Graphic designers have punished Hermann Zapf’s beautiful 1948 design, Palatino, for over a decade by avoiding it. Its crime? Ubiquity. It was everywhere after the desktop publishing revolution put it into the hands of the hoi polloi in the late 1980s. It’s time to forgive. Palatino is a gorgeous, robust font. It shouldn’t suffer because of indiscriminate licensing, or promiscuous distribution.
The greatest weakness of Palatino is, perhaps, its clunky ampersand. Mr. Zapf more than made up for it though, with the lively, energetic italic ampersand. Substitute the italic ampersand for the roman, and you’ve got instant elegance.
November 10, 2007 at 10:55 pm |
Are ampersands acceptable forms of und?
November 12, 2007 at 4:00 pm |
Of course they are! I adore Palatino and don’t care at all that it’s ubiquitous. In fact, it’s rather a good thing that it is, in my view. Italic ampersands are nicer than roman in practically every font, aren’t they?
November 12, 2007 at 4:24 pm |
The italic ampersand is the character that inspires wild creativity in even the most stodgy designs.
November 13, 2007 at 1:06 am |
Did you see the ampersand installation here http://julietdoyle.blogspot.com/2007/10/les-esperluettes.html ? See how ampersands inspire!!
December 20, 2007 at 3:18 am |
I agree that Palatino is a lovely face, although I am guilty of having avoided it in my own work. I have avoided it not because of its promiscuity, however, but because I’ve never liked the lowercase a. That italic ampersand, however, could swing my vote.
February 20, 2008 at 12:33 am |
[...] as some of us use italic ampersands in order to liven up dreary type, designers sometimes turn to ornaments in order to embellish text. [...]
May 26, 2008 at 10:17 am |
I have always liked the Palatino ampersand. It is one of the better ampersands of all fonts, and is very consitant with the basic font design.
October 6, 2008 at 10:52 pm |
Frankly, the only good use of Palatino I can think of is for headings and headlines, and even then it would not be at the top of my list. For body type, I want something that puts a minimum strain on the reader, so I usually default to things like Caslon or Goudy which have high readability indexes. I’m not saying Palatino is bad for this application, but it only maintains its good readability in certain sizes, and even then only for short passages, not page after page.
October 8, 2008 at 8:35 am |
Come to think of it, I never use Palatino for text, though I’ve never thought of it as less readable than the trusty text fonts I use. I experiment with text faces cautiously. I use Bembo and Garamond, but I’ve thrown caution to the wind recently, using Bulmer and Utopia in text laden designs. I purchased Columbus MT years ago, but I have yet to use it.
March 8, 2009 at 4:02 am |
Anybody knows a WordPress theme using Palatino?
Thanks in advance
March 8, 2009 at 3:17 pm |
CSS blog templates usually only use system fonts. This explains the ubiquity of Georgia, and the non-existence of Palatino.
April 19, 2009 at 9:29 am |
[...] as some of us use italic ampersands in order to liven up dreary type, designers sometimes turn to ornaments in order to embellish [...]