The contrast of strokes is low ( 1) and the hairlines are heavier than what we would see in high-contrast typefaces. Better tools and mostly improved skills of the punchcutters allowed the birth of this more refined style.įIG 1: The main characteristics of the old-style typefaces. The first old-style typefaces appeared in the 15th century and it was the most fundamental change in style because they moved away from the blackletter style which was first introduced by Johannes Gutenberg and his movable type printing machine. Let’s take a look at the most common font styles as they appeared throughout history and see what defines these styles and the stories behind them. You can better combine 2 or more font styles because you know which styles work well together and which don’t. You can make an educated decision for your next font choice for the web design project you’re working on. When you’re able to do that, and when you know what the story behind a particular style is, then you can make better decisions. This is where being able to recognise font styles comes in. Related | ~ 11 min read A Guide to Combining Fonts
When it comes to quality, do you want your typography to stand out or blend in? Using a font that is very popular is a safe choice, but safe choices will only get you so far in terms of originality. And when that happens, they lose their identity.
These are the fonts that have been used so much that you can literally see them everywhere. But doesn’t that lead to fonts being overused? Look at what happened to Helvetica, Gotham and Futura. Sure, you can copy others or use the most popular fonts based on classifications such as Typewolf’s Top 10 most popular typefaces of 2019. I was never confident in my font decisions and I was never sure if the font combination that I designed works well together. In fact, that’s what I did for a long time, especially at the beginning of my career. But first, why would anyone want to be able to recognise font styles? Why not just choose and combine fonts based on our gut feeling? So to find the clues to tell font styles apart, we need to learn to see these details. It’s hard to even imagine how much work goes into designing a typeface and how much focus type designers put into tiny details that remain invisible to most people. When it comes to typography, and especially when it comes to typefaces, it’s all in the details. Now I know why recognising the style of a font is so hard. The book consists of 13 chapters through which the reader designs and builds an example website. This guide is an excerpt of chapter 3 from the book Better Web Typography for a Better Web by Matej Latin. But the more I explored, the more I realised how vast the universe of font styles actually is. Being self-taught, the only major difference I could see was that a font was either a serif or a sans-serif. Telling font styles apart was one of the hardest things to do when I started working as a designer.
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