Citizen is a quirky two-weight font family for use in short texts and headlines. The design resulted from Licko’s experimentation with emerging technologies of the late 80s. With the introduction of laser printers, a “smooth” printing option was provided as a shortcut to increasing the resolution of bitmaps from screen to printer. This option processed 72 dpi bitmaps into 300 dpi bitmaps for laser printers; seemingly polishing stair step pixels into smooth diagonals. This was the inspiration for the design of Citizen. Licko used straight line segments to approximate the features of smooth printing, applied to her earlier Lo-Res Twelve bitmap design. Later, this progression would develop into the Triplex Sans family.
