Chaparral Pro® takes us back to the 16th century to the book lettering fonts that were popular in the days when mass printing was in its relative infancy. The slab serif was no accidental design addition of the day; it was a functional feature of the glyphs in a character set that leads the eye along the invisible baseline for the lower serifs. This functionality applies to any serif font, but even more so to slab serifs. In more recent times, the invention of the typewriter heralded the ability for anyone who could afford one of these cheap machines to print rather than handwrite everything; the typefaces on these machines were invariably serifs and typically used the roman style.

Claude Garamond was among the first to popularize use this typeface design in the 16th century. Printers of the day were moving away from the narrower Jensen-style roman typefaces and exploring wider character glyphs while still retaining the characteristic serifs and ligatures in common use at the time. Twombly captured the essence of this style and design to provide a more contemporary version that has a warmer and more articulate feel to it. This is hardly surprising considering that Twombly has her roots in art and design and regularly enjoys these pursuits such as painting with a passion outside of her award-winning contributions to typography.

Chaparral Pro is true to its origins and still conveys a times sense of class and has now become a popular standard for many print applications. Due to the broad range of available styles, Chaparral Pro performs as a workhorse, succeeding in the smallest optical sizes, up to large heavy headlines that boldly convey their message.

Chaparral has numerous uses, including books and other texts of length. Due to its availability in small optical sizes, and combined with its clarity of design, Chaparral is ideal as a caption and small-print typeface.