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Minion Alternatives

See also: Classic Typefaces

Noah Nazir
M
Last edited June 25, 2018

In designing Minion font, Robert Slimbach was inspired by the timeless beauty of the fonts of the late Renaissance. Minion was created primarily as a traditional text font but adapts well to today's digital technology, presenting the richness of the late baroque forms within modern text formats. This clear, balanced font is suitable for almost any use.

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Don’t treat me like a potato

FF Celeste is a typeface for designers who like the idea of a Bodoni or Walbaum, but look for a robust and readable text face which tempers the sobriety of romance type with friendlier Renaissance-era features. The serifs tend to the triangular and the italics harmonize well with the roman in tone and width. The letterforms are less rationalized and modular than the starkest modern faces, but... Read More

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Utopia, created by Robert Slimbach and presented by Adobe in 1992, was intended to solve a number of typographic problems related to office correspondence. This demanded versatility, so Slimbach created a font family with cuts for text, for titles, extra bold for headlines, small caps, all caps with numerals, old face numerals, fractions, ligatures and scientific markings. Not just its forms,... Read More

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hypothenuses
Funny is an attitude

Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books... Read More

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In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older... Read More

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Humor is reason gone bad

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The first sketches for the FF Clifford typeface were done in 1994. These drew inspiration from Alexander Wilson’s Long Primer Roman type,... Read More

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Even fools are right sometimes

Over the course of 50 years, the charismatic and enterprising Frederic W. Goudy designed more than 100 typefaces; he was the American master of type design in the first half of the twentieth century. Goudy Old Style, designed for American Type Founders in 1915-1916, is the best known of his designs, and forms the basis for a large family of variants. Goudy said he was initially inspired by the... Read More

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Pilgrim is a font family is a re-cut from Linotype from a face that Eric Gill originally has designed for a book published by the Limited Edition Club of New York. Admired for its tranquil dignity, the Pilgrim type is both firm and elegant. It resembles in its general appearance to Gill's Joanna font family. The contrast of the font is not very strong. The serifs are bracketed. Eric Gill, who... Read More

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Careful tiny grass is dreaming

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Law prohibits underwater smoking

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Please do not sit on crocodile

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Never put a sock in a toaster

ITC Legacy® was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and... Read More

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Beware of geeks bearing formulas

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Please do not get over it

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French designer Albert Boton developed FF Tibere as a caps-only titling face for titles and headlines. During the process however he saw... Read More

Christopher Burke
FontFont 1994
Robert Slimbach
Adobe 1989
Sumner Stone
ITC 1987
Frank Hinman Pierpont and Robert Granjon
Monotype 1700
Victor Lardent, Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent Stanley Morison
Monotype 1932
Erik Spiekermann, Christian Schwartz, Kris Sowersby, Ralph du Carrois and Botio Nikoltchev
FontFont 2007
Jean Jannon
Elsner+Flake 1671
Morris Fuller Benton
Linotype 1917
Aldus Manutius and Isabella Chaeva
ParaType
Akira Kobayashi
FontFont 1999
Veronika Burian and José Scaglione
TypeTogether 2008
Frederic W. Goudy and Monotype.Design Studio
Linotype 1915
Eric Gill, Walter Tracy and Linotype Design Studio
Linotype 1953
Michael Harvey
Monotype 2005
Thomas Sokolowski
Elsner+Flake 1998
Claude Garamond and Jan Tschichold
Monotype 1499
Jovica Veljovic
ITC 2010
Jovica Veljovic
ITC 1985
Freda Sack and Adrian Williams
Elsner+Flake
John Baskerville and John Quaranda
ITC 1706
Freda Sack and Adrian Williams
Elsner+Flake 1978
Colin Banks and Steve Matteson
Monotype 1996
Éric de Berranger
Monotype 1999
Ronald Arnholm
ITC 1992
Gerard Unger
Linotype 2009

Elsner+Flake
Morris Fuller Benton and Thomas Maitland Cleland
Elsner+Flake 1917

Elsner+Flake
Albert Boton
FontFont 2003