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BlackletterThe Middle Ages: very little white space and difficult to read

Humanist or Venetian15th century, lighter than blackletter with more open forms

Old Style or Garalde16th and 17th century with larger variations of stroke width; Aldus Manutius creates italic type

Transitional or Neoclassical18th century, the first that did not reproduce handwritten script; greater thick and thin stroke widthModern or DiodoneLate 18th century, extreme contrast in stroke width, known for elegance and still used in high-end publications as headings – not for running copy

Slab Serif, Square Serif or MechanicalLate 18th century, used with advertisements and headings on posters and billboards

Modern Art Periods and Typography

TYPOGRAPHYHistoric Milestones in Typography

Staatliches Bauhaus - The BauhausStaatliches Bauhaus, more commonly known as Bauhaus, was the influential art and architecture school founded in Germany in 1919.

Bauhaus became most influential on schools of thought in regard to typography, modern design, art, architec-ture and interior design. With the belief that artistic forms should be united, practise crafts should be pro-moted, and all should contribute to a utopian whole.

Typography played a large role in the Bauhaus move-ment, with many important and famous typefaces finding their roots there: Kombinationsschrift (Joseph Albers), Futura (Paul Renner), Super Grotesk (Arno Drescher) and Universal (Herbert Bayer).

Early 20th CenturyFuturists: Often used text that had no meaning, influenced by cubists

Russian Constructivists: Used a variety of sans serif type in posters

De Stijl Movement: Stripped away the decoration, used geometric shapes and blocky sans serif fonts

The Bauhaus School and Their motto: Form follows function. Type is stripped of decorative elements; lowercase lettering is favored and asymmetrical balance becomes a cen-tral feature in design composition.

Bauhaus typography was typically unadorned and clean. They believed: “Typography is an instrument of communication. It must present precise information in a suggestive form… For legibility, the message must never suffer from a priori aesthetics.”

Contemporary: Styles borrowed from the past, reinvented using electronic manipulation; free fonts are available for download or creation with simple computer graphic tools, new ap-proaches include grunge, cannibalism and distortion using filters.

Bauhaus Master Instructors1926From left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer.

Bauhaus: The Founders of Modern Design

A Brief History of Type

and Page Layout

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OldstyleA serif group based on hand lettering, works well with large areas of printed text

ModernInfluenced 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 SerifThick throughout the letter form, easy to see from afar, on posters, readable for smaller ar-eas of text with wide leading and often used for children’s books

Sans SerifNo serifs, come in a variety of different weights (bold, regular, thin, etc), Easier to read on screens for large areas of text.

ScriptResembles hand writing where letters con-nect; like cursive writing. Not good for large areas of text, best for small areas of text, logos or large accents.

DecorativeFun, distinctive, are best in small quantities and work great for headlines and small accents. Some look really awful no matter what!

ConcordantWhen you only use one type family without much variation – a safe mix—but can be a bit dull

ConflictingWhen you use different typefaces that are too similar in size, style, etc. Usually not a good direction in typography

ContrastingUsing completely different typefaces, which can be exciting and is a good direction in ty-pography. NEVER USE MORE THAN THREE PER PAGE!

LeadingThe horizontal space between one line of text and the next

KerningThe space between two letters

TrackingThe spacing across a whole string of letters, used for decorative purposes

SizeObvious differences in the font size or the use of large areas of white space

Weight or StyleThickness of stroke. Some examples include regular, bold, semibold, extra bold, light, etc.

Using contrasting weights makes a page more attractive and helps organize content.

StructureThe design of the typeface, such as stroke width, serif thickness, distance between let-ters

FormRefers to how a letter is shaped, such as the difference between upper case and lower case of the same typeface

DirectionRefers to the diagonal slant or vertical direc-tion of the counters.

TypeA printed character or printed characters; an element in design.

TypefaceThe style or design of a font.

Type Spacing

Type Categories Type Relationships Type Contrasts and Terms

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Sans Serif History

Postscript Type 1Developed by Adobe, these consist of a print-er 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.

TrueTypeDeveloped 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 MasterDeveloped 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.

OpenTypeDeveloped 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 cross-platform, and consists of a single font file.

Digital Typesof Fonts

For YourViewersLegibilityHow 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

ReadabilityThe ease with which a reader can scan over paragraphs of type.

• Line lengths

• Point size

• Leading

• Typeface selection

• Type alignment

• Background content

EgyptianThe 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.

AntiqueIn 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.

GrotesqueIt was originally coined by William Thorow-good 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. Ger-man 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.

DoricIt was the term first used by H. W. Caslon Foundry in Chiswell Street in 1870 to de-scribe various sans-serif fonts at a time the generic name ‘sans-serif ’ was commonly ac-cepted. Eventually the foundry used Sans-serif in 1906. At that time, Doric referred to a cer-tain kind of stressed sans-serif types.

GothicNot 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 ad-jective 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 com-monly used in Japan and South Korea.

ClassificationFor the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs can be divided into four major groups:

GrotesqueEarly sans-serif designs, such as Grotesque, Akzidenz Grotesk, and Franklin Gothic.

Neo-grotesque or Transitional or RealistModern designs such as Standard, Bell Cen-tennial, 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.

HumanistCalibri, Johnston, Lucida Grande, Segoe UI, Gill Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma, Verdana and Optima. These are the most cal-ligraphic of the sans-serif typefaces, with some variation in line width and more legibility than other sans-serif fonts.

GeometricFutura, ITC Avant Garde, Century Gothic, Gotham, or Spartan. As their name suggests, Geometric sans-serif typefaces are based on geometric shapes. Note the optically circu-lar 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 dis-tinct because Verdana’s capital-i, as an excep-tion, has serifs. Other fonts may have two horizontal bars on the capital-i, a curved tail on the lowercase-L, or both.

British Standards classificationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox-ATypI_classification(scroll down for examples)

GrotesqueLineale 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 in-clude Stephenson Blake Grotesque No. 6, Condensed Sans No. 7, Monotype Headline Bold.

Neo-grotesqueLineale 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.

GeometricLineale typefaces constructed on simple geo-metric shapes, circle or rectangle. Usually monoline, and often with single-storey a. Ex-amples include Futura, Erbar, Eurostile.

HumanistLineale typefaces based on the proportions of inscriptional Roman capitals and Humanist or Garalde lower-case, rather than on early gro-tesques. They have some stroke contrast, with two-storey a and g. Examples include Optima, Gill Sans, Pascal.