1. Design

2. Releases

3. Awards

4. See also

5. References and footnotes

6. External links

Design

As a transitional serif design, Georgia shows a number of traditional features of 'rational' serif typefaces from around the early 19th century, such as alternating thick and thin strokes, ball terminals and a vertical axis. Speaking in 2013 about the development of Georgia and Miller, Carter said, "I was familiar with Scotch romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular...and then they disappeared completely."^[3] Its figure (numeral) designs are lower-case or text figures, designed to blend into continuous text; this was at the time a rare feature in computer fonts.^[4]

Closer inspection, however, shows how Georgia was designed for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes.^[5] It features a large x-height (tall lower-case letters) and its thin strokes are thicker than would be common on a typeface designed for display use or the greater sharpness possible in print.^[6][7][8] Its reduced contrast and thickened serifs make it somewhat resemble Clarendon designs from the 19th century.

Georgia's bold is also unusually bold, almost black. Carter noted that, "Verdana and Georgia...were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white...The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series."^[3] Given these unusual design decisions, Matthew Butterick, an expert on document design, recommended that organizations using Georgia for onscreen display license Miller to achieve a complementary, more balanced reading experience on paper.^[9][10]

The Georgia typeface is similar to Times New Roman, another re-imagination of transitional serif designs, but as a design for screen display it has a larger x-height and fewer fine details. The The New York Times changed its standard font from Times New Roman to Georgia in 2007.^[11]

Georgia is a "Scotch Roman"—a style which originated in types sold by Scottish type foundries of Alexander Wilson and William Miller in the period of 1810–1820. According to Thomas Curson Hansard, these were cut by London-based punchcutter Richard Austin. Hansard was writing within Austin's lifetime and this attribution is accepted by Austin's biographer Alastair Johnston, although historian James Mosley has expressed caution on the attribution.^[12][13][14]

Releases

Microsoft publicly released the initial version of the font on November 1, 1996 as part of the core fonts for the Web collection, and later bundled it with the Internet Explorer 4.0 supplemental font pack: these releases made it available for installation on both Windows and Macintosh computers. This made it a popular choice for web designers, as pages specifying Georgia as a font choice would display identically on both types if users installed the core fonts package (or later Internet Explorer), simplifying development and testing. Its creators also produced at the same time Verdana, the first Microsoft sans serif screen font, for the same purposes. Some early public releases of Georgia included number designs between upper and lower-case, similar to those later released with Miller.^[15][16] Carter was asked by Robert Norton, Microsoft's type director, to change these to text, a decision Carter later considered an improvement.^[17]

New versions of Georgia, along with its sister sans-serif font Verdana, were released in 2013.^[18] The extension of the original font, named Georgia Pro, features a set of additional typefaces and designs, including:

• Additional weights, including condensed versions.
• Specialized small caps designs.
• Extensions to the character sets.
• Extensions to the kerning.
• OpenType typographic features such as ligatures.{{efn|Georgia's standard edition does include ligature designs, but they have to be inserted manually.}}
• Lining figures

The expanded font was designed for organisations which had made extensive use of Georgia and Verdana due to its availability but desired additional versions for specific uses.

Microsoft has commissioned a number of variants. Georgia Ref, a variant of Georgia consisting of a single weight, but with extra characters, was bundled with Microsoft Bookshelf 2000, Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 99, Encarta Virtual Globe 99. MS Reference Serif, a derivative of Georgia Ref with a bold weight and italic, was also included in Microsoft Encarta. However, Microsoft's font manager Bill Hill wrote of it that "I for one never felt totally comfortable with it as a book face. There's something very dark and 'vertical' about the way it feels", and noted that Microsoft had commissioned an alternative, versions of the pre-existing typefaces Berling and Frutiger, for its Microsoft Reader e-book product.^[19] Despite this, Georgia is used as one of the bundled book-reading fonts on several e-book applications.^[20]

Awards

The Cyrillic font won an award at Kyrillitsa in 1999.^[21]

May 26, 2011 Matthew Carter received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in part for designing the Georgia font.

See also

• Segoe
• Verdana

References and footnotes

External links

• Georgia font information (Microsoft typography)
• Georgia Ref font information (Microsoft typography)
• Article by Daniel Will-Harris

• Bay'ah Mosque
• Bayaja
• Bayajidda (mythology)
• Ba ya jin
• Bayajá
• Bayakou
• Bayakou (disambiguation)
• Bayakou (trade)
• Bayalage
• Bayali
• Bayali Atashov
• Bayali (disambiguation)
• Bayalu Seemey
• Baya Mahieddine
• Bayama Irukku
• Bayam Ariyaan
• Bayamoncito
• Bayamoncito, Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico
• Bayamon City Cup
• Bayamon Wolfpack
• Bayam Oru Payanam
• Bayamón Centro, Puerto Rico
• Bayamón (Cidra)
• Bayamón, Cidra, Puerto Rico
• Bayamón FC Femenino