Typography 101 – Styles

An important aspect of typography is discerning a typeface by style. In extremely broad terms typeface styles can be divided into four overarching chronological categories; Old Style, Transitional, Modern and digital.

Old style fonts are the oldest, always serifed and resemble the calligraphy style of old. Lines have different weights within the character. Imagine an ‘A’ with one diagonal line much thicker than the other. There is a slanted axis to the serifs and this can also be seen sometimes in the ‘o’s as the shape seems to slant also. Quills, chisels and other tools used to render text all had a wider flat edge which is why this slant is visible.

Transitional typefaces are still quite old but have less, if any, variation in the thickness of strokes. They are still serifed for the most part but begin to become slightly more geometrical with the axis of letters and the straight angles of the serifs.

Modern style follows the movements of all visual arts of the period, including Graphic Design, where the emphasis was on the minimal and loss of what might be seen as unnecessary ornateness. Simplification of typefaces, including the removal of serifs, uniform strokes and geometry typify this category.

Digital. Well this really isn’t a style but serves to put a marker in the sand as to when computers put the creation of typefaces from the hands of a skilled few into the hands of the masses. As expected a veritable explosion of typefaces in a cornucopia of styles began to appear. While some still pay homage to the past others blur the lines of the role of a typeface moving the shapes into the realms of fine art than simply a form of communication.

It is the abundance of typefaces that now makes a formal set of style classifications almost impossible. A good starting point when filing your fonts and faces would be to have a few folders named; Classic Serif, Modern Serif, Nouveau, Deco, Calligraphic, Decorative, Script, Geometric Sans Serif, Symbolic and maybe something like Quirky to hold those typefaces that you only ever use once.

If any of the terms used here have you saying something ‘What is Sans Serif’? don’t worry, I’ll cover this in an article of it’s own.

To fulfill a request by a friend here’s some facts relating to Lorem Ipsum. This is a body of text that is used as a placeholder for text yet to be inserted into a layout with the purpose of evaluating its aesthetic quality. This is called ‘Greeking’.

The text is Latin and is derived from a work called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum or ‘On the Ends of Goods and Evils’ by a man called Cicero. It plays an excellent role for this purpose as it typifies an average distribution of word length and spaces in English text.