Another form of Blackletter is called Textualis, a calligraphic style which is nowadays the most associated with name “Gothic”. Johannes Gutenberg carved textualis typeface with ligatures and abbreviations when he printed 42 line Bible but after that it was rarely used. The usual form of Textualis, a littera textualis was used for literary works and university texts. The most notable scripts of this type are Fraktur, Old English, Rotunda, Textura, Schwabacher.
Since this style is not easy to read it's not recommended to use it as a body text. It should be used for headings, posters, signs, logos, certificates, diplomas, and newspaper nameplates. It emphasizes tradition, heritage, reputationand it is also popular in tattoo art.
I personally love calligraphy very much because of that old sense, originality and sophistication. Like Chinese watercolour art, calligraphy also requires strong skills, still and loosen hand and a lot of practise in order to get soft and clean artwork with no mistakes.
Gaelic type (Irish type) – This is a
family of Insular typeface and Anglo – Saxon types in 17th century
are included in this category. This typeface is often called Gaelic or Unicial
although the most Gaelic types are not uncial. It was in common use in Ireland until the mid 20th century. Today is often used as decorative style. The traditional Irish newspapers print their name on the first page using this style and it is also used for pub signs, greeting cards, and display advertising.
Non – alphanumeric – Those typefaces
contain symbols and pictographs rather than letters and numbers. This category
contains fonts such as Dingbats, Ornaments and Pictorial. This style was popular among Victorians. Popular typeface from this category is Dingbats which focus on logos, symbols, and decorative borders.
Ornamented, Novelty- This group includes typefaces with ornate or
whimsical appearance and can simulate non typographical forms. Classic examples
are Rustic, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Comic Strip Lettering, Dot Matrix,
Futuristic, Machine Readable, Pixel, Pseudo Foreign Script, Victorian.
Sans serif is a typeface which doesn’t have small projecting features on the letters called serifs. They are readable and have cleaner and modern look which make them suitable for headlines rather than for body text when it comes to printed material. However, situation is different in web design where sans serif fonts are better option for body text. Computer monitors don't have such a good resolution as paper do, and serifs of the font will look a little blurred which make text harder to read. Before term “sans serif” which originated from France, this typeface was usually referred as a Gothic and this term is still present when it comes to font name such as Century Gothic or Trade Gothic. Sans serif typeface was used in older documents as emphasis because of its blacker type colour.
Classification of sans serif:
Classification of sans serif:
- Grotesque – early sans serif designs such as Grotesque, Akzidenz, Grotesk, and Franklin Gothic.
- Neo – grotesque or Realist or Transitional are modern fonts that comprise MS Sans Serif, Helvetica, Univers, Highway Gothic, and Arial, Standard, Bell Centennial. These fonts are in common use and they have plain appearance.
- Humanist fonts are he most calligraphic fonts in this category and they have more legibility. This subcategory includes fonts such as Calibri, Johnston, Lucida Grande, Segoe UI, Gill Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma, Verdana and Optima.
- Geometric – This typeface are based on geometric shapes and they have very modern appearance. They are considered to be the least useful for body text among other sans serif categories. The most notable geometric fonts are Futura, ITC Avant Garde, Century Gothic, Gotham, or Spartan.
Serif fonts can be divided into four categories:
- Old style or Humanist includes fonts such as Adobe Jenson, Arno, Berkeley Old Style, Centaur, Cloister, Fairfield, Legacy, and Trinité, Bembo, Caslon, Galliard, Garamond, Goudy Old Style, Granjon, Janson, Palatino, Renard, Sabon, and VandenKeere.
- Transitional – Often called Baroque serif typefaces first appeared in 18th century. Among them are two the most common fonts: Times New Roman and Baskerville. Visually by design they are between modern and old style so they are names transitional. Other fonts from this group includes Bookman, Century, Georgia and Plantin.
- Modern – This typefaces characterize difference between thick and thin lines. Examples include Bodoni, Didot, Computer Modern, and Walbaum and they are considered as less readable than old style or transitional fonts.
- Slab serif typefaces – Also called Egyptian or Square Serif typeface, and often have no difference between thick and thin lines. They have bold thick appearance and can be described as a sans serif fonts with bold rectangular serifs. These typefaces have strong appearance and was widely used for poster and billboards during the Industrial revolution.
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| Times New Roman |
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| Rockwell |
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| Bodoni |
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| Adobe Garamond |
Grunge
typography – This is relatively new form of
typography which originated from postmodernism and deconstructionism.
Importance of Grunge typography refers more to its visual appearance than its readability. David Carson, one of the most influential designers of the 20th
century marked the beginning of one new era called “grunge typography era”.
Those fonts generally have dirty, scuffed appearance.
Computer font- This refers to electronic data file, a scalable set of digital shapes that may be printed at many sizes.
There are three basic kinds of computer font:
- Bitmap which consists of matrix of dots or pixels which represents the raster image of each glyphs in each face and size. Those fonts are faster and easier to use and create, although it can not be scalable. They can be monochrome or fonts with shades of grey. They are in use in the Linux console, the Windows recovery console, and embedded systems. Old dot matrix printers also used these fonts. Some trace programs can use bitmap fonts to create outline fonts which is scalable.
- Outline fonts (vector fonts) where characters are scalable to any size. This is a collection of vector images, i.e. set of lines and curves which define borders of the glyphs. Main drawbacks when it comes to these fonts refer to Bezier curve (parametric curve) which can not be rendered properly on a raster display (computer monitors and printers) and their rendering can change shape depending on the desired size and position. There are four outline font formats:
- PostScript fonts- Type 1 and Type 3 fonts were introduced as a part of Post Script page description language There are generally two main components to PostScript typefaces. The first file contains the actual PostScript typeface itself and is often called the “binary” or “printer” file. The second file contains the typeface’s complete name, the spacing characteristics (font metrics) and information to help the computer display the typeface on the screen and for printing the font. Both files must be submitted.
- TrueType font - Truetype fonts only require one file to be submitted but a separate file needs to be submitted for each instance of the font. For example, a different file is needed for normal, bold, italic, bold italic, etc. TrueType typefaces are generally intended for business office use and can be less reliable for publishing applications.
- OpenType font - An OpenType font file contains all the outline, metric and bitmap data in one file. OpenType fonts are cross-platform compatible making it easier to share files across operating systems. Font management is simpler since there is just one file involved. It can contain TrueType (.ttf extension) or PostScript (.otf extension) font data and uses ATM to render the font on-screen. Adobe® InDesign® and Adobe® Photoshop® support OpenType which allows them to use the expanded character sets and layout features.
- Metafont is a description language used to define vector fonts. One of the characteristics of Metafont is that all of the shapes of the glyphs are defined with geometrical equations. Metafont font is primarily made up of strokes with finite-width "pens", along with filled regions. File describes the pen paths.
- Stroke-based fonts - A glyph's outline is defined by the vertices of individual strokes and stroke's profile. Its advantages over outline fonts include reducing number of vertices needed to define a glyph, allowing the same vertices to be used to generate a font with a different weight, glyph width, or serifs using different stroke rules, and the associated size savings. For a font developer, editing a glyph by stroke is easier and less prone to error than editing outlines. They are also scalable.
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