Font Classification -1

Alphabet Fonts: The Ultimate Guide

What are alphabet fonts? It is not exactly easy to learn typography, but what you can do at least is to familiarize with the history and types of alphabet typography styles in order to understand why the font fond is so large and how they were still made to look so different.

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Alphabet Fonts Classification

Alphabet fonts classification depends on the era or specific features of each design and it can, therefore, help you narrow down the font choice to few most attractive options.

Distinguishing types of alphabet fonts styles can have a huge influence on how you make design decisions, and help you discover the most suitable font for the purpose of your project.

This post is, in fact, a short overview of font classification of serif and sans serif solutions, and explains quite accurately how these types made it to the most-used list during the years.

Garalde Font (Old style)

Garalde font

Typefaces are being more and more carved to obtain a printable form, and that inspired many typographers to experiment with them and to create their own fonts instead of using existing scripts.

Goudy Old Style and Garamond were created exactly in this way and triggered the entire era of upright letterforms and clean crossbars instead of Humanist designs which favored thick strokes.

Transitional Font

Transitional Font

This style was developed by John Baskerville, an English typographer, and printer who decided to deviate from old and traditional styles somewhere in the middle of the 18h century. His transitional approach opened the door to neoclassical designs and wrapped up some of their best characteristics to improve printing method.

Baskerville worked on the so-called calendared paper which pulled out finer strokes and characters that can be easily reproduced and maintained. Transitional designs are recognizable by their curve stroke axis stressed vertically, and a more pronounced weight contrast. Serifs there are slightly bracketed, while head serifs look oblique.

Didone (Modern)

Didone (Modern) Font

Most contemporary & modern fonts are noticeable by their strong features, such as thick vertical strokes instead of the thin and vertical ones, end-to-end striking contrasts, and lack of rounded elements. All letters are joined vertically, as the fonts appeared during the transition trend in the 18th century.

The responsible developers were the Didone groups in France, while the first executor of the idea was Giambattista Bodoni from Italy.

Slab serifs

ultimate guide to the fonts

The early 19th century brought slab serifs on the scene, a popular style for advertising and display which features heavy serifs with minimal bracketing, or no bracketing at all. It is difficult to imperceptive changes in their weight, which is why many readers confuse them for sans serifs with heavy additions.

Sans serifs

In the first few centuries of typeface evolution, it was quite easy to follow developments and updates, but the transition from the 19th to the 20th century was a revolutionary explosion of ideas and brought up many of the fonts we are still using nowadays.

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The handwritten characteristics disappeared in a glance, and new sans serif styles arrived under the spotlight to completely transform typing as we know it today. The focus was shifted for the first time towards modern and functional reading, where users could understand text even at longer distances.

Sans serifs are precisely a product of the 19th century, but it took them a while to become as popular as they are today. What sans serifs did was to exclude the serif (‘sans’ means ‘without’ when translated from French), and to deliver a flexible, simple, and usable solution that is completely abstract to the standard letter alphabet.

Grotesque Sans Serifs

typeface with rounded, and monotone weight

Grotesque Sans Serifs were the first types to gain commercial popularity, due to their stroke weight contrast that can be described as more squared than curbed, and the ‘bowl and loop’ designed lowercase g which reminds of Roman writing styles.

The R is also sometimes curled, while Gs have spurs. Other modern sans serif patterns are also present and arrived a bit later than the grotesque to calm contrast down and to round the overdone ‘squareness’. More of the strokes were rounded, and monotone weight was less stressed.

Square Sans Serifs

grotesque like proportion and trait

What is most common in these designs is the grotesque like proportion and trait, even if squaring is much more definite and sometimes even dramatic. It was probably the moment when latitude rounding started to disappear, and focus was transferred to character spacing to make texts more clearly displayed.

Geometric Sans Serifs

typefaces influenced by geometry

These typefaces are influenced by geometry’s simplicity, and it is because of the fact that lines seem clear and strict, and all shapes remind of specific geometric forms. Contrary to what someone would expect, geometric types are more difficult to read than grotesques.

Humanistic Sans Serifs

easiest script to read and to understand

Here, the Roman inscriptional proportions are being applied to make stroke contrast really apparent. According to typography experts, humanistic sans serifs are the easiest to read and to understand, as they match significantly the proportions and characteristics of original serifs, and were designed under their calligraphic impact.

Scripts

Formal

Formal Script

We can trace formal scripts back to the 17th century’s writing styles, where characters were connected with strong strokes.

Calligraphic
Calligraphic Fonts
As you can probably guess, calligraphic scripts try to replicate calligraphic writing, and can be both connecting and non-connecting in terms of design. When you look at them, they create the feeling as if you were reading something handwritten with a flat-tipped instrument.

Lombardic and Blackletter

Lombardic and Blackletter scripts

Both typefaces were developed on the basis of manuscript lettering, long before movable types were actually invented.

Casual
Casual fonts
Contrary to their formal counterparts, casual scripts stand for relaxed and informal settings, alike something that was written in a rush, and has a specific purpose to satisfy. Most of the time, their letters are tightly connected to each other with character strokes.

Handwritten fonts

Handwritten fonts
Well, they’re not genuinely handwritten fonts, but they look as if they were. Their appearance is somehow casual and entertaining, and their shapes are cursive or very rounded. Unfortunately, as fun, as they are, handwritten fonts are not that legible.

Novelty (Decorative)
Novelty (Decorative) fonts

These are probably the easiest fonts to classify because they can’t be included in any of the abovementioned categories. They serve to inspire original moods, which is why they rarely appear on web content or in printing.

Ornamental fonts (Dingbats)

Ornamental fonts were designed with the unique purpose to remove alphanumeric characters, and to replace them with creative drawings, symbols, and pictures. Dingbats, in particular, don’t have a concrete purpose – they are just meant to be used wherever, and to beautify designs.

Final thoughts

Font Classification - Conclusion
We can’t be sure that this is the 100% reliable font classification and that nothing else you’ll read is correct, but it is still the result of hard work, experience, and dedicated research. We believe we included all types and particularities that are important to distinguish fonts and assign them to a specific alphabet font family, but we would be happy to hear something more from professional users.

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