What is “Trajan”?
Trajan is an old style Serif typeface and was first designed back in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. It is displayed as a Windows True Type font, and the Source Foundry is Linotype. Although there are many unofficial variations of the Trajan font, the official variations are owned by Adobe, such as Trajan Pro, and Trajan Pro Bold.
What does “Trajan” look like?
It is an easy to read font, and has hints of its Roman origins by its use of thin and thick constructive lines, giving the reader a feel of depth. Several letters have a flow in them, as can be seen in the letters J and R, but it is the Q that really catches attention as, unusually, it underlines the next adjacent letter creating a flow across the page.
The most unusual feature of Trajan is that it is in capitals only – when typing in lower case it uses slightly smaller caps than uppercase.
What is Trajan’s design origin?
The font itself is based on real Roman Square Capitals from ancient Italy, and received its name from Trajan’s Column in Rome, which was built in A.D.113.
However, the design of the Trajan font was by no means as simple as tracing Roman numerals and letters from ancient ruins, as lower case letter forms were not in use in Roman times. There is a more complete set of glyphs contained in Trajan Pro which is a 2001 update of the Carol’s original 1989 design, with a lower case set of small caps.
Where is Trajan used?
The frequency that Trajan is used in advertising and publications such as film posters and DVD titles has grown tremendously since its launch. It is now established as a film makers favorite.
There are many examples of best sellers that have based their headline publications on the use of the Trajan font, such as:
1. Font Designer - Carol Twombly, linotype.com
2. Trajan (typeface), Wikipedia
3. Trajan Regular, fonts.com
