In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque and § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist and § Other or mixed.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Frutiger is a series of typefaces named after its Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif typeface, intended to be clear and highly legible at a distance or at small text sizes. A popular design worldwide, type designer Steve Matteson described its structure as "the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation" at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann named it as "the best general typeface ever".
Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. It was designed as a contribution on the New Frankfurt-project. It is based on geometric shapes, especially the circle, similar in spirit to the Bauhaus design style of the period. It was developed as a typeface by the Bauer Type Foundry, in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's seminal Erbar typeface of 1926.
Univers is a large sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, it was notable for its availability from the moment of its launch in a comprehensive range of weights and widths. The original marketing for Univers deliberately referenced the periodic table to emphasise its scope.
Johnston is a sans-serif typeface designed by and named after Edward Johnston. The typeface was commissioned in 1913 by Frank Pick, commercial manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, as part of his plan to strengthen the company's corporate identity. Johnston was originally created for printing, but it rapidly became used for the enamel station signs of the Underground system as well.
Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid'.
Myriad is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems. Myriad was intended as a neutral, general-purpose typeface that could fulfill a range of uses and have a form easily expandable by computer-aided design to a large range of weights and widths.
Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head designer Morris Fuller Benton. “Gothic” was a contemporary term meaning sans-serif.
Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles. Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece for each glyph. A typeface consists of various fonts that share an overall design.
Rotis is a typeface developed in 1988 by Otl Aicher, a German graphic designer and typographer. In Rotis, Aicher explores an attempt at maximum legibility through a highly unified yet varied typeface family that ranges from full serif, glyphic, and sans-serif. The four basic Rotis variants are:
Syntax comprises a family of fonts designed by Swiss typeface designer Hans Eduard Meier. Originally just a sans-serif font, it was extended with additional serif designs.
News Gothic is a sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton, and was released in 1908 by his employer American Type Founders (ATF). The typeface is similar in proportion and structure to Franklin Gothic, also designed by Benton, but lighter.
Bank Gothic is a rectilinear geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders and released in 1930. The design has become popular from the late twentieth century to suggest a science-fiction, military, corporate, or sports aesthetic.
In typography, the Vox-ATypI classification makes it possible to classify typefaces into general classes. Devised by Maximilien Vox in 1954, it was adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) and in 1967 as a British Standard, as British Standards Classification of Typefaces, which is a very basic interpretation and adaptation/modification of the earlier Vox-ATypI classification. On April 27, 2021, ATypI announced that they had de-adopted the system and that they were establishing a working group building towards a new, larger system incorporating the different scripts of the world.
Source Sans is a sans-serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt, released by Adobe in 2012. It is the first open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License.
Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1929 onwards.
The Stephenson Blake Grotesque fonts are a series of sans-serif typefaces created by the type foundry Stephenson Blake of Sheffield, England, mostly around the beginning of the twentieth century.
