Designed by Robert Slimbach, it is inspired by late Renaissance-era type and intended for body text and extended reading.

[2][3][4] As the historically rooted name indicates, Minion was designed for body text in a classic style, although slightly condensed and with large apertures to increase legibility.

"[6][7] The design is slightly condensed, although Slimbach has said that this was intended not for commercial reasons so much as to achieve a good balance of the size of letters relative to the ascenders and descenders.

[11][a] It is an early member of what became Adobe's Originals program, which created a set of type families primarily for book and print use, many like Minion in a deliberately historical, humanist style.

[b] Minion is a very large family of fonts, including Greek, Armenian and Cyrillic alphabets, optical sizes, condensed styles and stylistic alternates such as swash capitals.

One of the most famous uses of Minion is The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst's book about fine printing and page layout.

[15][16] Modern Minion releases are in the OpenType (otf) format, allowing a variety of stylistic alternates such as small caps and ligatures to be encoded in the same font.

The original release used additional 'expert set' fonts for these features, and may remain used by designers using more primitive software such as Microsoft Office that has limited OpenType support.

The update is based on Minion MM but features slight changes to the selection of instances and modifications of the font metrics.

A rerelease including Armenian, redesigned Greek characters, full support for International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and other modifications.

[7] Type designer Matthew Butterick mildly criticised it for being overused: "Minion is beautifully made—it’s balanced, it’s clean, it’s handsome, it’s conservative.

MnSymbol is not a full math font, as such it provides mathematical symbols in the style of Minion[46] but not glyphs for Latin characters.