All graphic design is about evoking emotions and reinforcing the message of your communications. All design elements, from colours to imagery and layout, combine to achieve this. Still, one of the most potent tools, sometimes subtly, is your choice of typeface, which can significantly influence your audience’s emotional response.
Typefaces, a family of styles like Times New Roman, and fonts, individual styles like Times New Roman Bold, have been with us since the dawn of written language. The earliest examples are the imperial Roman letter forms chiselled into stone from as early as 43 BC. This iconic style lives on in the Trajan typeface, named after the historic Trajan’s Column in Rome, inscribed with carved lettering from top to bottom.
The modern typeface, as we know it, appeared around 1450, at the same time as the invention of the printing press and movable type blocks. The first typefaces were what we now call Serifs and are still as relevant today as they were then. The printing press allowed for the mass production of books and other printed materials, which, in turn, led to the need for standardised and easily readable typefaces.
Serif Fonts: Traditional and Trustworthy
A serif font features small strokes or “serifs” at the end of longer strokes. These mimic the marks of the quills from the manuscripts and the chisel marks made by Roman stonemasons, which preceded the fixed letterforms of the printing press and were the first mass-use typefaces.
Serif fonts carry their history and ancestry with them, giving them the feeling of professionalism, trustworthiness, and heritage. They range from Old Style Serif typefaces like Garamond to Transitional or Baroque serif typefaces that began to play with the contrast of thick and thin lines in each character in the mid-to late-18th century. Times New Roman is an excellent example of a transitional serif and, as its name suggests, was the perfect typeface with increased legibility in smaller newspaper print.
Later, in the 19th century, the Didone serif typefaces pushed the work of transitional typefaces to create the modern, extremely elegant serif typefaces we see today. Didone serif typefaces became very popular in advertising. Didot, one of the style’s most famous examples, still evokes European high fashion and refinement.
Other historical events have also left their mark on type design. When artefacts from ancient Egypt started to appear on display in the 19th century, the mass public interest brought the popularity of Slab Serifs. These bold, chunky serifs evoked the block-like construction of the pyramids. They became trendy in the Wild West of America and still evoke that period. These days, the style continues to live on with the typeface Rockwell.
As design evolved to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world, so did typefaces. While serifs carried a sense of tradition and historical continuity, a new wave of design thinking emerged.
Sans-Serif Fonts: Modern and Clean
The 19th-century Egyptomania that swept the world led typeface creators to rethink everything. The slab serifs led to a more geometric approach, and the Sans-serif fonts emerged and became the typefaces of the modern world. Sans (or without) serifs mean precisely that: the tiny strokes at the ends of the extended character strokes are gone.
Sans-serif typefaces evoke directness, modernity, and clarity. You can loosely group sans-serif typefaces into two main styles.
The first group comprises humanist sans-serif typefaces, which maintain the feeling of transitional serif typefaces. They have thick and thin contrasts in the letterform design and keep the DNA of the pen stroke in their design. They often feel more organic, approachable, and friendly and are readable in body text and display sizes. Humanist typefaces have been evoking the modern world for over a century, from the creation of the London Underground to Google. They will always continue to do so, including the font you are reading right now, a modern humanist sans serif called Gotham, that we use for our branding.
The other group of Sans-serif typefaces is the grotesque. These move away from the naturalist thick and thin shapes, with their roots in pen strokes, to constructed and engineered typefaces. They often have a square, more linear feel and can seem slightly brutal and direct. This is why they are often used on directional and instructional signage. One of the most famous typefaces that surrounds you every day is the ubiquitous Helvetica. Its grotesque traits are shown in the typeform of the letter ‘s’, with its hard horizontal cutoffs, as opposed to the flowing organic shape of the humanist style.
Other typeface variants, such as script and display, will be discussed in a future blog. Still, for now, we hope this has given you an insight into the two main categories we see around us daily.
To recap, serif typefaces are best used to evoke timelessness, formality, a time in history, to feel trustworthy, and to convey knowledge. They carry a sense of class and sophistication and have the functionality of making large areas of body text readable, even at smaller type sizes, due to the serifs giving a more defined shape to each word.
Sans serif typefaces are best used to evoke cleanness, modernity, unfussy communication, casualness and an eye on the future. They can quickly and clearly inform you where you need to go and warn you where you should not.
These aren’t hard and fast rules, and everything is subjective. There are many beautiful ways to combine serif and sans serif typefaces in your brand, creating exciting contrasts and dynamic ways to enhance your message. Your choice of typeface is just another tool in your complete brand identity, and we are happy to help you create the perfect suite for your brand.
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