Classification of typefaces based on historical periods

Here's another blog post / collection of notes based on The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. The book is definitely recommended reading if you're interested in typography. Bringhurst has an interesting approach of viewing typefaces based on historical eras.

But letterforms are not only objects of science, they also belong to the realm of art and they participate in history. They have changed over time just as music, painting or architecture have changed and the same historical terms—Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic and so on—are useful in each of these fields.

I've gathered some quotes as well as links to example typefaces. Unfortunately, the typography of this blog does not match the book :/

Early roman inscriptions

The examination starts from Greek & Roman inscriptions. Example modern typefaces based on these:

• Lithos (1989, based on Greek letterforms)
• Trajan (1989, based on letterforms of Roman square capitals).

Renaissance Roman and Italic Letter

It is interesting that names "roman" and "italic" are used for "upright" vs "cursive" letterforms. "Roman" of roman letter is related to the background with letterforms from Roman Empire. "Italic" type evolved in Italy during the Renaissance.

Bringhurst's words on the history of "Roman" and "Italic":

Roman type consists of two quite different basic parts. The upper case, which does indeed come from Rome, is based on Roman imperial inscriptions. The lower case was developed in northern Europe, chiefly in France and Germany, in the late Middle Ages, and given its final polish in Venice in the early Renaissance.

Italic letterforms, on the other hand, are an Italian Renaissance creation. Some early italics come from Rome, others from elsewhere in Italy ...

For more details, see Development of roman type and Italic type from Wikipedia.

Renaissance Roman Letter

Bringhurst's description for Renaissance roman letter:

Like Roman inscriptional capitals, Renaissance roman lowercase letters have a modulated stroke (the width varies with direction) and a humanist axis. This means that the letters have the form produced by a broadnib pen held in the right hand in a comfortable and relaxed writing position. The thick strokes run SW/SE, the axis of the writer's hand and forearm. The serifs are crips, the stroke is light, and the contrast between thick strokes and thin strokes is generally modest.

Examples based on Renaissance Roman letter forms:

• Centaur (1929, based on a printing of Nicolas Jenson around 1470)
• Bembo (1920s, based on a design by Francesco Griffo around 1495)

Renaissance Italic Letter

Some characteristics of the Renaissance italic letter by Bringhurst

• stems vertical or of fairly even slope, not exceeding 10°
• bowls generally elliptical
• light, modulated stroke
• consistent humanist axis
• ...

Examples based on Renaissance Italic letter forms:

• Arrighi (digital in digital form as Centaur italic)
• Bembo italic

Baroque

Bringhurst:

Baroque typography, like Baroque painting and music, is rich with activity and takes delight in the restless and dramatic play of contradictory forms. One of the most obvious features of any Baroque typeface is the large variation in axis from one letter to the next. Baroque italics are ambidextrous: both right- and lefthanded. And it was during the Baroque that typographers first made a habit of mixing roman and italic on the same line.

Examples:

• Monotype Garamond (early 1920s, based on the work of Jean Jannon in 1600s)
  • Note the misattribution to Claude Garamond
• Janson text (about 1685)

Rococo

The historical periods listed here ... are naturally not limited, in typography, to roman and italic letters. Blackletter and script types passed through the same phases as well. The Rococo period, with its love of florid ornament, belongs almost entirely to blackletters and scripts.

The Neoclassical Letter

Generally speaking, Neoclassical art is more static and restrained than either Renaissance or Baroque art, and far more interested in rigorous consistency. Neoclassical letterforms follow this pattern. In Neoclassical letters, an echo of the broadnib pen can still be seen, but it is rotated away from the natural writing angle to a strictly vertical or rationalist axis. The letters are moderate in contrast and aperture, but their axis is dictated by an idea, not by the truth of human anatomy. They are products of the Rationalist era: frequently beautiful, calm forms, but forms oblivious to the more complex beauty of organic fact. If Baroque letterforms are ambidextrous, Neoclassical letters are, in their quiet way, neitherhanded

Examples:

• Fournier (around the 1740s)
• Monotype Baskerville (around the 1750s)

The Romantic Letter

Neoclassicism and Romanticism are not sequential movements in European history. They marched through the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth side by side: vigorously opposed in some respects and closely united in others. Both Neoclassical and Romantic letterforms adhere to a rationalist axis, and both look more drawn than written, but it is possible to make some precise distinctions between the two. The most obvious difference is one in contrast.

In Romantic letters we will normally find the following:

• abrupt modulation of the stroke
• vertical axis intensified through exaggerated contrast
• hardening of terminals from lachrymal to round
• serifs thinner and more abrupt
• aperture reduced

Examples:

• Bulmer (around 1790)
• Didot (a group of typefaces, developed in 1784–1811)

The Realist Letter

Realist type designers - Alexander Phemister, Robert Besley and others, who have not achieved the posthumous fame of the painters - worked in a similar spirit. They made blunt and simple letters, based on the script of people denied the opportunity to learn to read and write with fluency and poise. Realist letters very often have the same basic shape as Neoclassical and Romantic letters, but most of them have heavy, slab serifs or no serifs at all. The stroke is uniform in weight, and the aperture (often a gauge of grace or good fortune in typefaces) is tiny. Small caps, text figures and other signs of sophistication and elegance are almost always missing.

Examples:

• Akzidenz Grotesk (1898)
• Clarendon (1845)

Geometric modernism

Early modernism took many intriguing typographic forms. One of the most obvious is geometric. The sparest, most rigorous architecture of the early twentieth century has its counterpart in the equally geometric typefaces designed at the same time, often by the same people. These typefaces, like their Realist predecessors, make no distinction between main stroke and serif. Their serifs are equal in weight with the main strokes or are missing altogether. But most Geometric Modernist faces seek purity more than populism. Some show the study of archaic inscriptions, and some include text figures and other subtleties, but their shapes owe more to pure mathematical forms - the circle and the line - than to scribal letters.

Examples:

• Futura (1927)
• Memphis (1929)

Lyrical Modernism

Another major phase of modernism in type design is closely allied with abstract expressionist painting. Painters in the twentieth century rediscovered the physical and sensory pleasures or painting as an act, and the pleasures of making organic instead of mechanical forms. Designers of type during those years were equally busy rediscovering the pleasures of writing letterforms rather than drawing them. In rediscovering calligraphy, they rediscovered the broadnib pen, the humanist axis and humanist scale of Renaissance letters. Typographic modernism is fundamentally the reassertion of Renaissance form. There is no hard lin between modernist design and Renaissance revival.

Examples:

• Spectrum family (1952)
• Palatino (1949)

The Expressionist Letter

In yet another of its aspects, typographic modernism is rough and concrete more than lyrical and abstract. ... typographic counterparts of expressionist painters ...

Examples:

• Preissig Antikva (1925?)
• Journal (1990)

Elegiac Postmodernism

... In the last decades of the twentieth century, critics of architecture, literature and music - along with others who study human affairs - all perceived movements away from modernism. Lacking any proper name of their own, these movements have come to be called by the single term postmodernism. ... Postmodern letterforms, like Postmodern buildings, frequently recycle and revise Neoclassical, Romantic and other premodern forms. At their best, they do so with an engaging lightness of touch and a fine sense of humor.

Examples:

• Esprit (1985)
• Nofret (1984)

Geometric Postmodernism

Some Postmodern faces are highly geometric. Like their predecessors the Geometric Modernist faces, they are usually slab-serifed or unserifed, but often they exist in both varieties at once or are hybrids of the two.

Examples:

• Triplex (1985 and 1989)
• ITC Officina Serif (1990)

Other classifications

For the interested, links to some other resources on typeface classification:

• Vox-ATypI classification
• Understanding the Nuances of Typeface Classification by Cameron Chapman
• Some type genres explained by Indra Kupferschmid
• Typeface Classifications at (typedia.com)

Quotes from The Elements of Typographic style

During the Christmas holidays, I had time to read an interesting classic, The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. The book kind of was on my to read list since Hack Design typography lessons. The author's love of typography is strongly present in the book, as well as his background as a poet and an author. I collected some fascinating quotes from the book.

First, some thoughts on purpose of typography:

... typography should perform these services for the reader:

• invite the reader into the text
• reveal the tenor and meaning of the text
• clarify the structure and order of the text
• link the text with other existing elements
• induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.

On a well made book

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.

Quality or quantity?

With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.

Good typography is like bread

Logotypes and logograms push typography in the direction of hieroglyphics, which tend to be looked at rather than read. They also push it toward the realm of candy and drugs, which tend to provoke dependent responses, and away from the realm of food, which tends to promote autonomous being. Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised, and dissected before it is consumed.

Thread metaphor

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns — but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

Motivation for text figures

It is true that text figures are rarely useful in classified ads, but they are useful for setting almost everything else, including good magazine copy and newspaper copy. They are basic parts of typographic speech, and they are a sign of civilization: a sign that dollars are not really twice as important as ideas, and numbers are not afraid to consort on an equal footing with words.

Shaping the page

A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and the body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.

On craftsmanship and instinct

Instinct, in matters like these, is largely memory in disguise. It works quite well when it is trained, and porky otherwise. But in a craft like typography, no matter how perfect one's instincts are, it is useful to be able to calculate answers exactly. History, natural science, geometry and mathematics are all relevant to typography in this regard - and can all be counted on for aid.

By the way, this reminds me of the discussion on intuition in the book Thinking - fast and slow.

Bringhurst doesn't value reading literature from a screen

The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertising and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

Whether typography is more engineering or art

The rate of change in typesetting methods has been steep — perhaps it has approximated the Fibonacci series — for more than a century. Yet, like poetry and painting, storytelling and weaving, typography itself has not improved. There is no greater proof that typography is more art than engineering. Like all the arts, it is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change.