They are sometimes curved as with Clarendon, but most often unbracketed like Rockwell. Slab serifs have thick block lines at the end of their stokes. Newspaper headlines and product advertising resulted in more attention grabbing type styles in the 19th century, which lead to typefaces being made more robust to withstand the industrialised printing process. Didot and Bodoni are the two most recognisable Didone typefaces. These typefaces have extreme contrast with broad strokes reducing to thin hairlines, along with unbracketed serifs that abruptly change from thick to thin without a transitional curve. Didone (aka Modern) – 1800sįonts from the 18th century that took the type design trends to the max were known as Didone or Modern. Transitional fonts such as Baskerville are more elegant with broad strokes becoming much thinner within the character and the stress is now perfectly vertical. The trend of more upright letters and greater contrast in strokes continued into the Transitional era, which is the period between Old Style and Modern font designs. Fonts such as Garamond and Goudy Old Style are from this era and are characterised with a move towards more upright letters and straighter crossbars compared to previous Humanist typefaces, as well as more variation between thick and thin strokes. With typefaces now being carved to form printable fonts, typographers began to experiment and design their own type, rather than mimic existing scripts. Centaur and Jenson are modern fonts in the Humanist style. Still based on hand lettering, these fonts have the characteristics of angled crossbars on the letter ‘e’ and a high stress which relates to how a scribe would hold a pen. In Italy the German blackletter style was soon replaced with typefaces inspired by Roman inscriptions. Serif fontsĪs movable type printing became the standard across Europe different typeface styles were developed, but these early typefaces were still based on early hand written scripts so they retained the characteristics of brush/pen lines and serifs on the entry and exit of each stroke. Fonts such as Gutenberg and Fraktur are popular modern interpretations of the first print typefaces. There’s a whole series of subcategories of Blackletter typefaces each with its own characteristics, but they’re all based on the original calligraphic style with tall, narrow letters and sharp angular lines. The first typeface carved by Gutenberg was based on the hand writing style of the time and was used to print the first books in Europe, including the Bible. In the middles ages books were hand lettered in the Gothic style that had been developed by scribes, until the invention of the movable type press by Johannes Gutenberg.

Sharp edge fonts