If I were to make up something (which am doing) I’d say an Office weight would be a typeface with characteristics optimized for office reproduction systems, such as laser printers, photocopiers, and fax machines, at a typical correspondence size (10-12 pt).

This may or may not relate to any real world definition, but it should, because I say so.

Interesting. Redesigned somewhat for bad printers and bad paper. Like Bell Gothic. I think they are also somewhat condensed. I need a magnifying glass to inspect the book closer.

Anyone else?

When I produced a typeface for a private client a couple of years ago, I supplied them with an ’office’ and ’book’ weight. As cuttlefish suggests, the office weight was designed to be used on office reproduction systems, while the book weight was intended for offset printing. The intention of providing two weights was to try to counteract the darkening effect of lower resolution printers to achieve a balance of blackness between office reproduction systems and offset printing (the low-res ’darkening effect’ is a result of the ’rounding-up’ of the printers rasterizing software). I also sold the client with the suggestion that the office weight would (somewhat negligibly) use less ink/toner and therefore would save them money etc..

Anyway, I think you grasp the idea, but what I wanted to add to this post was that a few months after I had signed-off the work to the client I was showing the design to a fellow designer who asked whether I had based the character widths and spacing for the office weight on Times New Roman. I thought this a bit strange at the time, but maybe this could explain the ’pseudo mono-spacing’ and condensed forms?

mike

the ’pseudo mono-spacing’ and condensed forms

. . . may be reminiscent of old typewriter faces, so the letter, invoice or whatever would be perceived as a more personal piece of communication than when set in a, for example, book face.

Carrying on from my previous post - taking the idea of development of certain ’weights’ for a variety of output systems, H&FJ expanded this practice with their ’grading’ system of weights for Mercury:

http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100017

mike

IIRC the “office” fonts started when a version of ITC Officina was created for used by office workers as Jason pointed out.