GT Canon

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Subfamilies
  • Standard S Light
    To lose face or to save face reveals the fragile, performative nature of this appearance. Therefore, naming a typeface is akin to attributing a paradoxical presence to letters, giving them an identity that is both personal and collective.
  • Standard M Light
    Who is the user of a typeface? The graphic designer, typographer and reader? Or is it equally down to its designer? UX-driven objectives still play a major role in type design, which is being framed in terms of legibility, usability, screen optimisation, hinting, or responsive typography.
  • Standard L Light
    It does not matter what note you play. What only matters is which note follows, a legendary trumpet player once said (in a pretty different way, but that is how I remember the quote).
  • Standard S Light Italic
    All we see are moments of division, are the edges where the one tips over into the other in order to remain the same. In praise of imagery: Imagination, pencils and all other instruments of visualisation eventually help us to create these compressed surfaces.
  • Standard M Light Italic
    Moving a vector between applications can result in measurable shifts caused by floating-point limitations and incompatible Bézier implementations. In typography, the discrepancy is heightened: glyph outlines include instructions (hinting) that govern their behaviour at specific sizes, which are lost when text is converted to outlines. Thus, even in fields predicated on precision, scale introduces qualitative change not as an exception but as a structural condition.
  • Standard L Light Italic
    There are countless forms and shades of power. We intuitively associate power with a powerful person, with someone who can impose their will on others. They make themselves the subject and degrade everyone else to their objects.
  • Standard S Regular
    An instance is a moment made material. It is the singular occurrence of a state that could have been otherwise. By virtue of this contingency, an instance is in turn also moment-creating: an instance is not only the capturing of time (including processes and patterns) or space (including organisational and hierarchical positions), but also their trigger.
  • Standard M Regular
    In the one the principles are palpable, but removed from ordinary use; so that for want of habit it is difficult to turn one's mind in that direction: but if one turns it thither ever so little, one sees the principles fully, and one must have a quite inaccurate mind who reasons wrongly from principles so plain that it is almost impossible they should escape notice.
  • Standard L Regular
    And yet, justification can mean a speech act of rare agency, inhabited with a groundless sorrow over the circumstances that necessitate it. Things should have been the other way around. From the start.
  • Standard S Regular Italic
    One of the great challenges in typography awaits both the typesetter and the type designer in the same place, and it concerns writers no less. It is not only the not-so-well-tempered poster that requires the right use of tension. It is especially the longer texts whose harmony and carrying power can be sustained only by maintaining tension.
  • Standard M Regular Italic
    In the one the principles are palpable, but removed from ordinary use; so that for want of habit it is difficult to turn one's mind in that direction: but if one turns it thither ever so little, one sees the principles fully, and one must have a quite inaccurate mind who reasons wrongly from principles so plain that it is almost impossible they should escape notice.
  • Standard L Regular Italic
    And yet, justification can mean a speech act of rare agency, inhabited with a groundless sorrow over the circumstances that necessitate it. Things should have been the other way around. From the start.
  • Standard S Medium
    This circumstance informs all aspects of the typeface design, from the architecture of the letters and the design of individual forms and components, to optical corrections (overshoot). Gravity manifests in stroke and proportion. The thickening of verticals, the grounding of serifs, the way curves rest against the baseline—all contribute to how a letter *sits *or stands..
  • Standard M Medium
    Scaling therefore entails rounding operations and antialiasing strategies that alter the appearance of shapes, particularly at small sizes where a single pixel represents a significant portion of form. Software environments introduce further divergence, using distinct coordinate systems, unit definitions, and conversion routines.
  • Standard L Medium
    Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles.
  • Standard S Medium Italic
    Now, who’s afraid of quotation marks? Straight marks, curly marks, make it single, make it double, mille milliards de guillemets mal embobinés ! German use (Anführungszeichen senken sich wie ein Grundruf in den Text, ein erstes Öffnen, in dem das Wort aus seiner Verborgenheit hervortritt, während ihr abschließendes Heben zurückweist in die Lichtung des Denkens, wo das Gesagte erst als solches zu zu stehen beginnt.)
  • Standard M Medium Italic
    Tools supporting interaction design. At the same time, we can observe a trend towards reduced interaction surfaces. Users increasingly ask than navigate. Which increasingly reduces the area of contact.
  • Standard L Medium Italic
    When quoting, words do not necessarily have to change, and yet most things do alter. Typeface, layout, screen, print technology, paper, context, means of distribution. Quoting always raises the question of origin and our relationship to it. What is it that we change when we quote?
  • Standard S Semibold
    A typeface, an interface, the face of a building—all these indicate how we can make things present: face is a principle, the visible form through which some becomes a thing. The face is the plane that mediates between structure and encounter.
  • Standard M Semibold
    Anatomy is the gesture of dividing the visible to seek what cannot be seen. Anatomy is the scientific study of the structure of living organisms.
  • Standard L Semibold
    To justify is to align. Be it aligning things or arguments, be it the alignment of an action and its actor with their surroundings and the forces that shape them. Who justifies, aims to shift the object of his or her justification, either in relation to its circumstances or to the object itself.
  • Standard S Semibold Italic
    One of the great challenges in typography awaits both the typesetter and the type designer in the same place, and it concerns writers no less. It is not only the not-so-well-tempered poster that requires the right use of tension. It is especially the longer texts whose harmony and carrying power can be sustained only by maintaining tension.
  • Standard M Semibold Italic
    Balance resides in contrast: between forms, weights, tones, tensions. It is noticed before it is seen, known before it is measured. A poster calming your eye without quieting it, a painting’s tension resolves in stillness. Balance is never imposed.
  • Standard L Semibold Italic
    An instance is a moment made material. It is the singular occurrence of a state that could have been otherwise. By virtue of this contingency, an instance is in turn also moment-creating: an instance is not only the capturing of time (including processes and patterns) or space (including organisational and hierarchical positions), but also their trigger.
  • Standard S Bold
    It does not matter what note you play. What only matters is which note follows, a legendary trumpet player once said (in a pretty different way, but that is how I remember the quote).
  • Standard M Bold
    In recent years, few terms in design have enjoyed such a meteoric rise as the two letters U and X. User experience quickly became the measure of all things. At first glance, there seems to be little wrong with that. Anyone who strives to offer users the best possible experience does not have to be a showman or a charlatan who turns even the simplest interaction into an experience.
  • Standard L Bold
    Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles.
  • Standard S Bold Italic
    If one geometrises gravity—which is said to be at the heart of the relativisation of space and time—it is the most direct possible movement of these bodies around the sun. Like the apple that falls from Newton’s tree, gravity does not distract it from its actual ideal—to float strangely and ghostly in the air or on the tree?
  • Standard M Bold Italic
    In the one the principles are palpable, but removed from ordinary use; so that for want of habit it is difficult to turn one's mind in that direction: but if one turns it thither ever so little, one sees the principles fully, and one must have a quite inaccurate mind who reasons wrongly from principles so plain that it is almost impossible they should escape notice.
  • Standard L Bold Italic
    Justification is a responsive act, regardless of whether what is to be justified lies in the past or in the future, as any justification presupposes something that has gone before. If that something points forwards, its intention is at least roughly outlined (by virtue of its potential to be realised).
  • Standard S Heavy
    But I can inform myself. I can learn about the environment and people I create for. Their past and present. Their needs and desires. We are not what we design and it would be foolish to believe that we know our so called target group as well as we know our flatmates.
  • Standard M Heavy
    Whether we view design as ‘creating with existing means’ or not, upon closer inspection, design has always been about constantly arranging things, and not just since the advent of computers. The ongoing alignment of shapes, images, letters with one another and within their surface.
  • Standard L Heavy
    Tension as a whole does not arise from the unrestrained or untamed wildness of individual elements. On the contrary, it is the right balance of unity and discipline on the one hand, and deviation on the other. In political and social contexts, the dissolution of tension is a noble and worthy pursuit. In design, it all too often leads to illegibility. This applies in both directions. After all, what is attraction, what is eroticism? The casual display of the fully revealed whole, or the play of gradually unveiling its parts? No tension, no relation.
  • Standard S Heavy Italic
    When quoting, words do not necessarily have to change, and yet most things do alter. Typeface, layout, screen, print technology, paper, context, means of distribution. Quoting always raises the question of origin and our relationship to it. What is it that we change when we quote?
  • Standard M Heavy Italic
    An instance is a moment made material. It is the singular occurrence of a state that could have been otherwise. By virtue of this contingency, an instance is in turn also moment-creating: an instance is not only the capturing of time (including processes and patterns) or space (including organisational and hierarchical positions), but also their trigger.
  • Standard L Heavy Italic
    And also nodes are often defined more by their context than by their very coordinates. As junctions, connecting points or simply as a basic unit they fundamentally define the structure of data, the architecture of shapes.
  • Standard S Black
    Balance is not symmetry. It is the tension between collapse and coherence. Therefore, it is the opposite of stillness. To speak of balance is to invoke the condition of something being held and not to be fixed. No conclusion but an ongoing relation.
  • Standard M Black
    Balance is not symmetry. It is the tension between collapse and coherence. Therefore, it is the opposite of stillness. To speak of balance is to invoke the condition of something being held and not to be fixed. No conclusion but an ongoing relation.
  • Standard L Black
    Both arise in a mutual interplay. Although drawing has never been just a medium of representation, but always also one of operation, one that forces the model into a certain order (line, proportion, grid, materiality), the introduction of nodes has given this reciprocal relationship a significant influence on authorship, insofar as it shifts slightly ‘in favour’ of the model: digital drawing can no longer not be a model, and from now on, the designer can no longer purely be a drawer but is always also a model-builder. Nodes allow form to be computed.
  • Standard S Black Italic
    An edge is both an end and a beginning. It is a marker in both senses: An edge causes the change, just as it indicates it. So far, so mundane. Nevertheless, the consequences are significant. Only that which is limited can be surpassed.
  • Standard M Black Italic
    It is one of the oldest branches of biological science, with its origins lying in early human attempts to understand the body by cutting it open, drawing it and naming its parts.
  • Standard L Black Italic
    We live in the age of scale. In economic ventures, scalability has long been the guiding principle on which new enterprises are founded; whoever masters the challenges of scaling is promised success. More interesting, however, are the observations that can be made across disciplines whenever something is scaled.
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Typeface information

GT Canon’s design is pragmatic but not static: movement and liveliness are embedded in the letterforms. It is our answer to what our digital times require of a serif today. It’s what a contemporary serif should be in both form and function. Like its sans serif sibling, GT Standard, it aims for modern functionality rather than stylistic reinvention.

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Latin-alphabet languages: Afaan, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Aromanian, Arrernte, Asturian, Atayal, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bemba, Bikol, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Chickasaw, Cimbrian, Cofán, Cornish, Corsican, Creek, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), Guadeloupean Creole, Gwich’in, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, Igbo, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Istro-Romanian, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese, Jèrriais, Kaingang, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan, Kaqchikel, Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Kurdish, Ladin, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Māori, Marquesan, Megleno-Romanian, Meriam Mir, Mirandese, Mohawk, Moldovan, Montagnais, Montenegrin, Murrinh-Patha, Nagamese Creole, Nahuatl, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Niuean, Noongar, Norwegian, Occitan, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Oshiwambo, Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Q’eqchi’, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian,Romansh, Rotokas, Inari Sami, Lule Sami, Northern Sami, Southern Sami, Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Seri, Seychellois Creole, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Upper and Lower Sorbian, Northern and Southern Sotho, Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Tuvaluan, Tzotzil, Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Wallisian, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Welsh, Wik-Mungkan, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zarma, Zazaki, Zulu, Zuni

Typeface features

OpenType features enable smart typography. You can use these features in most Desktop applications, on the web, and in your mobile apps. Each typeface contains different features. Below are the most important features included in GT Canon’s fonts:

  • TNUM
  • Tabular figures
0123456789
  • ONUM
  • Oldstyle figures
0123456789
  • SMCP
  • Small Caps
Anatomy
Typeface Minisite
  • Visit the GT Canon minisite to discover more about the typeface family’s history and design concept.
GT Canon in use