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Type Styles

Letter Form Project | The Printing Press | TypeStyles | History of Type | Letter Archetecture

Oldstyle
Typefaces created in the oldstyle are based on the hand lettering of scribes you can imagine a wedge-tipped pen held in the hand. Oldstyle always have serifs (see the call-out below) and the serifs of lowercase letters are always at an angle (the angle of the pen). Because of that pen, all the curved strokes in the letterforms have a transition from thick to thin, technically called the "thick/thin transition." This contrast in the stroke is relatively moderate, meaning it goes from kind-of-thin to kind-of-thicker. If you draw a line through the thinnest parts of the curved strokes, the line is diagonal. This is called the stress– oldstyle type has a diagonal stress.

Modern
As history marched on, the structure of type changed. Type has trends and succumbs to lifestyle and cultural changes, just like hairdos, clothes, architecture, or language. In the 1700s, smoother paper, more sophisticated printing techniques, and a general increase in mechanical devices led to type becoming more mechanical also. New typefaces no longer followed the pen in hand. Modern typefaces have serifs, but the serifs are now horizontal instead of slanted, and they are very thin. Like a steel bridge, the structure is severe, with a radical thick/thin transition, or contrast in the strokes. There is no evidence of the slant of the pen; the stress is vertical. Moderns tend to have a cold, elegant look.

Slab Serif
Along with the industrial revolution came a new concept: advertising. At first, advertisers took modern typefaces and made the thick thicker. You have seen posters with type like that-from a distance, all you see are vertical lines, like a fence. The obvious solution to this problem was to thicken the entire letterform. Slab serifs have little or no thick/thin transition.
This category of type is sometimes called Clarendon, because the typeface Clarendon (shown below) is the epitome of this style. They are also called Egyptian because they became popular during the Egyptomania phase of Western civilization; many typefaces in this category were given Egyptian names so they would sell (Memphis, Cairo, Scarab).

San Serif
The word "sans" means "without" (in French), so sans serif typefaces are those without serifs on the ends of the strokes. The idea of removing the serifs was a rather late development in the evolution of type, and did not become wildly successful until the early part of the twentieth century. Sans serif typefaces are almost always "monoweight," meaning there is virtually no visible thick/thin transition in the strokes; the letterforms are the same thickness all the way around.