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  • Essay / The Rise and Fall of Trajan

    There was a time when if a digital designer wanted to illustrate a story comparable to that of Homer's "The Iliad and the Odyssey", to tell a story of historical greatness which seems as if it was translated from ancient Roman literature itself. Trajan is the perfect example of a classic style font. Trajan is a serif font whose design is directly influenced by imperial letterforms carved in stone as early as 43 BC. American designer Carol Twombly worked as a professional type designer at the age of twenty-nine and created or helped create many fonts and typefaces. we still see it today. She was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where she received a master's degree in typographic design. As a result, she was quickly hired by Adobe in 1988 and was immediately tasked with creating attractive new fonts for digital design software that was becoming increasingly popular with corporate media buyers. In her work, Carol Twombly studied ancient historical literature for inspiration for her illustrations for digital fonts and typography. She managed to transcribe the first inscriptions from one of the Roman emperor Trajan's stone columns, from which her first widely known font took its name. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayTrajan uses an all-caps font because the Romans did not have a lowercase writing system at the time, but this problem was solved by Adobe's release of "Trajan Pro 3" which featured lower case letters in small caps. Twombly's digitization by adding more uniformity and balance to its original counterpart has retained its readability and hand-made calligraphic beauty very well. Professional typographers generally use Trajan for its elegant appearance, combination of proportions and distinct geometries. It had successfully established itself as a "Modern Ancient" design choice, but its stoic appearance gave way to visual cliché as more and more productions used it in subsequent advertisements and media illustrations. With the advancement and demand of printing and design technologies that led Trajan to Adobe Systems in 1989-1990, which coincidentally was part of the software that designers were also beginning to use to complete branding projects, especially for business and clothing logos, magazines, cinema posters. , DVD covers and more. It was touted as the next big thing. James Mosley, a renowned historian whose work has specialized in the history of letter design, once said, “Trajan is the new Helvetica.” Although its popularity never exceeded that of Helvetica, its insurgent use began to grow exponentially after its appearance on three movie posters. which showed box office hits that debuted in 1993, a few years after its digital premiere. Since then, it has evolved from a font that beautifully captured the essence of Roman history and literature, then gradually moved away from that concept to become an almost standard font for film branding that appeared everywhere and reached its peak in 2007. If you were a digital designer in the mid-90s and were tasked with creating multiple posters on schedule, you can almost guarantee that most would default to Trajan for its distinct readability and familiarity . Additionally, as the popularity.