GT Canon
Family overview
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Subfamilies
- Standard S 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 M LightQuoting 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 L LightBalance 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 S Light ItalicAnd 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 M Light 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 L Light ItalicAnd it is only the sequence of several nodes that determines the appearance. But especially in the visual realm, they lead a dubious existence. On the one hand, they are image-forming in vector image production, making it possible to create contours and surfaces in the first place; on the other hand, they ultimately recede behind the given image.
- Standard S RegularScaling 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 M RegularThe reason, therefore, that some intuitive minds are not mathematical is that they cannot at all turn their attention to the principles of mathematics. But the reason that mathematicians are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement.
- Standard L RegularTools 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 S Regular ItalicCutting 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 Regular 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 L Regular ItalicCompositional spaces or their amplifiers, such as grids, can also be seen as registers of response. To the questions the design willingly or unwillingly might need to respond to. And in this respect, too, the artboard extends far beyond the immediate surface into the problem definition, the historical and social context, the budget and time constraints, taste, and all other design premises or sudden contingencies.
- Standard S MediumLayouts 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 M MediumWith this comes an epistemic shift: Drawing and model are interrelated, like hands touching each other. Each hand both touches and is touched, with their roles constantly shifting. And so drawing is not merely a representation of the model, and the model is not merely the origin of the drawing.
- Standard L MediumAnd 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 Medium ItalicIf 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 Medium 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 L Medium ItalicYou will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare.
- Standard S SemiboldThere 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 M SemiboldCutting 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 L SemiboldNow, 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 S Semibold ItalicA face is presence. It looks back, even when it does not see. The face is exposure, vulnerability, recognition: it is how we appear to others, how we are held in relation. It is therefore always recognition and exemplification. Individual and collective.
- Standard M Semibold ItalicWalter 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 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 S BoldWhat are the consequences? On the one hand, the design of the self. The device-ification of our bodies does not begin with chip implants, artificial intelligence and the semi-automation of intellectual work, but earlier and more decisively through this very intertwining of design and the various modes of supposed self-discovery.
- Standard M BoldOn a page, balance occurs across the line: x-height against ascender height, text weight against leading, headline mass against white space. In multi-weight families, balance becomes structural.
- Standard L BoldIn 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 Bold ItalicIf my limited knowledge of physics, gained from school lessons long time ago, has enabled me to understand the theorists of general relativity correctly, the motion of our planets around the sun is only apparently circular, but rather a kind of straight line.
- Standard M Bold ItalicLetterforms were constructed, architectural drawings relied on projection, mechanical parts were dimensioned with astonishing precision. But as these constructions were “analogue”, they remained continuous. Enter the node: Forms are now discrete, shapes are a list of coordinates and continuity is produced by computational smoothing.
- Standard L Bold ItalicOne of the most important factors in keeping the feet on sucklings, weanlings and yearlings in proper condition as is specified in this article is to see that you are keeping the leg in the middle of the foot, otherwise many a good horse suffers, as the concussion and strain is not equally distributed on both sides of the foot when in action.
- Standard S HeavyAccordingly, 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 HeavyThe 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 L HeavyThe subject possesses and orders; the object obeys and performs. More powerful still is the one who no longer needs to command at all, the one to whom others obey pre-emptively and unreservedly. Yet even this preventive, often invisible power still relies on a distinction between subject and object.
- Standard S Heavy ItalicMoving 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 M Heavy ItalicIf 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 L Heavy 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 S BlackOn 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 M BlackThe reason, therefore, that some intuitive minds are not mathematical is that they cannot at all turn their attention to the principles of mathematics. But the reason that mathematicians are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement.
- Standard L BlackAll 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 S Black 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 M Black ItalicCompositional spaces or their amplifiers, such as grids, can also be seen as registers of response. To the questions the design willingly or unwillingly might need to respond to. And in this respect, too, the artboard extends far beyond the immediate surface into the problem definition, the historical and social context, the budget and time constraints, taste, and all other design premises or sudden contingencies.
- Standard L Black ItalicWhat are the consequences? On the one hand, the design of the self. The device-ification of our bodies does not begin with chip implants, artificial intelligence and the semi-automation of intellectual work, but earlier and more decisively through this very intertwining of design and the various modes of supposed self-discovery.
- 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.
- Designed by Grilli Type
- Released in 2026
- Available in 224 styles
- GT Canon is available for customization and language extensions
- Download the free trial fonts
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
