Defend the Indefensible: Adobe's first original display typefaces

So basically in 1989 one woman from RISD working at Adobe proceeds, in one year and three fonts, to sentence the rest of us to decades of typographic mediocrity and, indeed, despair.

https://www.fonts.com/browse/designers/carol-twombly

Carol Twombly
Carol Twombly – born 13. 6. 1959 in Concord, USA – type designer. Studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Stanford University.

1984: is awarded 1st prize in the Morisawa type competition in Japan for he Mirarae typeface. 1988: joins Adobe and designs Adobe’s first original display typefaces (Trajan, Charlemagne and Lithos).

http://www.adobe.com/products/type/font-designers/carol-twombly.html

After graduation from RISD and a year spent working in a Boston graphic design studio, Carol accepted an invitation from Bigelow to join a small group of students in a newly formed digital typography program at Stanford University. The program, since discontinued, awarded Carol and her colleagues Masters of Science degrees after two years of study in computer science and typographic design. Carol continued to work for the Bigelow and Holmes studio for the next four years and, during this time, entered her first type design in an international competition sponsored by Morisawa Ltd., a Japanese manufacturer of typesetting equipment. To Twombly's surprise and delight, she won first prize in the Latin text category, and Morisawa subsequently licensed and marketed her design under the name Mirarae™. Soon after, Carol began working for Adobe Systems and in 1988 became a full-time type designer in the Adobe Originals program.

We could probably do a poll about which of the currently available Carol Twombly fonts is truly so bad it's the best, because I mean: https://www.fonts.com/browse/designers/carol-twombly Zebrawood, people! but this thread is about 1989, and Charlemagne, Lithos and Trajan. They're on more bad menus than Copperplate Gothic, and where the whimsically addled might choose to use the universally derided Comic Sans for their flyer, the ones who use these are far more dangerous IMHO. When Brandeis warned us about insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding, he was talking about people who use Trajan.

Just so everyone knows what we're talking about here

http://i.imgur.com/rp35R0G.png
http://i.imgur.com/P3v2ldu.png
http://i.imgur.com/WJkhzuh.png

Based on Byzantine, Greek, and Roman writing, although in first two cases it is based very loosely.

Trajan abuse is not her or Adobe's fault in my opinion. If it had only been used for things based on ancient Rome it would have been fine.

Has Lithos ever looked good on anything?

Lithos is as eye-grating as Remedy to me, but I'm not averse to Trajan in its proper context.

ancient rome?

indeed

I once spent a non-trivial amount of my time hassling with which version of ATM was installed on which Macs. If you graduated from UC Irvine in 1991-92 and had the Kinkos across the street typeset your resume. I probably was the one doing it.

Fuck Lithos to hell. I still have an immediate EEWWWYYYUUUCCHHH reaction to it.

I feel like Lithos Black could still have legitimate comedy purposes, like the aforementioned Comic Sans. That's not much of a defense, but it puts it over Remedy in my estimation.

appropriate use of Trajan:
http://www.impawards.com/1999/posters/titus_ver1.jpg

not trajan, because i checked:
Gladiator (Castellar)
Ben-Hur 2016 (Friz Quadrata?)

i like trajan's j

I saw some Lithos Black on a sign the other day and actually got a kick out of it. I don't remember why I decided to be so OTT mean-spirited in this thread, at all!

Actually I can guess, but still, why poor Carol Twombly had to be the target of so much ire the day after Christmas, that's just ridiculous. That Tombot is a jerk!