BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON THE TYPE FACE:
A modern classic.
Steeped in the virtues of classical typography, Hoefler Text is a comprehensive family of typefaces from the dawn of the digital age.
When Jonathan Hoefler founded the company in 1989, digital typography was in its infancy. Few of the great type foundries had embraced electronic publishing in any significant way, and those that had were just beginning to tentatively remaster their most famous fonts for use on personal computers. Manufacturing their most important faces first, at a time when their production processes were at their weakest, meant that some of the world’s greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts. It’s no wonder that mossbacked traditionalists were so skeptical of the computer.
While the market for digital type was untested, the possibilities of the medium were apparent. For those font users willing to submit to annoying workarounds (remember the “expert set?”), digital type offered the potential for fonts to be not merely as good as traditional ones, but demonstrably better than anything that had gone before. Hoefler Text, designed in 1991, was an opening salvo in the fight for fine typography.
Following on the heels of the Adobe Originals program, which had just begun to introduce designers to such far-out concepts as “old-style figures” and “small caps,” Hoefler Text resuscitated a number of other traditions that had once been central to fine printing: extended ligature sets, the engraved capitals of the early twentieth century, and the arabesques of the renaissance. Hoefler Text even invented a few traditions of its own, such as case-specific punctuation and italic small caps, and worked to expand the reach of digital typography beyond the United States by including a wealth of foreign symbols and accents.
Hoefler Text’s steadfast agenda sparked the interest of developers at Apple, where a fledgling technology called “TrueType GX” was being created with the goal of making fine typography not only available to everyone, but effortless to use. Apple commissioned us to further expand the fonts, and licensed Hoefler Text for inclusion in System 7, the Macintosh operating system. While GX never emerged as a viable font format for designers, it did fulfill its original promise of turning Hoefler Text’s “advanced features” into a new baseline for digital typography. In the years since, small caps and old-style figures have become standard issue with the best text faces from all of the world’s great type foundries.
http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100010
Hoefler Text is a contemporary serif Antiqua font that was designed for Apple Computer to demonstrate advanced type technologies. Hoefler Text was created to allow the composition of complex typography; as such it takes cues from a range of classic fonts, such as Garamond and Janson.
Designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1991, a version of Hoefler Text has been included with every version of Mac OS since System 7.5. Hoefler Text incorporates automatic ligatures, the round and long s, real small capitals, old style figures and swashes. Hoefler Text also has a matching ornament font. It was, until OpenType made advanced typographic features more common, one of only a few fonts in common usage that contained old style, or ranging figures, which are designed to harmonize with standard upper- and lowercase text.
Since the introduction of the font, Hoefler Text has been expanded to include additional typographic features, and versions of the font published by Hoefler & Frere-Jones now include three weights, swash caps, italic small capitals, and two sets of engraved capitals. Hoefler Text was used in the Wikipedia logo until the 2010 redesign, when it was replaced with Linux Libertine. (However, if you look at the design of the logo today it still resembles the Hoefler typeface.) It was announced in 2011 that Hoefler Text would be used as part of the new visual identity of Dickinson College.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_Text
After looking at Hoefler typeface in comparison with Times New Roman I felt like they were very similar and thought it would be more interesting to do one:
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