Styles of Type

_ Old Style: Old style type is generally considered "warm" or friendly, thanks to its origins in Renaissance humanism. The main characteristics of old style typefaces are low contrast with diagonal stress, and cove or "bracketed" serifs (serifs with a rounded join to the stem of the letter).

_ Transitional: A refinement of Old Style forms, this style forms the transition between Renaissance Old Style and Modern typefaces. With the change from the woodcut to copperplate engravings in the 17th Century, the lines of the letters became more fine and rich in contrast. The thick-to -thin relationships were exaggerated, and the brackets were lightened.

_ Modern: Modern typefaces arose with the distribution of copper and steel engraving techniques in the 17th and 18th Century. The appearance is technical exact. Modern types are named Didone after Didot and Bodoni.

_ Slab Serif: At the beginning of the 19th Century typefaces for attracting attention were in demand for advertising, posters, flyers, business and private printed matters. Egyptian and Grotesque typefaces arose from Modern typefaces. The name Egyptian is derived from its use in a publication about booty from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.

_ Sans Serif:
*GEOMETRIC: Sans-serif typefaces influenced by the Bauhaus movement and featuring circular or geometric letters, with little variation in stroke thickness. * Some sans-serif types are built around geometric forms. In Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1927, the Os are perfect circles, and the peaks of the A and M are sharp triangles.

*HUMANIST: Sans-serif typefaces with oval shapes and variations in stroke thickness to create a more graceful, human appearance. *Sans-serif typefaces became common in the twentieth century. Gill Sans, designed by Eric Gill in 1928, has humanist characteristics. Note the small, lilting counter in the letter a , and the calligraphic variations in line weight.

*GROTESQUE: The first sans-serif designs developed in the 19th century, and considered grotesque by the English. *Helvetica, designed by Max Miedinger in 1957, is one of the world's most widely used typefaces. Its uniform, upright character makes it similar to transitional serif letters. These fonts are also referred to as "anonymous sans serif"

_ Script: Script typefaces are based upon the varied and often fluid stroke created by handwriting. They are organized into highly regular formal types similar to cursive writing and looser, more casual scripts.

_ Blackletter: Black letter, also known as Gothic script or Gothic minuscule, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes the entire group of faces is known as Fraktur. Black letter is sometimes called Old English, but it is not to be confused with the Old English language, despite the popular, though mistaken, belief that it was written with black letter. The Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) language predates black letter by many centuries, and was itself written in the insular script.

_ Grunge: “Grunge” derives from “grungy” meaning that it is dirty. It was first coined to stand for a specific type of music, a style that is influenced by punk, rock and heavy metal.
Given its definition, it shouldn’t surprise you if grunge is usually associated with a design that is aggressive, disorganized, and dirty.

_ Monospaced: A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space.[1] This contrasts to variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size to one another.

_ Undeclared: Fonts that do not comfortably fit in any of the above categories.