About Corbel

In 2003 Jeremy Tankard was commissioned by Microsoft to design a sans serif typeface to be included in the Windows Vista™ operating system and Office 2008 applications.

At the start of the project the ClearType technology was demonstrated at Microsoft and the character set for the font collection established. Design sketches were made to show the concept and from these several letters were developed to test ideas.

Development [open/close]

Latin, Greek and Cyrillic were designed together from the outset. This allowed for greater harmony across the design. Care was taken to maintain some degree of uniformity in look and feel among the three scripts. Terminal endings and curves are consistent where the structure of the forms allow.

The italic variants of Corbel unite the cursive forms of each script. With Greek the italic forms are very similar to the roman ones, infact the roman forms naturally have a cursive feel. With Cyrillic, the italic forms vary a great deal to their roman conterparts, which are generally quite angular in structure. Where possible cursive traits of letters have been emphasized to create an even flow across the italics and a contrast to the roman letters.

Italic forms [open/close]

Fonts

Live sample

Sample