These are all from the useful site for free fonts. To get started, here are some free fonts you can download today and use for experiments. If you haven’t tried square serif fonts in your book designs, give them a try. Sometimes even one letter of a square serif font can be powerful enough to represent an entire brand, and square serifs are often used to convey stability in the corporate world.įor a good example of the masculine force of these typefaces, check out this look at Chunk Five, one of my very favorite display faces: ![]() The more graceful square serif fonts can be used for body copy, and in their bolder variations make impressive display fonts. Square serif typefaces give an air of solidity and stability to your design. What they trade in gracefulness they make up in emphasis. Each of these type designs shares in the character of the square serifs: they are solid, strong, full of purpose, powerful. Some other notable square serif typefaces are Memphis, Serifa, and the graceful, transitional typeface Chaparral. The most common, of course, is good old Courier, but typefaces like American Typewriter, probably the most graceful typewriter-style square serif, are also derived this way. Typewriter-Yep, the plain old typewriters that are still in use almost always use slab-serif typefaces, which are highly legible and generally simple letterforms.Italienne-Here the serifs become much heavier in relation to the stroke weight of the letters, which gives the designs a very dramatic effect.The letterforms work well as sans serif styles also, and are modeled on the Grotesque typefaces of the early part of the twentieth century. Neo-grotesque-These typefaces are characterized by even stroke weights and plain serifs.Note that Clarendon has variation in its stroke weights, one of the ways to recognize it. You might be familiar with it from signs like this in the National Parks. Clarendon-This famous British typeface has more varied serifs than the usual slab-serif typeface.There are four distinct varieties of these typefaces, each with a different origin. ![]() ![]() Apparently typefounders jumped on the bandwagon, and called the new square serif typefaces used for advertisements “Egyptian” and the name stuck, except in England, where they already had an “Egyptian” typeface. The term derives from a fad for everything Egyptian in the early nineteenth century, following Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. You might wonder why these designs are called Egyptians. And like sans serif typefaces, they usually have uniform stroke weights. Like oldstyles, they have serifs, and their serifs are even more pronounced. One of the most popular, and most useful, are the square serif typefaces, also known as Egyptians or slab serifs.Ī lot of people tell me they can’t tell the differece between one typeface and another, but you won’t have any trouble recognizing square serif typefaces. Between the grace and rhythm of oldstyle typefaces, with their serifs inspired by the pens of calligraphers, and sans serif typefaces, with their uniform strokes and modern look, there are several other groups of type designs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |