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 a sans-serif one. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic", and serif typefaces as "roman".
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed text, to identify many types of creative works, or, when quoting a speaker, a way to show which words they stressed. One manual of English usage described italics as "the print equivalent of underlining".
Antiqua ) is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries. Letters are designed to flow and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion; in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur-style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in the germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard.
Cooper Black is an ultra-bold serif typeface intended for display use that was designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry in 1922. The typeface was drawn as an extra-bold weight of Cooper's "Cooper Old Style" family. It rapidly became a standard typeface and was licensed by American Type Founders and also copied by many other manufacturers of printing systems.
Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928-9 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the "Aldine roman". Bembo is named for Manutius's first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo. The italic is based on work by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, a calligrapher who worked as a printer in the 1520s, after the time of Manutius and Griffo.
Bookman or Bookman Old Style, is a serif typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both display typography and for printing at small sizes such as in trade printing, and less commonly for body text. In advertising use it is particularly associated with the graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, when revivals of it were very popular.
Kabel is a sans-serif typeface designed by German designer Rudolf Koch, and released by the Klingspor foundry from 1927 onwards.
Mrs Eaves is a transitional serif typeface designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. It is a variant of Baskerville, which was designed in Birmingham, England, in the 1750s. Mrs Eaves adapts Baskerville for use in display contexts, such as headings and book blurbs, through the use of a low x-height and a range of unusual combined characters or ligatures.
FF Meta is a humanist sans-serif typeface family designed by Erik Spiekermann and released in 1991 through his FontFont library. According to Spiekermann, FF Meta was intended to be a "complete antithesis of Helvetica", which he found "boring and bland". It originated from an unused commission for the Deutsche Bundespost. Throughout the 1990s, FF Meta was embraced by the international design community with Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger writing that it had been dubiously praised as the Helvetica of the 1990s.
Architype Renner is a geometric sans-serif typeface reproducing the experimental alternate characters of Paul Renner's 1927–29 typeface Futura for the Bauer foundry. Renner's original design for Futura shows the influence of Herbert Bayer's experimental "Universal" alphabet. The alternate characters Renner proposed for Futura were mostly deleted from the face's character set, resulting in a more conventional, and perhaps more economically successful typeface.
Requiem is an old-style serif typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1992 for Travel & Leisure magazine and sold by his company, Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The typeface takes inspiration from a set of inscriptional capitals found in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's 1523 writing manual, Il Modo de Temperare le Penne, and its italics are based on the chancery calligraphy, or cancelleresca corsiva of the period.
Caledonia is a serif typeface designed by William Addison Dwiggins in 1938 for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and commonly used in book design. As a transitional serif design, one inspired by the Scotch Roman typefaces of the early nineteenth century, Caledonia has a contrasting design of alternating thick and thin strokes, a design that stresses the vertical axis and sharp, regular serifs on ascenders and descenders.
Nobel is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Sjoerd Henrik de Roos (1877–1962) and Dick Dooijes (1909–1998) in the period 1929–1935 for the Amsterdam Type foundry). Capitalizing upon Lettergieterij Amsterdam's substantial financial interest in the Berlin typefoundry H. Berthold AG, de Roos decided as a Dutch competitor to Futura to license the Berthold foundry's geometric Berthold Grotesk, change some characters and sell it in the Netherlands under this name. The resulting face became very popular in Dutch printing.
The Bauer Type Foundry was a German type foundry founded in 1837 by Johann Christian Bauer in Frankfurt am Main. Noted typeface designers, among them Lucian Bernhard, Konrad Friedrich Bauer, Walter Baum, Heinrich Jost, Imre Reiner, Friedrich Hermann Ernst Schneidler, Emil Rudolf Weiß, and Heinrich Wienyck, designed typefaces for the company.
Tower was a slab serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders and based upon his earlier design for Stymie, but with straight sides to the round letters emphasizing the vertical appearance. Tower Italic was designed but not cast. In 1936, Tower Bold was started by the same designer, but was instead made into Stymie Bold Condensed.
Jakob Erbar was a German professor of graphic design and a type designer. Erbar trained as a typesetter for the Dumont-Schauberg Printing Works before studying under Fritz Helmut Ehmcke and Anna Simons. Erbar went on to teach in 1908 at the Städtischen Berufsschule and from 1919 to his death at the Kölner Werkschule. His seminal Erbar series was one of the first geometric sans-serif typefaces, predating both Paul Renner's Futura and Rudolf Koch's Kabel by some five years.
In typography, Erbar or Erbar-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface in the geometric style, one of the first designs of this kind released as type. Designer Jakob Erbar's aim was to design a printing type which would be free of all individual characteristics, possess thoroughly legible letter forms, and be a purely typographic creation. His conclusion was that this could only work if the type form was developed from a fundamental element, the circle. Erbar-Grotesk was developed in stages; Erbar wrote that he had originally sketched out the design in 1914 but had been prevented from working on it due to the war. The original version of Erbar was released in 1926, following Erbar's "Phosphor" titling capitals of 1922 which are very similar in design.
