Corbel (typeface)

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Corbel is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Jeremy Tankard for Microsoft, released in 2004. It is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a group designed to work well with Microsoft’s ClearType rendering on LCD screens. The other members are Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas and Constantia.

Corbel aims for an uncluttered, clean appearance on screen, with open letter shapes and soft, flowing curves. It is legible at small sizes, and at larger sizes the detailing becomes more noticeable. The italic style is a true italic with influences from serif fonts and calligraphy, often with a right-leaning tail. The design is similar to Calibri and Candara and is slightly more condensed than average. Font designer Raph Levien described it as similar to Frutiger. Tankard’s goal was to move away from round i-dot sans fonts, making Corbel less cuddly and more assertive, with an expressive italic.

Corbel by default uses text figures (old-style numerals) rather than lining numerals, which helps running text blend with numbers. Lining figures can be enabled via OpenType features or CSS font-variant-numeric: lining-nums. Text figures are also used in Georgia, Microsoft’s serif typeface.

Corbel is distributed with Microsoft tools such as Excel Viewer, PowerPoint Viewer, the Office Compatibility Pack for Windows, and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. For use on other systems, such as Linux, Corbel is not free; it is licensed and sold by Ascender.