Matthew Carter designed Bell Centennial in 1978 specifically for AT&T Corporation (the name honors their 100th anniversary) to use in telephone books. Carter developed it to have high legibility at small sizes, and for composition on high-speed, cathode-ray-tube composing machines. (Bell Gothic, the typeface originally designed for telephone books in 1937 and for composition on the hot metal Linotype machines, was no longer usable in the new technology.) Bell Centennial is a sturdy, condensed sans-serif design that achieves great economy of space while being highly legible. Bell Centennial can be used for modern display purposes and, of course, for small print and lists. The Alternate version of Bell Centennial Bold Listing sits on a standard baseline; the original version sits far below the baseline, and cannot mix properly with other fonts on the same line.
The Adobe Originals program started in 1989 as an in-house type foundry at Adobe, brought together to create original typefaces of exemplary design quality, technical fidelity, and aesthetic longevity.
Today the Type team’s mission is to make sophisticated and even experimental typefaces that explore the possibilities of design and technology. Typefaces released as Adobe Originals are the result of years of work and study, regarded as industry standards for the ambition and quality of their development.
As with everything from Adobe Fonts, you can use these fonts for:
Design Projects
Create images or vector artwork, including logos
Website Publishing
Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
PDFs
Embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
Video and Broadcast
Use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content
How to Use
You may encounter slight variations in the name of this font, depending on where you use it. Here’s what to look for.
Desktop
In application font menus, this font will display:
{{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_family_name}} {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_subfamily_name}}Web
To use this font on your website, use the following CSS:
font-family: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.family.css_font_stack.replace('"', '').replace('",', ', ')}};
font-style: italicnormal;
font-weight: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.font.web.weight}};
Glyph Support & Stylistic Filters
Fonts in the Adobe Fonts library include support for many different languages, OpenType features, and typographic styles.