Lithos is a glyphic
sans-serifIn typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the Latin word sans, meaning "without"....
typefaceIn typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also include ideograms and symbols, or consist...
designed by
Carol TwomblyCarol Twombly is an American calligrapher and typeface designer who has designed many typefaces, including Trajan, Myriad and Adobe Caslon. She worked as a type designer at Adobe Systems from 1988 through 1999, during which time she designed, or contributed to the design of many typefaces...
in 1989 for
Adobe SystemsAdobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. The company has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more-recent foray towards rich Internet application software...
. Lithos is inspired by the unadorned, geometric letterforms of the engravings found on
Ancient GreekAncient Greece is the civilisation belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the...
public buildings. The typeface consists of only capital letters, and comes in five weights, with no italics.
According to Twombly, Lithos only used Greek inscriptions as inspiration, making Lithos more of a modern reinterpretation than a faithful reproduction.
Lithos is a glyphic
sans-serifIn typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the Latin word sans, meaning "without"....
typefaceIn typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also include ideograms and symbols, or consist...
designed by
Carol TwomblyCarol Twombly is an American calligrapher and typeface designer who has designed many typefaces, including Trajan, Myriad and Adobe Caslon. She worked as a type designer at Adobe Systems from 1988 through 1999, during which time she designed, or contributed to the design of many typefaces...
in 1989 for
Adobe SystemsAdobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. The company has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more-recent foray towards rich Internet application software...
. Lithos is inspired by the unadorned, geometric letterforms of the engravings found on
Ancient GreekAncient Greece is the civilisation belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the...
public buildings. The typeface consists of only capital letters, and comes in five weights, with no italics.
According to Twombly, Lithos only used Greek inscriptions as inspiration, making Lithos more of a modern reinterpretation than a faithful reproduction. Twombly also designed
TrajanTrajan is an old style serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. The design is based on the letterforms of capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column from which the typeface takes its name. Since lower case forms...
and Charlemagne based respectively on ancient Roman and Byzantine inscriptions. Those typefaces, unlike Lithos, were modeled more directly upon their historical counterparts. One example of Lithos' departure from historical accuracy is the inclusion of bold weights, which never existed in historical Greek inscriptions.
Publications associated with African, African-American and Southwestern cultures have used Lithos for its "ethnic" feel, even if it is the wrong ethnicity. Lithos has also become something of a generic stand-in whenever a "primitive" feel is desired. For this reason, Lithos has been compared to
Rudolf Kochthumb|250px|[[Fraktur]] fonts by Rudolf KochRudolf Koch was a leading German calligrapher, typographic artist and teacher, born in Nuremberg. He was primarily a calligrapher with the Gebr. Klingspor foundry. He created several typefaces, both in fraktur and roman styles...
's typeface,
NeulandNeuland is a German typeface that was designed in 1923 by Rudolf Koch.Koch designed it by directly carving the type into metal. The original typeface thus had a great deal of variance between the sizes...
, which was originally intended to be a modern reinterpretation of
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script or Gothic minuscule, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to 1500. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes the entire group of faces is...
, but received similarly broad use.
Lithos Pro
In 2000, Adobe released the
OpenTypeOpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior....
version called Lithos Pro, which included Adobe CE, Adobe Western 2, Greek character sets support, and
small capsIn typography, small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures...
in the lowercase positions. OpenType features include alternates, case forms, proportional lining figures, small caps.
Lithos in popular culture
Lithos was the resident typeface of
MTVMTV is a cable television network based in New York City and launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs...
during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Lithos was used on the reverse side of the 2009 one dollar coin produced by the
United States MintThe United States Mint primarily produces circulating coinage for the United States to conduct its trade and commerce. The main Mint facility is located in Washington, D.C., and branch facilities are located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Denver, Colorado; San Francisco, California; and West...
. The scene depicted on the coin is one of a native American planting corn, and Lithos may have been selected to make some visual reference to native American letterforms, even though Lithos is based on Greek letterforms, not native American letterforms.