In typography, a serif is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface, and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic" and serif typefaces as "roman".
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.
Hoefler Text is an old-style serif font by Jonathan Hoefler released by Apple Computer Inc. in 1991 to showcase advanced type technologies. Intended as a versatile font that is suitable for body text, it takes cues from a range of classic fonts, such as designs by Miklós Kis and Jean Jannon.
Jonathan Hoefler is an American type designer. Hoefler founded the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989, a type foundry in New York.
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.
Didone is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the 19th century. It is characterized by:
Tobias Frere-Jones is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program.
In metal typesetting, a font or fount is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface, defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni includes fonts "Roman", "bold" and "italic"; each of these exists in a variety of sizes.
Adobe Jenson is an old-style serif typeface drawn for Adobe Systems by its chief type designer Robert Slimbach. Its Roman styles are based on a text face cut by Nicolas Jenson in Venice around 1470, and its italics are based on those created by Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi fifty years later.
Archer is a slab serif typeface designed in 2001 by Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler for use in Martha Stewart Living magazine. It was later released by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for commercial licensing.
Benton Sans is a digital typeface family begun by Tobias Frere-Jones in 1995, and expanded by Cyrus Highsmith of Font Bureau. It is based on the sans-serif typefaces designed for American Type Founders by Morris Fuller Benton around the beginning of the twentieth century in the industrial or grotesque style. It was a reworked version of Benton Gothic developed for various corporate customers, under Frere-Jones's guidance. In developing the typeface, Frere-Jones studied drawings of Morris Fuller Benton's 1908 typeface News Gothic at the Smithsonian Institution. The typeface began as a proprietary type, initially titled MSL Gothic, for Martha Stewart Living magazine and the website for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. As Benton Gothic, there are 7 weights from Thin to Black and only 2 widths.
Centaur is a serif typeface by book and typeface designer Bruce Rogers, based on the Renaissance-period printing of Nicolas Jenson around 1470. He used it for his design of the Oxford Lectern Bible. It was given widespread release by the British branch of Monotype, paired with an italic designed by calligrapher Frederic Warde and based on the slightly later work of calligrapher and printer Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi. The italic has sometimes been named separately as the "Arrighi" italic.
Martin Majoor is a Dutch type designer and graphic designer. As of 2006, he had worked since 1997 in both Arnhem, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland.
Century is a family of serif type faces particularly intended for body text. The family originates from a first design, Century Roman, cut by American Type Founders designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894 for master printer Theodore Low De Vinne, for use in The Century Magazine. ATF rapidly expanded it into a very large family, first by Linn Boyd, and later by his son Morris. With ATF no longer operating, a wide variety of variants and revivals with varying features and quality are available.
Memphis is a slab-serif typeface designed by Rudolf Wolf and released in 1929 by the Stempel Type Foundry.
A reverse-contrast or reverse-stress letterform is a typeface or custom lettering where the stress is reversed from the norm, meaning that the horizontal lines are the thickest. This is the reverse of the vertical lines being the same width or thicker than horizontals, which is normal in Latin-alphabet writing and especially printing. The result is a dramatic effect, in which the letters seem to have been printed the wrong way round. The style was invented in the early nineteenth century as an attention-grabbing novelty for display typefaces. Modern font designer Peter Biľak, who has created a design in the genre, has described them as "a dirty trick to create freakish letterforms that stood out."
A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use in display type at large sizes for titles, headings, pull quotes, and other eye-catching elements, rather than for extended passages of body text.
Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1929 onwards.
Retina is a font by created by Tobias Frere-Jones for The Wall Street Journal, which used it for high density print in their newspapers from 2000 to 2007. It was created to be legible at very small font sizes, using ink traps to stop smearing during the printing process.
