Typeface baby names: Georgia, Calisto, Rockwell

I recently discovered that the name of my favorite font, Verdana, was created by combining the words verdant (in honor of the Pacific Northwest) and Ana (the name of the daughter of one of the developers).

Verdana may not be ready for broad use as a baby name, but this still made me wonder: which typeface names can be used as human names? Here’s what I came up with…

• Albertus
• Aldus (which was named after fifteenth-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius)
• Arial
• Calisto
• Cambria
• Cooper, from Cooper Old Style (which was designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper in 1918)
• Franklin, from Franklin Gothic (which was named after Benjamin Franklin)
• Georgia (which, believe it or not, was named in honor of a quirky tabloid headline: “Alien heads found in Georgia”)
• Gill, from Gill Sans (which was designed by Eric Gill in 1928)
• Joanna (which was named after one of the daughters of its designer, Eric Gill)
• Perpetua (which was named after Christian martyr Vibia Perpetua)
• Rockwell
• Roman, from Times New Roman (which was designed for the British newspaper The Times in 1931)
• Trajan (which was named after Trajan’s Column in Rome).

Many script fonts (i.e., fonts that look like handwriting) also have traditional first names — examples include Andy, Ashley, Bradley, Gigi, Kristen, and Vladimir.

Sources: Wikipedia, Font Library – Microsoft

Image: Adapted from Pescia, stamperia benedetti, caratteri tipografici 02 by Sailko under CC BY-SA 4.0.

[Latest update: Jan. 2024]