Type Classification
Mostly a chronology of letterform skeletons, from Roman inscriptions to variable fonts and from Mincho to Hangul, with the methods of making and setting type and the foundries that issued it around them.
Dictionary entry
- Roman Square Capitals 1st–2nd century / Style
Capitals cut for stone, with geometric proportions and serifs, became the skeleton of the Latin alphabet and the archetype of authority for two thousand years.
- Blackletter 12th century– / Style
The manuscript hand compressed into dense black verticals, filling the page with an even darkness like woven cloth. It was also the first typeface of printing.
- Old Style Serif 15th–16th century– / Style
Set the standard for text faces that read without fatigue: the pen's oblique axis and gentle stroke contrast.
- Italic 1501– / Style
The humanist cursive cast in type: slanted letters that made pocket books possible, later becoming the second voice beside roman.
- Transitional Serif 18th century / Style
Raising the axis toward vertical, sharpening the contrast between strokes and designing paper and ink along with the letter moved type past handwriting into an object made in its own right.
- Didone late 18th century– / Style
A constructed roman that pushes the contrast of hairline and thick vertical stem to its limit, standing at once as the terminus of the Age of Reason and as a sign of luxury.
- Fat Face c. 1803– / Style
Advertising swelled the didone's stems to extremes. The result was the earliest display type, built to shout across the street.
- Slab Serif 1815– / Style
Square serifs as thick as the strokes turned letters into machine structures. Industrial society's advertising and notices found their sturdy voice.
- Grotesque Sans 1816– / Style
When the letter dropped its serifs it was at first called grotesque, but its odd evenness became the new voice of notices and headlines.
- Neo-grotesque Sans 1957– / Style
The grotesque had its quirks removed and neutrality set in their place as the design goal. What came out became the voice of postwar rationalism and the global corporation.
- Geometric Sans 1927– / Style
It reduced letterforms to the circle, the line and the triangle, trying to build the letters of a new era out of geometry rather than out of the habits of the hand.
- Humanist Sans 1916– / Style
Keeping the roman's skeleton and proportions without serifs, it stays functional while remembering the hand, which made it the standard for public signage.
- Wood Type 1827– / Technique
Gigantic letters cut from wood for broadside posters created the display vocabulary of extreme condensation, extension and ornament.
- Mincho 19th century– / Style
It regularizes the kaisho skeleton into thin horizontals and thick verticals suited to carving, and with its uroko serifs it still carries the body text of Japanese.
- Japanese Gothic late 19th century– / Style
The Japanese sans-serif of nearly even strokes: born for headline emphasis, it grew into the text face of the screen.
- Monospace 1874– / Style
Fixed-width letters born from the typewriter's mechanism, settled as the voice of work-in-progress: drafts, forms and code.
- Talnemokkol (De-squared Hangul) 1980s- / Style
Hangul type that gives up fitting each syllable into a square and stacks consonant and vowel as fixed shapes, so height and width change from letter to letter. Ahn Sang-soo's typeface and posters carried the form to a wide audience.
- ITC Style 1970s–1980s / Style
New York in the phototype era produced a style of huge x-heights and tightly packed settings. Lubalin's conceptual typography and U&lc magazine staged letters as pictures and gave the period its face.
- Calligraphic Revival 1906– / Style
The modern revival of Western writing begun when Johnston rebuilt the foundational hand from medieval manuscripts. Through the Underground letters and Gill, the written hand became a source of modern design.
- Emigre 1984–2005 / Style
The magazine and foundry that turned digital coarseness into an aesthetic the moment the Mac appeared: bitmap faces, colliding layers and a defense of difficulty at the center of the 1990s design debates.