GT Canon

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Subfamilies
  • Standard S Light
    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 M Light
    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 Light
    What are we but areas that move between areas, perceiving areas, dividing areas, with the help of areas, into more areas? Lines, on the other hand, lead a ghostly existence: in their terrible conspicuousness, they are omnipresent and yet we cannot perceive them.
  • Standard S Light Italic
    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 M Light Italic
    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 Light Italic
    How does a bold relate to its regular? How does balance persist across axes? Balance champions accuracy over precision. It is about what we see, not what we measure. And the eye likes balance, not boredom. Balance is invitation.
  • Standard S Regular
    No 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 M Regular
    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 L Regular
    On 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 S Regular Italic
    In 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 M Regular Italic
    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 L Regular Italic
    A 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 S Medium
    There is something in the foot of the horse that has been a mystery to many who have been unable to find out the secrets by reading some of the books that have been printed on the different subjects, and experimenting on the same, pertaining to a perfect balance of the trotter and pacer when in action.
  • Standard M Medium
    So let us think of designers as those who constantly operate on the edge—whether with and on forms of recognition, or by allowing in the different, which fills the constantly repeating cascade of differences (from sensuality to imagination, from imagination to memory, from memory to forgetting, and finally to creative power (and then the whole thing starts all over again)).
  • Standard L Medium
    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 S Medium Italic
    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 Italic
    Quoting 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 Medium Italic
    No 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 Semibold
    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 M Semibold
    You 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 L Semibold
    Mathematically this is correct; the computational model of points, curves, and transformations retains its internal precision at any size. Yet, in practice, vectors are always realised within systems that impose discrete constraints. Every display, printer, and imaging device ultimately renders to a raster.
  • Standard S Semibold 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 M Semibold Italic
    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 Semibold Italic
    How does a bold relate to its regular? How does balance persist across axes? Balance champions accuracy over precision. It is about what we see, not what we measure. And the eye likes balance, not boredom. Balance is invitation.
  • Standard S Bold
    With 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 M Bold
    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 L Bold
    And 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 Bold Italic
    Depends on a ruler who can be deceived, attacked, and overthrown. Higher power unfolds beyond that. Smart, gentle, even “positive” power operates through consent, self-optimisation, and internalisation, not through prohibition or force.
  • Standard M Bold Italic
    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 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 S Heavy
    It 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 Heavy
    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 Heavy
    Compositional 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 Heavy Italic
    Mathematically this is correct; the computational model of points, curves, and transformations retains its internal precision at any size. Yet, in practice, vectors are always realised within systems that impose discrete constraints. Every display, printer, and imaging device ultimately renders to a raster.
  • Standard M Heavy Italic
    Contrast is difference made visible, the consequence and prerequisite of an appearance. Without contrast, there is no difference. Everything is not just monotonous, it simply is not. It is one and therefore isn’t. Contrast is the distance and proximity of the in-between. What is, is through difference.
  • Standard L Heavy Italic
    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 S Black
    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 M Black
    A cock was once strutting up and down the farmyard among the hens when suddenly he espied something shinning amid the straw. “Ho! ho!” quoth he, “that’s for me,” and soon rooted it out from beneath the straw.
  • Standard L Black
    There is something in the foot of the horse that has been a mystery to many who have been unable to find out the secrets by reading some of the books that have been printed on the different subjects, and experimenting on the same, pertaining to a perfect balance of the trotter and pacer when in action.
  • Standard S Black Italic
    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 Italic
    Edges mark the threshold of meaning, the moment when sense meets its outside of the inside of the outside of the sentence. And therefore all is exterior.
  • Standard L Black Italic
    Balance is the tension needed to neither explode or implode. What arises when intention meets the accidental and neither is abolished. In bodies, in breaths, in the temporality and modalities of being, balance appears as that which is always about to shift.
  • Settings
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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.

Download Specimen PDF

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