Claude Garamond

Claude Garamond, also known as Claude Garamont, was a type founder, publisher, punch cutter and a type designer, who was born around the 1480’s in Paris, France, and died in 1561. He was first married to Guillemette Gaultier, and after she died, he was then remarried to Ysabeau Le Fevre.

Garamond worked under the apprenticeship of Antoine Augereau, who was a renaissance printer and punch cutter in Paris, and was also trained by Simon de Colines, a Parisian printer, who was also involved in punch cutting. Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould shape to cast type. Garamond later worked with Geoffroy Tory, a French engraver who was known for adding accents to letters, whose interests in humanist typography and the ancient Greek capital letterforms, may have influenced Garamond’s work.

He worked in the tradition now called old-style serif design, which produced letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen but with a slightly more structured and upright design. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches. His work was so clean there was harmony of design between uppercase, lowercase, and italics letters in a closer and tighter space. He is well known today for the elegance of his typefaces. Many old-style serif typefaces are collectively known as Garamond, which are respectively named after the designer.

The Garamond typeface is normally used for body text and printing. Adobe’s Garamond release contain Greek designs that compromise between Garamond’s upright Latin design and his slanted Greek ones. Some characteristics of Garamond include low x-height (height of lower-case letters), making capitals look relatively large, oblique apexes, and it tends it evokes elegance and airiness. This member of the Roman type family has survived the centuries because of its remarkable readability. As one of the oldest typefaces, Garamond conveys a sense of solid tradition, yet still soft and attractive thanks to its elegantly rounded serifs and its diagonally emphasised strokes.

During Claude Garamond’s time, it was quite difficult for Garamond to get recognition for his work because it was copied on numerous occasions. However, it was after he died in 1561, that his wife sold his work, which later contributed in the Graphic Design world today.

Examples of Claude Garamond’s Garamond typeface: