Allan Ramsay 1713–1784

National Galleries of Scotland
and National Portrait Gallery

1992   |  330 × 245mm   |  156pp

A time of transition. Looking back, we can see that the early 1990s were a period of unprecedented change in the world of printing. It now seems curious that the catalogue section of this prestigious publication was printed in black and white, with colour reserved for an old-fashioned plate section. Yet, at the same time, I was able to draw on a new stream of well-produced new digital typefaces, in this case Adobe Caslon. The Adobe Originals program was established in 1989, when Sumner Stone hired font designers Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach. Twombly's successful version of Caslon was released in 1990, during an immensely productive period that made available many notable typefaces, both revivals and new designs. These came with the full range of typographical niceties – lost to designers of the previous generation – which made possible the attention to detail that the Swiss designer Jost Hochuli has termed 'micro-typography'.