian (Dom Casual)
• Jeremy Dooley (Aviano)
• Michael Doret (Metroscript, Deliscript, DeLuxe Gothic, Orion MD, PowerStation)
• William Addison Dwiggins (36 completed typefaces including Electra, Caledonia, Metro)
• William E. Fink (Greenwich)
• Robert Foster (Pericles)
• Tobias Frere-Jones (Interstate, Gotham, Reactor, plus numerous custom designs for publications including the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Esquire, NY Times Magazine)
• Sidney Gaunt (46 typefaces including Adstyle, Pencraft)
• William S. Gillies (Gillies Light, Gillies Bold)
• Bertram Goodhue (Cheltenham)
• Frederic Goudy (90 completed typefaces including: Copperplate, 1905; Goudy Old Style, 1915; Berkeley Oldstyle, 1938)
• James Grieshaber
• Baruch Gorkin (Ariel Hebrew, New Peninim)
• Chauncey H. Griffith (34 typefaces including Bell Gothic, 1937; Poster Bodoni, 1938)
• Victor Hammer (American Uncial)
• Berton Hasebe
• George Hauser (Hauser Script)
• Cyrus Highsmith (Benton Sans, together with Tobias Frere-Jones)
• Sol Hess (house designer for Lanston Monotype Company where he completed 85 typefaces)
• Jonathan Hoefler (Knockout, Hoefler Text, Gotham, Archer, Sentinel, partner with Tobias Frere-Jones)
• Kris Holmes (Lucida)
• Paul D. Hunt
• Dard Hunter (private faces for his Mountain House Press)
• Dard Hunter, Jr. (private faces for his father's Mountain House Press)
• Walter Huxley (Huxley Vertical)
• Susan Kare (original Apple Macintosh typeface, 1984)
• Max R. Kaufmann (Kaufmann Script, Balloon)
• Richard Kegler
• Donald Knuth (Computer Modern)
• Carl Stephen Junge (Swagger Capitals)
• Jess Latham (Shimmer, Pink Martini)
• Kent Lew (Whitman)
• Patricia Lillie
• Richard Lipton (Arrus, Bremen)
• Herb Lubalin (Lubalin Graph)
• Richard N. McArthur (Old Dutch)
• Douglas Crawford McMurtrie (Ultra-Modern Roman)
• R. Hunter Middleton (99 typefaces including: Stellar, Coronet, Stencil, Delphian, Umbra )
• James Montalbano (Clearview)
• Dave Nalle (Abaddon, Hesperides, Ligeia, Ironworks, Folkard)
• William Dana Orcutt (Humanistic)
• Hrant H. Papazian
• Wadsworth A. Parker (Lexington, Gallia)
• Jim Parkinson
• Robert Petrick
• Joseph W. Phinney (Abbott Old Style, Cloister Black (with M.F. Benton), Camelot (with F. Goudy))
• Gerry Powell (Onyx, Stencil)
• Will Ransom (Parsons)
• John L. “Bud” Renshaw (Franklin Gothic Wide)
• Frank H. Riley (Grayda)
• Bruce Rogers (Centaur)
• Tim Rolands
• Guido + Lawrence Rosa (Rosa Roman + Italic)
• David J. Ross (Manicotti)
• Rudolph Ruzicka (Fairfield)
• Stefan Sagmeister (Sagmeister, Inc.)
• Stuart Sandler (Leisure Script)
• Michael Scarpitti (typeface based on Latin inscriptions)
• Christian Schwartz (Neutraface, Amplitude, Guardian Egyptian)
• Ralph Fletcher Seymour (private typefaces for his Alderbrink Press)
• Mark Simonson (Proxima Nova, Coquette, Mostra Nuova)
• Robert Slimbach (Minion, Adobe Garamond, Utopia, Garamond Premier)
• Dan X. Solo
• Brian Sooy
• Robert E. Smith (Park Avenue, Brush)
• Willard T. Sniffin (Nubian, Rivoli, Piranesi)
• Sara Soskolne (Gotham with Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones)
• Tony Stan (ITC Century)
• Sumner Stone (Stone Sans, Stone Serif, Stone Informal, Stone Print, Cycles)
• Ilene Strizver
• Neil Summerour (Aaux, Baka, Epic, Organic )
• Judith Sutcliffe
• Tommy Thompson (titling series for Saturday Evening Post and Colliers)
• Christina Torre
• Howard Allen Trafton (Trafton Script, Cartoon)
• George F. Trenholm (Trenholm Oldstyle)
• Carol Twombly (Lithos, Myriad (co-designer), Trajan, Charlemagne, Nueva, Adobe Caslon)
• Frederic Warde (Arrighi)
• Jim Wasco (Elegy, Harmonia Sans, Mythos)
• Robert Wiebking (31 typefaces as a designer, including: Artcraft, Munder, Advertisers Gothic. Many more as a punch-cutter.)
• George Williams (Caslon Roman, Monospace)
• Delve Withrington (Blot Test)
• Doyald Young (Young Baroque, Eclat)
• John Zimmermann (head matrix maker for Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry)
• John Hudson (Gabriola)

See also[link]

• List of freeware type designers
• Typographers

References[link]

Russia[link]

Other[link]

External links[link]

• Typophile: Type Designers list
• Type designers, typographers and other font people

Steven R. Matteson (b. 1965, Chicago, Illinois) is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices. He is the designer of the Microsoft Windows Vista system font family Segoe;^[1] of the Droid font collection used in the Android mobile device platform,^[2] and designed the brand and user-interface fonts used in both the original Microsoft Xbox and the Xbox 360.^[3]

Biography[link]

Matteson is a 1988 graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology where he studied typography, design and printing. Upon graduation he spent two years learning font hinting technology while employed at laser-printer manufacturer QMS.

In 1990 Matteson began work at Monotype Corporation (later Agfa-Monotype) contributing to the creation of the Windows 3.1x core TrueType fonts: Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New.^[4]

Matteson produced fonts for the Agfa-Monotype library (such as Goudy Ornate and Gill Floriated Capitals) and directed custom-font design for companies including Agilent Technologies,^[5] Symantec and Microsoft.^[6] Matteson’s mono-spaced font design Andale Mono is bundled with Mac OS X and was one of the original Core fonts for the Web.

Matteson directed custom type development for Agfa-Monotype until 2003. In 2004 he became a founding partner and Director of Type Design at Ascender Corporation in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.^[7]

In 2005 Matteson designed the font family Convection for use in the branding and user-interface of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console. Matteson also designed the user-interface font used in Microsoft’s Zune music player.^[8] In 2007 software maker Red Hat released the open-source Liberation fonts family designed by Matteson.^[9] Also in 2007, Matteson designed the Droid family of fonts included in the Android mobile-phone platform supported by the Open Handset Alliance.

Fonts designed by Steve Matteson[link]

See also[link]

• Ascender Corporation
• Droid fonts
• Liberation fonts
• Monotype Corporation
• Segoe UI

External links[link]

• http://www.myfonts.com/person/matteson/steve/
• http://www.identifont.com/show?5LB
• http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/designer/steve_matteson/
• http://www.ascendercorp.com/stevepage.html
• http://typophile.com/node/16223?

References[link]

Barack Obama
44th President of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office January 20, 2009
Vice President	Joe Biden
Preceded by	George W. Bush
United States Senator from Illinois
In office January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Preceded by	Peter Fitzgerald
Succeeded by	Roland Burris
Member of the Illinois Senate from the 13th District
In office January 8, 1997 – November 4, 2004
Preceded by	Alice Palmer
Succeeded by	Kwame Raoul
Personal details
Born	Barack Hussein Obama II (1961-08-04) August 4, 1961 (age 50)[1] Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.[2]
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Michelle Robinson (1992–present)
Children	Malia (born 1998) Sasha (born 2001)
Residence	White House (Official) Chicago, Illinois (Private)
Alma mater	Occidental College Columbia University (B.A.) Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Profession	Community organizer Lawyer Constitutional law professor Author
Religion	Christianity[3]
Awards	Nobel Peace Prize
Signature
Website	barackobama.com

	This article is part of a series on Barack Obama
Background Illinois Senate US Senate Political positions Public image Family 2008 primaries Obama–Biden campaign Transition Inauguration Electoral history Presidency Timeline '09 '10 '11 '12 First 100 days Nobel Peace Prize Re-election campaign

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other domestic policy initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, and the Budget Control Act of 2011. In May 2012, he became the first sitting U.S. president to openly support legalizing same-sex marriage. In foreign policy, he ended the war in Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. involvement in the 2011 Libya military intervention, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

Early life and career[link]

Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,^[2][4][5] and is the first President to have been born in Hawaii.^[6] His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry,^[7] along with Scottish, Irish, German, and Swiss.^{[8][9][10][11][12]} His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.^[13][14] The couple married on February 2, 1961,^[15] separated when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University on scholarship, and divorced in 1964.^[13] Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.^[16]

After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta.^[4][17] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School.^[18]

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.^[19] Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year before dying of ovarian cancer.^[15][20]

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."^[14] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.^[21] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."^[22] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."^[23] At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama described his high-school drug use as a great moral failure.^[24]

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to divest from South Africa in response to its policy of apartheid.^[25] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks.^[25] Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations^[26] and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation,^[27] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.^[28][29]

Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School[link]

Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.^[29][30] He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.^[31] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.^[32] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.^[33] He returned to Kenya in August 2006 for a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya.^[34]

In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,^[35] and president of the journal in his second year.^[31][36] During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.^[37] After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude^[38] from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.^[35] Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention^[31][36] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,^[39] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.^[39]

University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney[link]

In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.^[39][40] He then taught at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law.^[41]

From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, leading Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.^[42] In 1993, he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. His law license became inactive in 2002.^[43]

From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project; and of the Joyce Foundation.^[29] He served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999.^[29]

Legislative career: 1997–2008[link]

State Senator: 1997–2004[link]

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which at that time spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park – Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn.^[44] Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation that reformed ethics and health care laws.^[45] He sponsored a law that increased tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare.^[46] In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.^[47]

Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was reelected again in 2002.^[48] In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.^[49]

In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority.^[50] He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained, and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.^[46][51] During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.^[52] Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the U.S. Senate.^[53]

U.S. Senate campaign[link]

County results of the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Counties in blue were won by Obama.

In May 2002, Obama commissioned a poll to assess his prospects in a 2004 U.S. Senate race; he created a campaign committee, began raising funds, and lined up political media consultant David Axelrod by August 2002. Obama formally announced his candidacy in January 2003.^[54]

Obama was an early opponent of the George W. Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[55] On October 2, 2002, the day President Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War,^[56] Obama addressed the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally,^[57] and spoke out against the war.^[58] He addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.^[59]

Decisions by Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald and his Democratic predecessor Carol Moseley Braun to not participate in the election resulted in wide-open Democratic and Republican primary contests involving fifteen candidates.^[60] In the March 2004 primary election, Obama won in an unexpected landslide—which overnight made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party, started speculation about a presidential future, and led to the reissue of his memoir, Dreams from My Father.^[61] In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention,^[62] seen by 9.1 million viewers. His speech was well received and elevated his status within the Democratic Party.^[63]

Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004.^[64] Six weeks later, Alan Keyes accepted the Republican nomination to replace Ryan.^[65] In the November 2004 general election, Obama won with 70 percent of the vote.^[66]

U.S. Senator: 2005–2008[link]

Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 3, 2005,^[67] becoming the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus.^[68] CQ Weekly characterized him as a "loyal Democrat" based on analysis of all Senate votes in 2005–2007. Obama announced on November 13, 2008, that he would resign his Senate seat on November 16, 2008, before the start of the lame-duck session, to focus on his transition period for the presidency.^[69]

Legislation[link]

Obama cosponsored the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act.^[70] He introduced two initiatives that bore his name: Lugar–Obama, which expanded the Nunn–Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept to conventional weapons;^[71] and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which authorized the establishment of USAspending.gov, a web search engine on federal spending.^[72] On June 3, 2008, Senator Obama—along with Senators Tom Carper, Tom Coburn, and John McCain—introduced follow-up legislation: Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008.^[73]

Obama sponsored legislation that would have required nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities of radioactive leaks, but the bill failed to pass in the full Senate after being heavily modified in committee.^[74] Regarding tort reform, Obama voted for the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which grants immunity from civil liability to telecommunications companies complicit with NSA warrantless wiretapping operations.^[75]

Obama and U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) visit a Russian facility for dismantling mobile-missiles (August 2005).^[76]

In December 2006, President Bush signed into law the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor.^[77] In January 2007, Obama and Senator Feingold introduced a corporate jet provision to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which was signed into law in September 2007.^[78] Obama also introduced Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections,^[79] and the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007,^[80] neither of which was signed into law.

Later in 2007, Obama sponsored an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act to add safeguards for personality-disorder military discharges.^[81] This amendment passed the full Senate in the spring of 2008.^[82] He sponsored the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act supporting divestment of state pension funds from Iran's oil and gas industry, which has not passed committee; and co-sponsored legislation to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism.^[83] Obama also sponsored a Senate amendment to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing one year of job protection for family members caring for soldiers with combat-related injuries.^[84]

Committees[link]

Obama held assignments on the Senate Committees for Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Veterans' Affairs through December 2006.^[85] In January 2007, he left the Environment and Public Works committee and took additional assignments with Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.^[86] He also became Chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs.^[87] As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. He met with Mahmoud Abbas before Abbas became President of the Palestinian National Authority, and gave a speech at the University of Nairobi in which he condemned corruption within the Kenyan government.^[88]

Presidential campaigns[link]

2008 presidential campaign[link]

Obama stands on stage with his wife and daughters just before announcing his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, February 10, 2007.

President George W. Bush meets with President-elect Obama in the Oval Office on November 10, 2008.

On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.^[89][90] The choice of the announcement site was viewed as symbolic because it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic "House Divided" speech in 1858.^[89][91] Obama emphasized issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care,^[92] in a campaign that projected themes of "hope" and "change".^[93]

A large number of candidates entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The field narrowed to a duel between Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton after early contests, with the race remaining close throughout the primary process but with Obama gaining a steady lead in pledged delegates due to better long-range planning, superior fundraising, dominant organizing in caucus states, and better exploitation of delegate allocation rules.^[94] On June 7, 2008, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama.^[95]

On August 23, Obama announced his selection of Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate.^[96] Biden was selected from a field speculated to include former Indiana Governor and Senator Evan Bayh and Virginia Governor Tim Kaine.^[97] At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Hillary Clinton called for her supporters to endorse Obama, and she and Bill Clinton gave convention speeches in his support.^[98] Obama delivered his acceptance speech, not at the center where the Democratic National Convention was held, but at Invesco Field at Mile High to a crowd of over 75,000; the speech was viewed by over 38 million people worldwide.^[99][100]

During both the primary process and the general election, Obama's campaign set numerous fundraising records, particularly in the quantity of small donations.^[101] On June 19, 2008, Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976.^[102]

McCain was nominated as the Republican candidate and the two engaged in three presidential debates in September and October 2008.^[103] On November 4, Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to 173 received by McCain.^[104] Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote to McCain's 45.7 percent.^[105] He became the first African American to be elected president.^[106] Obama delivered his victory speech before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Chicago's Grant Park.^[107]

2012 presidential campaign[link]

On April 4, 2011, Obama announced his re-election campaign for 2012 in a video titled "It Begins with Us" that he posted on his website and filed election papers with the Federal Election Commission.^{[108][109][110]} As the incumbent president he ran almost unopposed in the Democratic Party presidential primaries,^[111] and on April 3, 2012, Obama had secured the 2778 convention delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.^[112]

Presidency[link]

First days[link]

Barack Obama takes the oath of office as President of the United States.

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President, and Joe Biden as Vice President, took place on January 20, 2009. In his first few days in office, Obama issued executive orders and presidential memoranda directing the U.S. military to develop plans to withdraw troops from Iraq.^[113] He ordered the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp,^[114] but Congress prevented the closure by refusing to appropriate the required funds.^{[115][116][117]} Obama reduced the secrecy given to presidential records,^[118] and changed procedures to promote disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.^[119] He also reversed George W. Bush's ban on federal funding to foreign establishments that allow abortions.^[120]

Domestic policy[link]

The first bill signed into law by Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, relaxing the statute of limitations for equal-pay lawsuits.^[121] Five days later, he signed the reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover an additional 4 million uninsured children.^[122] In March 2009, Obama reversed a Bush-era policy which had limited funding of embryonic stem cell research and pledged to develop "strict guidelines" on the research.^[123]

Barack Obama speaking at Joint session of Congress with Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on February 24, 2009

Obama appointed two women to serve on the Supreme Court in the first two years of his Presidency. Sonia Sotomayor, nominated by Obama on May 26, 2009, to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter, was confirmed on August 6, 2009,^[124] becoming the first Hispanic to be a Supreme Court Justice.^[125] Elena Kagan, nominated by Obama on May 10, 2010, to replace retiring Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, was confirmed on August 5, 2010, bringing the number of women sitting simultaneously on the Court to three, for the first time in American history.^[126]

On September 30, 2009, the Obama administration proposed new regulations on power plants, factories and oil refineries in an attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to curb global warming.^[127][128]

On October 8, 2009, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a measure that expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.^[129][130]

On March 30, 2010, Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, a reconciliation bill which ends the process of the federal government giving subsidies to private banks to give out federally insured loans, increases the Pell Grant scholarship award, and makes changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.^[131][132]

In a major space policy speech in April 2010, Obama announced a planned change in direction at NASA, the U.S. space agency. He ended plans for a return of human spaceflight to the moon and development of the Ares I rocket, Ares V rocket and Constellation program, in favor of funding Earth science projects, a new rocket type, and research and development for an eventual manned mission to Mars, and ongoing missions to the International Space Station.^[133]

On December 22, 2010, Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, fulfilling a key promise made in the 2008 presidential campaign^[134][135] to end the Don't ask, don't tell policy of 1993 that had prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the United States Armed Forces.^[136]