GT Canon
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Subfamilies
- Standard S LightThe scene is laid in the house of Cephalus at the Piraeus; and the whole dialogue is narrated by Socrates the day after it actually took place to Timaeus, Hermocrates, Critias, and a nameless person, who are introduced in the Timaeus.
- Standard M LightMoving 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 LightTension 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 Light ItalicTo 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 M Light ItalicDorothy 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 L Light ItalicNo matter if we geometrise gravity or not, it begins with attraction, not with weight. The body is never free from the fall. We are always in relation to a center we cannot see.
- Standard S RegularConsidering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostess.
- Standard M RegularWalter Sills labored for years as an unknown laboratory worker—but at fifty he makes his great discovery! Fame, riches are to be his fate—until interference looms up in the form of a few unreliable characters—and Nature herself!
- Standard L RegularAn 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 S Regular ItalicQuoting is a technique of remembering. When we quote, we conjure up the past. We bring a text or an image from another time and place into a new environment. Remembering is a transformative process: what we remember is altered by adding, omitting or rewriting. The house is now red.
- Standard M Regular ItalicQuoting is a genuinely creative practice. Something has always been there before. We create in its stead and carry it forward. On quiet soles we walk, torchbearers with the blowpipe tucked behind the ear, moving through the forest in search of our prey.
- Standard L Regular ItalicBoth 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 MediumCutting into stone, writing swiftly by hand, pushing nodes on a graphical user interface: Motion is one of the driving forces in typography and a guiding principle between handwriting and type design.
- Standard M MediumAnd 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 L MediumOnly that is limited can invite, can expand and intrude, or be intruded upon. No boundaries, nothing to transcend? At least nowhere to stay. Wandering does not leave any traces as long as it keeps up with the wandering of time.
- Standard S Medium ItalicAccordingly, texts are often described as linear, even though, in most cases, this linearity is erratic or even fractal (with eye movements consisting of saccades). Any attempts to escape this linearity usually result in the lines becoming fragmented into more lines, except in the case of one-word readers, where the reading movement is directed towards a single word.
- Standard M Medium ItalicWhatever is scaled inevitably changes. The morphology of insects versus that of humans. The differing stability of small and large load-bearing structures in architecture. The behaviour of algorithms that perform well on small datasets yet falter when applied to billions of inputs.
- Standard L Medium ItalicBoth 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 SemiboldIt 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 SemiboldOne 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 L SemiboldOn the other hand, tools and designs are tailored to the user to such an extent that they do not even need to be used, as every possible action is anticipated, thus becoming literally useless, and the user, around whom everything revolved, has been relieved of their usage. Free, weight-, timeless and a fence observer. Rather than being oppressed by tradition and forced to master the tool as it has been forged over hundreds of years of craft.
- Standard S Semibold ItalicInstances correspond emphatically to design. Although the use of the term *instance *has become increasingly common in recent years, with specific uses in various disciplines, the underlying logic seems to have permeated the concept of design in an almost intrinsic way long before that.
- Standard M Semibold ItalicLayouts can be balanced or not, regardless of whether they are symmetrical or asymmetrical. A sculpture can teeter and still rest. Our task is not to enforce equilibrium, but to find the point where the space begins to breathe.
- Standard L Semibold ItalicNo doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer’s way.
- Standard S BoldInstances correspond emphatically to design. Although the use of the term *instance *has become increasingly common in recent years, with specific uses in various disciplines, the underlying logic seems to have permeated the concept of design in an almost intrinsic way long before that.
- Standard M BoldA weight here presupposes a counter there, even if that counter is nothing but the absence of its here with reversed signs. Balance does not eliminate difference; it activates it, arranges it, gives it place.
- Standard L BoldMoving 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 S Bold ItalicIt emerges through attention and waiver. Balance is not the absence of friction, but its distribution. Balance follows form, forms form, follows content, content which is shaping form, form flowing into form, unintentionally intentional.
- Standard M Bold ItalicThere 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 L Bold ItalicAn 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 HeavyAll 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 HeavyWe stand on a field and throw a stone. We follow the motion of the stone. How can we be sure that it is the stone that is moving and not the surroundings? A well-known phenomenologist devoted a handful of densely written pages to investigating this process and championed a view that describes movement as a coherent, holistic activity that cannot be adequately described by either a mechanical or a philosophical view of consciousness.
- Standard L HeavyIt is too simplistic to equate the broadening of the denominator with an expansion of the numerator. Yet, there lies a sever misconception and danger in this term. Not so much because the dividing lines between users and manufacturers are supposedly becoming increasingly blurred in the rapidly changing digital landscape, but rather because of an ontological misconception in believing that the acting subject knows not just the rational and motives behind it’s actions, but also knows itself, and considers the urge of knowing itself as a invisible but leading design principle.
- Standard S Heavy ItalicWe meet in blurriness. If we understood each other completely, we would be identical and weightless, dissolving into pure oneness. Until that happens, however, recognising our differences and contrasts helps us to come closer together.
- Standard M Heavy ItalicIt emerges through attention and waiver. Balance is not the absence of friction, but its distribution. Balance follows form, forms form, follows content, content which is shaping form, form flowing into form, unintentionally intentional.
- Standard L Heavy ItalicIn the war of Troy, the Greeks having sacked some of the neighbouring towns, and taken from thence two beautiful captives, Chryseïs and Briseïs, allotted the first to Agamemnon, and the last to Achilles.
- Standard S BlackTension 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 M BlackAnatomy 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 BlackAn instance can be a subsequently submitted determination of a limited point in time. In most cases, however, it marks the section of a defined sequence.
- Standard S Black ItalicTools 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 M Black ItalicThe original or merely a template? Traces? And who is to say that our sense of things, our emotions and feelings, are nothing but an unwitting attempt to quote the stories and songs that have moved us?
- Standard L Black ItalicAn 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.
- Settings
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.
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.

