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Type Categories Type Relationships Type Contrasts and Terms Oldstyle A serif group based on hand lettering, works well with large areas of printed text Modern Influenced by the Industrial Revolution and Mechanical Age; advances in advertising. Serifs are horizontal and very thin. Best in large sizes for headings and titles. Very low legibility. Slab Serif Thick throughout the letter form, easy to see from afar, on posters, readable for smaller areas of text with wide leading and often used for children’s books Sans Serif No serifs, come in a variety of different weights (bold, regular, thin, etc), Easier to read on screens for large areas of text. Script Resembles hand writing where letters connect; like cursive writing. Not good for large areas of text, best for small areas of text, logos or large accents. Decorative Fun, distinctive, are best in small quantities and work great for headlines and small accents. Some look really awful no matter what! Concordant When you only use one type family without much variation – a safe mix—but can be a bit dull Conflicting When you use different typefaces that are too similar in size, style, etc. Usually not a good direction in typography Contrasting Using completely different typefaces, which can be exciting and is a good direction in typography. NEVER USE MORE THAN THREE PER PAGE! Type Spacing Leading The horizontal space between one line of text and the next Kerning The space between two letters Tracking The spacing across a whole string of letters, used for decorative purposes page 2 of 3 Size Obvious differences in the font size or the use of large areas of white space Weight or Style Thickness of stroke. Some examples include regular, bold, semibold, extra bold, light, etc. Using contrasting weights makes a page more attractive and helps organize content. Structure The design of the typeface, such as stroke width, serif thickness, distance between letters Form Refers to how a letter is shaped, such as the difference between upper case and lower case of the same typeface Direction Refers to the diagonal slant or vertical direction of the counters. Type A printed character or printed characters; an element in design. Typeface The style or design of a font.
Sans Serif History Egyptian The term was first used by Joseph Farington after seeing the sans serif inscription on John Flaxman’s memorial to Isaac Hawkins Brown in 1805, although today the term is commonly used to refer to slab serif, not sans serif. Antique In about 1817, the Figgins foundry in London made a type with square or slab-serifs which it called ‘Antique’, and that name was adopted by most of the British and US typefounders. An exception was the typefounder Thorne, who confused things by marketing his Antique under the name ‘Egyptian’. In France it became Egyptienne, and to worsen the confusion, the French called sans-serif type ‘Antique’. Some fonts, such as Antique Olive, still carry the name. Grotesque It was originally coined by William Thorowgood of Fann Street Foundry, the first person to produce a sans-serif type with lower case, in 1832. The name came from the Italian word ‘grottesco’, meaning ‘belonging to the cave’. In Germany, the name became Grotesk. German typefounders adopted the term from the nomenclature of Fann Street Foundry, which took on the meaning of cave (or grotto) art. Nevertheless, some explained the term was derived from the surprising response from the typographers. Doric It was the term first used by H. W. Caslon Foundry in Chiswell Street in 1870 to describe various sans-serif fonts at a time the generic name ‘sans-serif’ was commonly accepted. Eventually the foundry used Sans-serif in 1906. At that time, Doric referred to a certain kind of stressed sans-serif types. Gothic Not to be confused with blackletter typeface, the term was used mainly by American type founders.The term probably derived from the architectural definition, which is neither Greek or Roman;and from the extended adjective term of ‘Germany’, which was the place where sans-serif typefaces became popular in 19th to 20th century.[13] Early adopters for the term includes Miller & Richard (1863), J. & R. M. Wood (1865), Lothian, Conner, Bruce McKellar. Although the usage is now rare in the English-speaking world, the term is commonly used in Japan and South Korea. Classification For the purposes of type classification, sansserif designs can be divided into four major groups: Grotesque Early sans-serif designs, such as Grotesque, Akzidenz Grotesk, and Franklin Gothic. Digital Types of Fonts Postscript Type 1 Developed by Adobe, these consist of a printer or outline font, a screen or bitmap font, and usually a font metrics file (.afm). Type 1 fonts are considered the high-quality standard for years, although OpenType is changing that. TrueType Developed by Apple and MicroSoft, TrueType was to replace Type1 font standards. TrueType consists of a single file and more commonly used on Windows computers. Multiple Master Developed by Adobe, Multiple Master fonts were intended to give the designer creative freedom to scale fonts to custom widths and weights. They are similar to Type 1 fonts. Adobe no longer supports these fonts. OpenType Developed by Adobe and MicroSoft, Open- Type is a universal font format that includes the benefits of Type 1 fonts and TrueType font technologies. It is Unicode compliant, is crossplatform, and consists of a single font file. Neo-grotesque or Transitional or Realist Modern designs such as Standard, Bell Centennial, MS Sans Serif, Helvetica, Univers, Highway Gothic, and Arial. These are the most common sans-serif fonts. They are relatively straight in appearance and have less line width variation than Humanist sans-serif typefaces. Transitional sans-serif is sometimes called “anonymous sans-serif” due to its relatively plain appearance. Humanist Calibri, Johnston, Lucida Grande, Segoe UI, Gill Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma, Verdana and Optima. These are the most calligraphic of the sans-serif typefaces, with some variation in line width and more legibility than other sans-serif fonts. Geometric Futura, ITC Avant Garde, Century Gothic, Gotham, or Spartan. As their name suggests, Geometric sans-serif typefaces are based on geometric shapes. Note the optically circular letter “O” and the simple construction of the lowercase letter “a”. Geometric sans-serif fonts have a very modern look and feel. Of these four categories, geometric fonts tend to be the least useful for body text. Note that in some sans-serif fonts, such as Arial, the capital-i and lowercase-L appear identical. Verdana, however, keeps them distinct because Verdana’s capital-i, as an exception, has serifs. Other fonts may have two horizontal bars on the capital-i, a curved tail on the lowercase-L, or both. page 3 of 3 For Your Viewers Legibility How easy it is to distinguish one letter from another in a particular typeface. • Doesn’t call too much attention to itself • Has good contrast • Has a larger x-height and little variation in stroke width • Has easy to recognize characteristics • Isn’t too bold or light • Does not use all caps or caps on each word in a headline Readability The ease with which a reader can scan over paragraphs of type. • Line lengths • Point size • Leading • Typeface selection • Type alignment • Background content British Standards classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox-ATypI_classification (scroll down for examples) Grotesque Lineale typefaces with 19th century origins. There is some contrast in thickness of strokes. They have squareness of curve, and curling close-set jaws. The R usually has a curled leg and the G is spurred. The ends of the curved strokes are usually horizontal. Examples include Stephenson Blake Grotesque No. 6, Condensed Sans No. 7, Monotype Headline Bold. Neo-grotesque Lineale typefaces derived from the grotesque. They have less stroke contrast and are more regular in design. The jaws are more open than in the true grotesque and the g is often open-tailed. The ends of the curved strokes are usually oblique. Examples include Edel/ Wotan, Univers, Helvetica. Geometric Lineale typefaces constructed on simple geometric shapes, circle or rectangle. Usually monoline, and often with single-storey a. Examples include Futura, Erbar, Eurostile. Humanist Lineale typefaces based on the proportions of inscriptional Roman capitals and Humanist or Garalde lower-case, rather than on early grotesques. They have some stroke contrast, with two-storey a and g. Examples include Optima, Gill Sans, Pascal.
Page 1: Historic Milestones in Typography B

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