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Retina
Category	Sans-serif
Designer(s)	Tobias Frere-Jones
Commissioned by	The Wall Street Journal
Foundry	Hoefler & Frere-Jones
Date created	1999; 25 years ago
Date released	2000; 24 years ago
Re-issuing foundries	Digital
License	Proprietary
Trademark	Frere-Jones Type
Website	frerejones.com/families/retina

Retina is a font by created by Tobias Frere-Jones for The Wall Street Journal, which used it for high density print in their newspapers from 2000 to 2007. It was created to be legible at very small font sizes, using ink traps to stop smearing during the printing process.

History

In 1999^[3] Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones's firm Hoefler & Frere-Jones was commissioned to create a font for The Wall Street Journal stock listings.^[6]^[7] The font was completed and began use in The Wall Street Journal stock listings in 2000.^[2]

The small size of Retina allowed The Wall Street Journal to print the same amount of text on eight fewer pages per issue, which was estimated to have saved the newspaper $6 million to $7 million annually.^[7] The Wall Street Journal condensed the size of its pages in 2007, replacing Retina with another font that was also developed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones called Exchange.^[6]

In 2011 Retina was one of twenty-three digital fonts acquired by MoMA for its Architecture and Design collection^[2] after being gifted to the museum by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, and the font is now used by many newspapers for high density texts such as stock information and classified ads.^[3]

Retina was released for licence to the public in 2016.^[8]

Design

Retina was originally created specifically to be used at 5.5 point on newspaper.^[8] The resulting font is designed to be best used at 7 point or below.^[3] Unlike a monospaced font, each letter has a unique width,^[2] but each character has the same width regardless of weight, meaning a bold letter will take up the same width as an italic letter or a regular letter.^[1]

Retina is a sans-serif font^[1] designed for high-density texts^[3] and comes in a microplus and standard version. The microplus is meant for extremely small font, whereas the standard version is meant for larger point where the notches on the microplus version would be too visible.^[1]

The notches in the microplus version are ink traps, designed to serve as wells for excess ink to pool into during the printing process to avoid smudging the tiny lettering.^[1]^[8]

The font shares some features with old-style serif fonts such as Garamond and Janson.^[2]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Brownlee, John (October 5, 2016). "How A Micro-Font Designed For Stock Indexes Became A Classic". Fast Company. Archived from the original on July 24, 2021. Retrieved August 27, 2022.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Riechers, Angela (October 11, 2016). "Frere-Jones Finishes Retina, the Font He's Been Designing for 15 Years". Eye on Design. Archived from the original on May 16, 2021. Retrieved August 27, 2022.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e "Tobias Frere-Jones. Retina. 1999". MoMA. Archived from the original on June 28, 2022. Retrieved August 27, 2022.
^ ^a ^b Frere-Jones, Tobias. "Frere-Jones Type". FrereJones.com. Archived from the original on May 5, 2022. Retrieved August 27, 2022.
^ U.S. Trademark 77,855,306
^ ^a ^b Postrel, Virginia (February 2008). "Playing to Type". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on June 28, 2022. Retrieved August 27, 2022.
^ ^a ^b Fagone, Jason (June 2, 2014). "A Type House Divided". New York. Archived from the original on August 10, 2022. Retrieved August 27, 2022.
^ ^a ^b ^c Stinson, Liz (October 5, 2016). "Typographic Trickery Shifts a Font from Paper to Pixels". Wired.com. Archived from the original on September 24, 2021. Retrieved August 27, 2022.