The story
The Originals program was established in 1989, when Sumner Stone hired font designers Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach. This period saw the growth of desktop publishing, at a point when printing and design was becoming more accessible. Adobe already had contracts to digitise and sell fonts by companies such as ITC, but felt that many of these designs had a somewhat dated appearance.
Early typefaces released included Utopia and Adobe Garamond, a reinterpretation of the Roman types of Claude Garamond and the italics of Robert Granjon. Slimbach developed the design to have a timeless, accurate appearance through visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and seeing books and original printing equipment from the 16th century. A parallel Adobe Originals program was developed to provide Japanese-language fonts, including the works of such designers as Masahiko Kozuka and Ryoko Nishizuka.
Groups of fonts
A particularly large group of Adobe designs was inspired by the decorative wood types of the nineteenth century. These were given names after types of wood and trees.
The series also features many eccentric display designs, some echoing the grunge typography movement of the 1990s with its awkward, science-fiction-style letterforms.
Recent activity
Adobe has published fewer original designs since around 2000, publishing other companies' designs through its Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit) online sales program for Web fonts (and more recently, desktop fonts as well). However, the company still does publish original designs, including Thomas Phinney's Hypatia Sans and Slimbach's recent Trajan Sans, Adobe Text, Arno and Acumin. Several of these are very large designs with complex character sets, Acumin reportedly having been in development for eight years and expanded in conception from four fonts to ninety.
Adobe has also released a large group of fonts, the Source family, as an open-source project that can be freely redistributed.
From Wikipedia’s article on Adobe Originals, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4