Mad Love for Trajan Pro

When Carol Twombly designed Trajan Pro for Adobe, little did she know that it would be such a huge success in movie marketing that most of the movie posters are made of text written in Trajan Pro. Now, you get to see Trajan Pro everywhere like logos, posters, websites etc. It has built for itself a big fan-base of designers. Will this spell a disaster for this font as was the case with Comic Sans and Papyrus?

Let’s dig into a brief history of Trajan Pro. Carol Twombly studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and went on to become one of the five students to get master’s degrees in type design from Charles Bigelow at Stanford. She worked for Adobe Systems from 1988-99, producing many well-known typefaces, including Lithos, Trajan, and Adobe Caslon. She retired from type design and left Adobe in 1999.

Trajan, i.e., the lettered inscription on the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome, is often regarded as one of the best models of the Imperial Roman alphabet. Trajan’s Column was erected by the Senate and People of Rome as a memorial the Emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus’ wars, which slightly extended the Empire’s frontiers even further into “barbarian” territory than it had already been. Roman handwriting was very different from Roman monumental lettering. The letters on Trajan’s Column represent one of the best examples left to us from antiquity. The Romans were the first to put serifs on their letters. Adobe’s Trajan is an all caps alphabet. Small capitals take the place of the lowercase glyphs, as Trajan’s Column certainly did not have any symbols similar to our present-day’s lowercase letters on them (these were invented centuries later).

I guess that was too much of a briefing. But nice insights into the font, its maker and its history from typophile.

Now, if you remember the movie titles of Titanic or The Mummy, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Those were written in Trajan Pro! There’s a Flickr group named Trajan Film Poster which has good collection of posters where Trajan Pro is used not only for the titles but also for description, slogans and information.

Visit the Flickr pool for more

Apart from movie posters, I get to see Trajan Pro even in logo designs. For example, see the ones below.

Even websites are using Trajan Pro extensively. For example, this site uses it right from the logo to sub headings! So much for the love of Trajan!

But, will Trajan attain the status of Comic Sans or Papyrus soon? That would be a debatable topic. In my opinion, not in the near future. I feel that Trajan is a typeface whose foundation is based on an ancient lettering unlike Comic Sans. It has a grandeur to itself. Though it is overused, it exudes an elegance  everywhere regardless of where it’s used. So, when you look at another movie poster, you’ll know that it’s Trajan and say to yourself – ‘Not again!!’ like I do.

~ by Saawan on July 12, 2008.