Courier (typeface)
monospaced slab serif typeface designed by Howard Kettler for IBM typewriters
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed in the mid-1950s by Howard "Bud" Kettler (1919–1999) for IBM. The Courier name and design concept are in the public domain. Courier has been adapted for use as a computer font, and versions of it are installed on most desktop computers.
History
IBM did not trademark the name Courier, so the name and its design are now public domain. According to some sources, a later version for IBM's Selectric typewriters was developed with input from Adrian Frutiger, although Paul Shaw writes that this is a confusion with Frutiger's adaptation of his Univers typeface for the Selectric system. Sources differ on whether the design was published in 1955 or 1956.
Kettler was once quoted about how the name was chosen. The font was nearly released with the name "Messenger". After giving it some thought, Kettler said, "A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability."
Usage
As a monospaced font, in the 1990s Courier found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned, for instance, in computer programming. It has also become an industry standard for all screenplays to be written in 12-point Courier or a close variant. Twelve-point Courier New was also the U.S. State Department's standard typeface until January 2004, when it was replaced with 14-point Times New Roman.
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This entry incorporates text from “Courier (typeface)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.