In a blurb for its use, Corbel was described as "designed to give an uncluttered, clean appearance on screen.

Font designer Raph Levien, reviewing it for Typographica, described it as similar to Frutiger.

[1] Tankard described his aims in the family's design: “I wanted to move away from the round i-dot sans fonts we've seen a lot of recently.

This is an uncommon choice in sans-serif faces, especially those designed for display on a screen, but several of the other ClearType fonts also make this the default option; lining figures can be suggested using an OpenType stylistic alternates menu or CSS font-variant-numeric:lining-nums.

[6] For use in other operating systems, such as Linux, cross-platform use and web use it is not available as a freeware and is licensed and sold by Ascender.