The Last Word On My History of Typefaces

So far I have discussed Black Letter, Old Style, Transitional and Modern typefaces.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Black Letter: the first typeface – its paradigm was the scrolls of medieval scribes. It has thick vertical lines and thin horizontal connectors. Today we regard this kind of typeface as good for headlines, but not for body text.

Old Style: letters with thick serifs and low contrast between thick and thin strokes. These first roman types arrived in the fifteenth century as an alternative to Black Letter and were an instant hit for readability.

Transitional: letters with thinner serifs and a higher contrast between thick and thin strokes. Popular in Europe and the U.S., these are still used today.

Modern: the styles of these typefaces include very thin serifs and extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes. Like the others mentioned above, these are still in use and in fact currently popular with designers for marketing pieces.

HOWEVER…all these typefaces did have one thing in common: Serifs.

William Caslon’s great grandson, William Caslon IV, decided change was in order. He designed a typeface without serifs. This new kind of typeface is now known as sans serif.  It took a while to catch on but as we all know, sans serif fonts are now extremely popular. One of their first uses was in billboard advertising where letters had to be wide and tall, and sans serifs were a good fit for this. As well, they are a good contrast to serif types, with many documents today containing a mix of two or more different typefaces for effect.

Could you read a page of this?

After this innovation, many would-be typographers got in on the act and a slew of new sans serif faces appeared, some of them completely illegible due to being too chunky or abstract. 

However, we also have this period to thank for some timeless new typefaces, both serif and sans serif. For instance, slab serifs – also known as Egyptian because of the thick, block-like serifs that simulate those seen on hieroglyphics – are huge today and we see variations of them on TV, in books, in advertising and on business pieces. They make catchy headings that stand out in aesthetically pleasing ways. Rockwell is an example of a slab serif.

Later still came another artistic creation in the design of typeface, the geometric sans. Futura, designed by Paul Renner, has a foundation of geometric principles: squares and circles.

Gill Sans, by Eric Gill, is similar but not as stark – with its softer curves it became known as humanist sans.

More recently still – fifty years ago – the sans serif Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann to fulfill a need for a typeface that could be used for various purposes and in various weights.

Helvetica has many fonts, from bold to light, from Black to condensed; it is extremely versatile, because with just one type family a designer still can create an eye-catching document using various fonts for headers, tables, etc.

Trivia Break:

Helvetica is one of the most global typefaces in the sans serif style. Even Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Chinese and other non-Western alphabets have a version of Helvetica for use in their own languages.

                          

Today

The advent of computers meant easier typeface design, at least after the early problem years were behind us (when early screens with their obvious and clumsy-looking pixels hindered such development). Now there are thousands of new typefaces that are easy to buy and download.

We no longer need to consider issues of the old printing press days, such as fitting a last spare line onto a full page, for we can now kern and track our letters, reduce a type size or the leading and so on. We can choose typefaces that fit different functions. Life in the printing, marketing and design worlds has never been easier.