What's your Type?

​Since 1455 we no longer must use only the handwritten word. Johannes Guttenberg (in the opinion of some the most influential person of the second millennium) developed the printing process and printing press. The letters then were ornate, the alphabet included characters found only in Old German. Gothic Script, or Blackletter, was the name given to his font. Let’s remember that it took nearly a lifetime for a monk to hand-copy the Bible. No wonder that a big part of society at that time was illiterate!
Until the 18th century most of the typefaces were serif-adorned. If you are not sure what a serif is- it’s the little cross-bar ending a line such as little feet on the capital A. It gives the letter a finished look. See Times New Roman for references

​There was a theory that those little dashes on the bottoms of letters mostly allowed the eye to move from one to another quicker. It’s debatable, I think.
The shapes of serifs, much like the shape of the letters themselves changed over time. They evolved and devolved-depending on your definition of progress. Initially, the serifs were bracketed, as the ink would naturally fill the angle where they met the line of the letter.

​EX  An example is Garamond and its successor Baskerville. In their evolution, serifs started slanted (in Garamond) when on the top of the letters, then over time became straight, then thick, then thin. 

​With the progress in printing technique, the thick/thin difference could be more pronounced as a very thin line; also, the fonts size could diminish, not jeopardizing readability. Over the 19th, and half of the 20th, century the current lead casting machines (linotypes and monotypes) stamped letters with slab serifs (Memphis), hair-like serifs (Bodoni), still used faithful Garamond and elegant Baskerville. Photo techniques that came afterwards provided more possibilities for the refinement of the typeface.
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With increasingly smaller font size much thought was devoted to readability. Ascenders (the top part of t, k, l) and descenders (the bottom part of y or j) were elongated, which called for increased leading making reading easier.  “Leading” is line spacing- we still use this term in digital print even though we do not put lead slabs to vertically separate verses/lines.
With the invention of typewriters, the letters used occupied the exact same space. So, no matter if you type “I” or “m” the space for them is of equal width. Of course, this can look silly but in computer programming or typewriter use, elegance is a distant concern from usability. Consolas and Courier are good examples of such typeface. 

​Stroke in typography relates to the thinning and thickening of the line with which a letter is built. The variations of the stroke of the letter increased over time. The stroke is only relevant to letters that have at least some curve or angle. Let’s consider an “o” for example. If the thin parts are centrally located at the top and  the bottom of the “o”, the line that may connect them will be vertical. This constitutes a vertical stroke. If the thin places are off center (say 1 o’clock and 7 o’clock) the line that connects them will be diagonal. It’s a diagonal stroke.

​And then in Switzerland (in Latin called Helvetia) in 1957, Helvetica was born. Helvetica was the brain-child born to two fathers: Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Spare, clean, and simplified she was first known as Neue Haas Grotesk (New Haas Grotesque). She was baptized in 1960 and known since as Helvetica. She was the first sans-serif typeface used on a largescale. Her lineage comes from Akzidenz-Grotesk (Commercial Grotesque) from the Berthold Type Foundry, which had produced trade/financial documents. Curiously, Grotesk/grotesque seems to be the name of unadorned typeface…but it’s not a laughing matter, I think.
Helvetica gave rise to the group of fonts known as sans-serif (French for “without serif”) and took the world by storm. Her relatives are still being developed. I’m sure you have met many of them, Arial (and it’s millions of variations), Calibri, Candara, Corbel, Ebrima, Gautami, Berlin Sans or Franklin Gothic Book, to name a few.
Sans serifs rarely carry the calligraphic quality of vertical or diagonal stroke, but Optima (and Candara) are nice exceptions

​By now, we have serif and sans-serif typefaces, calligraphic, ornamental and some specially designed for a company or organization as part of their branding.
It’s a big debate in some circles to serif or not to serif…which one is more functional, which one is more elegant. I am certain my bias came through three paragraphs above.
On that note, Two Chicks Conspiracy occasionally designs typefaces appropriate for our own creations.

Typeface Orca, designed for our belt and fob
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