The Principles of Beautiful Typography

Typeface Distinctions

Everybody knows what a font is. It's a set of letters that appear in a similar style, they come pre-installed on your computer, and you change it when you want your text to look different. The average Windows PC has just over 40 fonts installed by default, while the average Mac user has access to around 100 fonts. Many of these fonts are grouped together into font families, with each font in the family representing a different variation of the font after which the family is named. Most font families include the regular font face along with italic, bold, and bold italic variants. Some fonts have no variations at all, some may only have bold or italic, and some commercially available font families have hundreds of variants.

Just as all the members of some families have big ears or abnormally long pinky toes, every font family has its own unique, identifiable characteristics. Take a look at all the variation that exists between fonts for the letter "g" in Figure 4.13.

These characteristics are what help us to categorize fonts and font families. The majority of font families can be classified as either serif or sans serif. Beyond this distinction, there are many other ways in which we can classify and group fonts. I prefer to group fonts into six simple categories: serif, sans serif, handwritten, monospace, novelty, and dingbats. Let's look at each of them now.

Serif Fonts

Historians believe that the serif has its origin in Roman stone carving. There is much debate over the original purpose of these ornamental strokes, but in more recent history, they've been proven to increase legibility in large blocks of text by providing a horizontal line of reference. When most designers try to choose a serif font, Times New Roman is the first one that comes to mind. However, there's a great variety of serif fonts from which we can choose. To help us with that decision, it's a good idea to first decide what type of voice we want our text to have.

Take a look at the Garamond text in Figure 4.14. Garamond is an old-style serif font. Old-style serif fonts are adapted from the brush strokes of Italian scribes and can be recognized both by the smooth transitions between thick and thin strokes, and by their rounded serif edges. When I see an old-style serif font, it seems to me to have a hint of historic, handcrafted charm. At the same time, fonts like Garamond are extremely versatile. They're not so old-fashioned that they can't be used in modern applications, but this isn't their forte.

The second font in Figure 4.14 is Baskerville, a transitional serif font. The curved angle that connects the terminal of the stroke to the serif is known as a bracket. The brackets of transitional serif fonts are rounded but the edges of the serifs are squared off. The simple addition of 90-degree angles and perfectly straight lines gives this category of font a more modern and mechanical voice. This category of serif fonts is known as transitional because it provides a transition between old-style and modern serif fonts.

In Figure 4.15, the font Didot is a modern serif font. Modern serif fonts provide a large amount of contrast between the thick and thin strokes, and their serifs are often completely unbracketed. Modern serif fonts were introduced during the Industrial Revolution as a radical alternative to the transitional serif style. Today, these fonts have an association with elegance, sophistication, and fashion. They represent timelessness more than they suggest cutting-edge modernity.

Because of their fine-line details, modern serif fonts are really only suitable for use in headlines. The logo for Vogue magazine, which you can see in Figure 4.15, is a classic example of modern serif font use. Other famous magazines that use modern serif fonts faces for their mastheads include Brides magazine and Harper's Bazaar.

The consistent use of Italian Didot for the Vogue magazine logo helped to establish both the font and the company as icons of style.

In the later part of the 1800s, as advertising, posters, and flyers became more common, a bolder variation of modern serif fonts was needed to catch people's attention. It was at this time that slab serif fonts were introduced. Slab serif faces like Rockwell, which you can see in Figure 4.15, have an industrial voice of strength and fortitude. These faces were designed to be extremely readable from a distance.