The story of Garamond Premier begins with a trip to Belgium. While developing the Adobe Garamond font family in 1994, designer Robert Slimbach went to Antwerp to view the punches and designs of Claude Garamond, the legendary type designer of the 16th century.

Impressed by the range of sizes in Garamond’s work, Slimbach decided to undertake a different approach to a modern Garamond from what was intended with Adobe Garamond. His new design would be based on these hand-cut models and supplemented with italics based on the work of Robert Granjon.

Given the prevalence of digital Garamonds on the marketplace, Slimbach’s Premier would be somewhat distinct for its grounding in Garamond’s original work; many Garamond revivals in recent decades had actually been based on the work of punchcutter Jean Jannon, whose work had been misattributed to Claude Garamond for hundreds of years.

Slimbach worked for over 10 years at the endeavor, finally releasing Garamond Premier in 2005. The resulting font family had a wide range of optical size variants and a full suite of OpenType features for use in Adobe InDesign®, Illustrator®, and Photoshop®.

References:
Adobe: Garmond
Typophile: Slimbach's New Garamond
Typophile: Our Favorite Typefaces of 2005

Garamond Premier is used by the Philadelphia Insurance Companies for certain design elements in its branding. It is also very popular amongst educational institutions. The University of Delaware has made it its official serif typeface and recommends it for use in all UD correspondence. The Yale University Press recently revamped their logo to feature Garamond Premier.