Janice Wong - Apple Garamond

Apple Garamond (introduced by Tony Stan)

When one think of typefaces on newspapers and magazines, the few things come to their mind are probably miller headline stainless and Farnham display. However, have you ever thought of the marketing fonts of brands like mobile companies and technology firms?

With reference to the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Garamond is adopted as a new corporate front of Apple, called Apple Garamond. It was a combination of the classic Garamond typeface, having the features of a narrow shape and a taller x-height. Basically, apple Garamond was created out of ITC Garamond (introduced by Tony Stan in 1977) which was condensed to 80% of its normal width. However, Apple felt that the existing ITC Garamond was too narrow. Bitstream condensed the font and subtly adjusted the stroke widths and created a postscript font apgram and then delivered to Apple.

AppleGaramond-Light.ttf

AppleGaramond-LightItalic.ttf

AppleGaramond.ttf

AppleGaramond-Italic.ttf

AppleGaramond-Bold.ttf

AppleGaramond-BoldItalic.ttf

First seen on DaFont: before 2005

In cases when the Apple logo was accompanied by text, it was always set in Apple Garamond. Aside from the company name, most of Apple's advertising and marketing slogans such as "Think different." used the font as well.

The iMac was the first Mac to depart from the Apple Garamond branding.

This typeface has been an identical representation of Apple for almost two decades and formed a huge part of Apple's brand recognition. It was not only used as the logo, but also in manuals, ads, and to label products with model names.

Apple has not released the true Apple Garamond font. ITC briefly sold ITC Garamond Narrow - Apple Garamond without the custom hinting - as part of its Apple Font Pack in the 1990s. A version of the font was also included under a different name in some versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.3 as it was used by the Setup Assistant installation program.

Reference list:

Fonts2u (2012). Apple Garamond True Type, viewed 4^th March 2012, http://www.fonts2u.com/apple-garamond.font

 Francois K (2005), “Welcome back, Apple Garamond”, viewed 4^th March 2012, http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2005/10/welcome_back_apple_garamond.html

Typedia (2011). Apple Garamond, viewed 4^th March 2012, http://typedia.com/explore/typeface/apple-garamond