274 TUGboat, Volume 40 (2019), No. 3

Book review: Carol Twombly: Her brief butbrilliant career in type design,by Nancy Stock-Allen

Karl Berry

Nancy Stock-Allen,Carol Twombly: Her briefbut brilliant career in typedesign. Oak Knoll Press, 2016,hardcover, 176pp., US$49.95,ISBN 978-1584563464.oakknoll.com/pages/books/

125344

The book begins with a welcome overview of womentype designers; although women were employed intype production from at least the 19th century on-ward, the book reports the earliest documented de-sign by a woman was perhaps Belladonna Karten-schrift in 1912, by Hildegard Henning for a Leipzigfoundry. The careers of Gudrun Zapf von Hesse,Fiona Ross, Zuzana Licko, and many others, areall discussed. But as the title indicates, the book’ssubject is Carol Twombly (1959–), an extended casestudy of a designer’s career as digital typographycame of age.

Following the introduction, the book containstwo main parts: Twombly’s student years at theRhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Stanford;and her career at Adobe. A third section presentssamples of her released typefaces, with commentaryfrom Twombly on each, written for the book.

In each section, Stock-Allen describes the rele-vant designs at length, with attention to typographicdetail. Many illustrations are included, from screen-shots of font design software to photographs, frommarked-up proofs of draft letterforms to samples ofthe final type.

Of particular interest to the TEX world is theextensive section on Twombly’s graduate studies atStanford, as one of the inaugural (and, as it turnedout, only) class in the Master’s program in digitaltypography. The program was promulgated by Don-ald Knuth and co-chaired by Charles Bigelow, whohad met Twombly as an undergraduate at RISD andinvited her to Stanford.

Her time there is covered in considerable detail,including classes, conferences, the many visiting typo-graphic luminaries, the computer science vs. artisticchallenges and collaborations, and culminating in im-plementing Hermann Zapf’s Euler design, a projectwidely known in the TEX world.

Following Stanford, Twombly worked at Adobefor a decade, spanning the era from the beginningsof commercial digital type to fonts becoming a com-modity item. Stock-Allen concisely but informativelydescribes both the changing typography milieu asdesktop publishing became common in the world,and Adobe’s changes as a corporation.

Twombly’s first designs for Adobe were the dis-play faces Lithos, Charlemagne, and Trajan, all ofwhich met with commercial success, followed by theAdobe Caslon Pro revival. She was then involvedwith the Multiple Master project at Adobe, for es-sentially its entire duration. Her last project forAdobe was the Chaparral Multiple Master family, ahumanistic slab serif which, unusually, had designaxes for changing serifs (wedge to slab), and opticalsize, as well as the common weight and width axes.

Stock-Allen ends the main text with commentsfrom several noted typographers and historians onthe significance and legacy of Twombly’s work.

As a postlude, Twombly retired from type de-sign (and city living) after leaving Adobe, and nowpursues other artistic interests in a small town nearthe Sierras. As Stock-Allen observes, rhythm andwriting remain an innate part of her art.

The book is superbly designed by the authorand typeset in Twombly’s Adobe Caslon Pro andAdobe Trajan.

� Karl Berrykarl (at) freefriends dot org

tug.org/books

Some of the Chaparral Multiple Master design axes.

recent works: (left) woven and beaded Shekere gourds;(right) detail from mixed media painting.

Karl Berry