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So let's first start by talking about the difference between the two biggest families in typography
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which is the serif and the san serif.
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So the serif typeface are differentiated from the san serif by these tiny little feet that you can see
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highlighted in red and they are said to be slightly older than the san serifs.
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But the reason why they have these little feet is actually because of stone carving.
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So back in the days when people needed to carve out letters, Latin letters, in stone,
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usually the designer would use a paint brush and paint the letters that they want
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but the stonemasons would have to carve it out from that painting.
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And I don't know how many of you guys have carved into stone before but not only is a difficult art
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to master but it's also incredibly difficult to carve out Latin letters, Latin typefaces, on stone without
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creating these tiny little feet.
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It's just very difficult to carve out a 90 degree angle without having these reliefs. So hence a lot
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of the serif typefaces that you'll see will look a lot more traditional a lot more conservative than
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the more contemporary modern san serifs.
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And when you're using different typefaces, usually people tend to use the serif typefaces for something
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quite serious
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for example a law office's letterhead and the san serifs are reserved for slightly more modern contemporary
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design.
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So once we've classified our typeface into serifs and the san serifs, the serifs are further subdivided
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into four major families.
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The first of which is old style.
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So this is very much the oldest serif typeface family.
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So this family includes fun such as Adobe Jenson such as Centaurs such as Goudy old style. And their
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typeface is modeled on what text used to look like in The 1400s,
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so very conservative very old looking.
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And if you come further into the future you've got the transitional serif family which is slightly
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more modern looking.
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And a lot of these fonts you'll be familiar with this is your Times New Roman,
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this is your Baskerville,
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this is your Georgia for example.
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And then if we come even further into modern times, you've got the modern serif typeface family.
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So one such example is Didot which is the typeface that you see on the title of Vogue magazine and
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it's an incredibly modern yet classy looking typeface.
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And finally in the serif family you've got the slab serif
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and we'll talk about slab serifs in just a second.
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But first we're going to talk about how do you differentiate from these four major classes in the serif
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family?
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And it's actually quite easy to do.
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Now when you compare these three styles side by side, old style versus transitional versus modern, if
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you have a look at the thinnest versus the thickest part of the letters, you'll see that as you progress
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from the older to the more modern type faces you'll see an increased difference in what we call the
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modulation of the typeface.
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So if you concentrate on the os for example comparing the old style to the modern, that thickness here
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versus this is much larger than for example this versus this part. And a lot of this modulation comes
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from the people who used to write with flat nibbed pens.
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So for example imagine you know somebody in the Shakespearean era with their feathered pen, the way that
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they turn that feather into a pen is by chopping the tip.
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So you create a flat nib and then it holds the ink and allows you to write. Now that flat nib is
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what gives you this modulation,
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this difference between the thickest and thinnest parts of the font. Equally if you take a highlighter and
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you try to write versus if you take a sharpie, you'll notice that the typeface that you create will look
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different.
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So what about the slab serif? As you can see, there's pretty much zero difference between the thickest
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and the thinnest parts of the font.
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And it was designed intentionally like so. Even though it's one of the modern members in the serif family,
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it doesn't follow the rule of the more into the future you go the higher the greater the difference
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between the thickest and the thinnest part of the font.
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So why is that?
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Well slab serif was actually created for a particular reason and it was created for Newspaper printing.
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Now think about the times when Newspaper used to be printed on really poor quality paper.
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What happens when you put ink on poor quality paper?
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Well the ink will spread out and you will lose a lot of detail.
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So if you think back to those comic books to be hand-lettered, the typeface that's used is a type of
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comic book typeface but it looks very similar to this kind of slab serif.
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And the reason why we style it like this is so that it would look good despite the poor quality of the
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paper.