Misplaced Pages

#550449

102-433: Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces , named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond , generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and body text . Garamond's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by his punchcutter Francesco Griffo in 1495, and are in what

204-483: A Greek word derived from σῠν- ( 'syn-' , "together") and ῥῖψῐς ( 'rhîpsis' , "projection"). In 1827, Greek scholar Julian Hibbert printed with his own experimental uncial Greek types, remarking that the types of Giambattista Bodoni 's Callimachus were "ornamented (or rather disfigured) by additions of what [he] believe[s] type-founders call syrifs or cerefs". The printer Thomas Curson Hansard referred to them as "ceriphs" in 1825. The oldest citations in

306-527: A cleaner result than historic typefaces whose master punches had been hand-carved, and allowed rapid development of a family in a large range of sizes. In addition, the new hot metal typesetting technology of the period created increasing availability and demand for new fonts. Among hot metal typesetting companies, Monotype's branches in Britain and the United States brought out separate versions, and

408-613: A crisp revival of the original Garamond typefaces in the 1920s, inspired by a rediscovered specimen from the Egenolff-Berner foundry in Frankfurt, as did Linotype in Britain. A 1920s adaptation created by the Stempel Type Foundry and released for hot metal typesetting by Linotype, that has remained popular. Its lower case 'a' has a sharp and somewhat angular look with a crisp hook at the top left, in contrast to

510-553: A division made on the Vox-ATypI classification system. Nonetheless, some have argued that the difference is excessively abstract, hard to spot except to specialists and implies a clearer separation between styles than originally appeared. Modern typefaces such as Arno and Trinité may fuse both styles. Early "humanist" roman types were introduced in Italy. Modelled on the script of the period, they tend to feature an "e" in which

612-658: A e m n r t (two forms) and z. Garamond cut more roman types than italics, which at the time were conceived separately to roman types rather than designed alongside them as complementary matches. Italics had again been introduced by Manutius in 1500; the first was cut by Griffo. This first italic used upright capitals, copying a popular style of calligraphy. The modern italic style of sloped capitals first appeared in 1527 and only slowly became popular. Accordingly, many of Garamond's italics were quite small and had upright capitals. Some of his italics did have sloped capitals, although Vervliet did not feel he integrated them effectively into

714-520: A left-inclining curve axis with weight stress at about 8 and 2 o'clock; serifs are almost always bracketed (they have curves connecting the serif to the stroke); head serifs are often angled. Old-style faces evolved over time, showing increasing abstraction from what would now be considered handwriting and blackletter characteristics, and often increased delicacy or contrast as printing technique improved. Old-style faces have often sub-divided into 'Venetian' (or ' humanist ') and ' Garalde ' (or 'Aldine'),

816-844: A range of sizes. Konrad Berner showcased various types of Garamond's and other French engravers in a 1592 specimen, which named the types' engravers and would later be a source for historians. Plantin's collection of original Garamond punches and matrices survives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, together with many other typefaces collected by Plantin from other typefounders of the period. The collection has been used extensively for research, for example by historians Harry Carter and Vervliet. Plantin also commissioned punchcutter Robert Granjon to create alternate characters for three Garamond fonts with shortened ascenders and descenders to allow tighter linespacing. Garamond's name

918-403: A sans serif font versus a serif font. When size of an individual glyph is 9–20 pixels, proportional serifs and some lines of most glyphs of common vector fonts are smaller than individual pixels. Hinting , spatial anti-aliasing , and subpixel rendering allow to render distinguishable serifs even in this case, but their proportions and appearance are off and thickness is close to many lines of

1020-434: A small eye and the bowl of the 'a' which has a sharp turn at top left. Other general features are limited but clear stroke contrast and capital letters on the model of Roman square capitals . The 'M' is slightly splayed with outward-facing serifs at the top (sometimes only on the left) and the leg of the 'R' extends outwards from the letter. The x-height (height of lower-case letters) is low, especially at larger sizes, making

1122-422: A softened version of the same basic design, with reduced contrast. Didone typefaces achieved dominance of printing in the early 19th-century printing before declining in popularity in the second half of the century and especially in the 20th as new designs and revivals of old-style faces emerged. In print, Didone fonts are often used on high-gloss magazine paper for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar , where

SECTION 10

#1732782697551

1224-583: A taste for new italics, wider and with flat incoming serifs, introduced by the Romain du roi type and popularised by Simon-Pierre Fournier (see below): "it is common enough, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to find books set in a Garamond roman or a near copy mated with one of Fournier's italics". A trademark associated with the Garalde style in modern times is the four-terminal 'W', although sixteenth-century French typefaces generally do not include

1326-586: A teardrop design that is common in many other serif typefaces. Stempel Garamond has relatively short descenders , allowing it to be particularly tightly linespaced. An unusual feature is the digit 0, which has reversed contrast , with the thickest points of the number on the top and bottom of the digit to make it more distinguishable from an 'o'. The Klingspor Museum credits it to Stempel's head of typeface development Dr. Rudolf Wolf. Garamond No. 1 and Garamond No. 2 are both based on Stempel Garamond, with various differences. Another typeface known as Original Garamond

1428-401: A vertical stress and thin serifs with a constant width, with minimal bracketing (constant width). Serifs tend to be very thin, and vertical lines very heavy. Didone fonts are often considered to be less readable than transitional or old-style serif typefaces. Period examples include Bodoni , Didot , and Walbaum . Computer Modern is a popular contemporary example. The very popular Century is

1530-709: Is a clone of Stempel Garamond. Serif Serif typefaces can be broadly classified into one of four subgroups: § old style , § transitional , § Didone and § Slab Serif , in order of first appearance. Some Old-style typefaces can be classified further into one of two subgroups: § Antiqua and § Dutch Taste . Serifs originated from the first official Greek writings on stone and in Latin alphabet with inscriptional lettering —words carved into stone in Roman antiquity . The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of

1632-627: Is actually made for one 'Nicholas Jannon', which historians have concluded to be a mistake.) Despite the purchase, it is not clear that the office ever much used Jannon's type: historian James Mosley has reported being unable to find books printed by the Imprimerie that use more than two sizes of italic. His type would later be misattributed to Garamond. Despite this, it is known that authorities in 1644 raided an office in Caen where he had been commissioned to do printing. Warde initially assumed that this

1734-459: Is commonly used on headings, websites, signs and billboards. A Japanese-language font designed in imitation of western serifs also exists. Farang Ses, designed in 1913, was the first Thai typeface to employ thick and thin strokes reflecting old-style serif Latin typefaces, and became extremely popular, with its derivatives widely used into the digital age. (Examples: Angsana UPC, Kinnari ) Roman type In Latin script typography , roman

1836-469: Is ended with a dipping motion of the brush, the ending of horizontal strokes are also thickened . These design forces resulted in the current Song typeface characterized by thick vertical strokes contrasted with thin horizontal strokes, triangular ornaments at the end of single horizontal strokes, and overall geometrical regularity. In Japanese typography, the equivalent of serifs on kanji and kana characters are called uroko —"fish scales". In Chinese,

1938-500: Is now called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen , but with a slightly more structured, upright design. Following an eclipse in popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, many modern revival faces in the Garamond style have been developed. It is common to pair these with italics based on those created by his contemporary Robert Granjon , who

2040-527: Is one of the three main kinds of historical type , alongside blackletter and italic . Sometimes called normal , it is distinct from these two for its upright style (relative to the calligraphy-inspired italic) and its simplicity (relative to blackletter). During the early Renaissance , roman (in the form of Antiqua ) and italic type were used separately. Today, roman and italic type are mixed, and most typefaces are composed of both an upright roman style and an associated italic or oblique style. Roman type

2142-436: Is otherwise known and to whom no obvious other body of work can be ascribed. If so, his disappearance from history (perhaps due to an early death, since all his presumed work appeared in just four years from 1530 to 1533) and the execution of Augereau on a charge of heresy in 1534 may have allowed Garamond's reputation to develop in the following decade. Regardless of these questions about his early career, Garamond's late career

SECTION 20

#1732782697551

2244-488: Is the printed capital I , where the addition of serifs distinguishes the character from lowercase L (l). The printed capital J and the numeral 1 are also often handwritten with serifs. Below are some images of serif letterforms across history: In the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, there are common type styles based on the regular script for Chinese characters akin to serif and sans serif fonts in

2346-499: Is the past tense of schrijven (to write). The relation between schreef and schrappen is documented by Van Veen and Van der Sijs. In her book Chronologisch Woordenboek , Van der Sijs lists words by first known publication in the language area that is the Netherlands today: The OED ' s earliest citation for "grotesque" in this sense is 1875, giving 'stone-letter' as a synonym . It would seem to mean "out of

2448-580: Is well-recorded, with most of his later roman types (in Lane's view, his best work) preserved in complete sets of matrices at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, which has allowed example sets of characters to be cast, with further documentation and attributions from later inventories and specimen sheets. Of the Garamond types preserved, all include small capitals apart from the gros-canon , and the parangonne uniquely includes terminal swash forms for

2550-608: The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) are 1830 for 'serif' and 1841 for 'sans serif'. The OED speculates that 'serif' was a back-formation from 'sanserif'. Webster's Third New International Dictionary traces 'serif' to the Dutch noun schreef , meaning "line, stroke of the pen", related to the verb schrappen , "to delete, strike through" ( 'schreef' now also means "serif" in Dutch). Yet, schreef

2652-768: The Aldine Press in Venice. He also worked as a publisher and bookseller. By 1549, a document from theologian Jean de Gagny specified that the goldsmith Charles Chiffin, who had cut an italic for his private printing press, should receive payment at the rate of "the best punchcutter in this city after master Claude Garamont", clearly showing that he was considered the pre-eminent punchcutter in Paris at this time. Vervliet concludes that Garamond created thirty-four typefaces for which an attribution can be confidently made (17 roman, 7 italic, 8 Greek, 2 Hebrew) and another three for which

2754-475: The Janson and Ehrhardt types based on his work and Caslon , especially the larger sizes. Transitional, or baroque, serif typefaces first became common around the mid-18th century until the start of the 19th. They are in between "old style" and "modern" fonts, thus the name "transitional". Differences between thick and thin lines are more pronounced than they are in old style, but less dramatic than they are in

2856-548: The end of the French monarchy ), which, unlike Garamond's own work, had survived in Paris. The attribution came to be considered certain by the Imprimerie's director Arthur Christian, who commissioned the cutting of additional sizes in a matching style. Early revivals were often based directly on the Imprimerie nationale types, one of the first by Peignot and then by American Type Founders (ATF). These revivals could be made using pantograph machine engraving systems, which gave

2958-524: The germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard in Germany. (In German, the term "Antiqua" refers to serif typefaces. ) A new genre of serif type developed around the 17th century in the Netherlands and Germany that came to be called

3060-429: The wood grain on printing blocks ran horizontally, it was fairly easy to carve horizontal lines with the grain. However, carving vertical or slanted patterns was difficult because those patterns intersect with the grain and break easily. This resulted in a typeface that has thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes . In accordance with Chinese calligraphy ( kaiti style in particular), where each horizontal stroke

3162-456: The "Dutch taste" ( "goût Hollandois" in French ). It was a tendency towards denser, more solid typefaces, often with a high x-height (tall lower-case letters) and a sharp contrast between thick and thin strokes, perhaps influenced by blackletter faces. Artists in the "Dutch taste" style include Hendrik van den Keere , Nicolaas Briot, Christoffel van Dijck , Miklós Tótfalusi Kis and

Garamond - Misplaced Pages Continue

3264-648: The "Estienne master", other engravers were active in the French renaissance style. Pierre Haultin particularly created many types which were very popular and distributed very widely around Europe: as a Protestant, he spent much of his career outside Paris working in Geneva , Lyons and La Rochelle and his nephew Jérôme established a career importing and casting his types in London, where his types were extremely common. In Carter's view Haultin "has been greatly underrated". Another engraver whose types were very popular in London

3366-617: The "Latin" style include Wide Latin , Copperplate Gothic , Johnston Delf Smith and the more restrained Méridien . Serifed fonts are widely used for body text because they are considered easier to read than sans-serif fonts in print. Colin Wheildon, who conducted scientific studies from 1982 to 1990, found that sans serif fonts created various difficulties for readers that impaired their comprehension. According to Kathleen Tinkel, studies suggest that "most sans serif typefaces may be slightly less legible than most serif faces, but ...

3468-457: The "M"; Cloister is an exception. Antiqua ( / æ n ˈ t iː k w ə / ) is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries. Letters are designed to flow, and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion; in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur -style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in

3570-488: The 'Garamond' his company was reviving was really Garamond's work, noting that he had never seen it in a sixteenth-century book. He discussed his concerns with ATF junior librarian Beatrice Warde, who would later move to Europe and become a prominent writer on printing advising the British branch of Monotype. In a 1926 paper published on the British typography journal The Fleuron , Beatrice Warde revealed her discovery that

3672-477: The 'M' shown in De Aetna which, whether intentionally or due to a casting defect, had no serif pointing out of the letter at top right. This form was to appear in many fonts of the period, including Garamond's earlier ones, although by the end of his career he had switched to mostly using an M on the Roman capital model with a serif at top right. The period from 1520 to around 1560, encompassing Garamond's career,

3774-497: The 1530s onwards. Often lighter on the page and made in larger sizes than had been used for roman type before, French Garalde faces rapidly spread throughout Europe from the 1530s to become an international standard. Also during this period, italic type evolved from a quite separate genre of type, intended for informal uses such as poetry, into taking a secondary role for emphasis. Italics moved from being conceived as separate designs and proportions to being able to be fitted into

3876-433: The 16th century assiduously examined Manutius's work (and, it is thought, De Aetna in particular) as a source of inspiration: Garamond's roman, italic and Greek typefaces were all influenced by types used by Manutius. An event which was to particularly define the course of the rest of Garamond's career came starting on 6 September 1530, when the printer Robert Estienne began to introduce a set of three roman types adapting

3978-653: The American branch of Linotype licensed that of ATF. A number of historians began in the early twentieth century to question if the Imprimerie nationale Latin-alphabet type was really the work of Garamond, as the Grecs du Roi undoubtedly were. Doubt was raised by French historian Jean Paillard, but he died during the First World War soon after publishing his conclusions in 1914 and his work remained little-read. ATF's historian Henry Lewis Bullen secretly doubted that

4080-494: The Didone fonts that followed. Stress is more likely to be vertical, and often the "R" has a curled tail. The ends of many strokes are marked not by blunt or angled serifs but by ball terminals . Transitional faces often have an italic 'h' that opens outwards at bottom right. Because the genre bridges styles, it is difficult to define where the genre starts and ends. Many of the most popular transitional designs are later creations in

4182-470: The Imprimerie nationale type had been created by Jean Jannon, something she had discovered by examining printing credited to him in London and Paris and through reading the work of Paillard, and perhaps with advice from French bibliographer Marius Audin. By the time Warde's article was published some revivals had been released that were more authentic revivals of Garamond's work, based on period books and printing specimens. The German company Stempel brought out

Garamond - Misplaced Pages Continue

4284-626: The Le Bé Memorandum (based on the memories of Guillaume Le Bé, but collated by one of his sons around 1643) suggests that Garamond finished his apprenticeship around 1510. This is considered unlikely by modern historians since his mother was still alive when he died in 1561 and little is known of him before around 1540. One particular question about Garamond's early career is whether he cut the typefaces used by Estienne from 1530. Because of Garamond's known connection with Estienne in his later career, it has been assumed that he cut them, but this

4386-462: The Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks, which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiselled into stone. The origin of the word 'serif' is obscure, but apparently is almost as recent as

4488-591: The University). It has sometimes been claimed that this term was an official name designated for the Jannon type by Cardinal Richelieu , while Warde in 1926 more plausibly suggested it might be a garbled recollection of Jannon's work with the Sedan Academy, which operated much like a university despite not using the name. Carter in the 1970s followed this conclusion. Mosley, however, concludes that no report of

4590-469: The Vatican type in exotic alphabets including Arabic, Armenian and Hebrew. His career also took in stops in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and finally for the last twelve years of his life Rome, where he ended his career in the service of the Vatican. Vervliet comments that Granjon "laid the foundation for our image of the way an Italic should look." Although he was not quite the first designer to use

4692-666: The West. In Mainland China, the most popular category of serifed-like typefaces for body text is called Song ( 宋体 , Songti ); in Japan, the most popular serif style is called Minchō ( 明朝 ) ; and in Taiwan and Hong Kong, it is called Ming ( 明體 , Mingti ). The names of these lettering styles come from the Song and Ming dynasties, when block printing flourished in China. Because

4794-655: The accommodation both of the public and of myself. Jannon was a Protestant in mostly Catholic France. After apparently working with the Estienne family in Paris he set up an independent career as printer in Sedan in what is now north-eastern France, becoming printer for the Protestant Academy . By his report he took up punchcutting seriously in his thirties, although according to Williamson he would have cut decorative material and engravings at least before this. Sedan

4896-605: The arrival of what is now called the Didone , or modern-face, style of printing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, promoted by the Didot family in France and others. This favoured a much more geometric, constructed style of letter which could show off the increasingly refined paper and printing technologies of the period. Lane suggests Fournier's type foundry may have finally disposed of its materials around 1805; in contrast,

4998-451: The art, [men whose deaths] I hear regretted every day [Jannon mentions some eminent printers of the previous century] ... and inasmuch as I could not accomplish this design for lack of types which I needed ... [some typefounders] would not, and others could not furnish me with what I lacked [so] I resolved, about six years ago, to turn my hand in good earnest to the making of punches, matrices and moulds for all sorts of characters, for

5100-735: The attribution is problematic (one each of roman, Greek and Hebrew). If Garamond distributed specimens of his typefaces, as later punchcutters and typefounders did, none is known to survive, although one unsigned specimen in the Plantin-Moretus Museum collection, presenting a synopsis of his late Parangon type, may have been made around the time of his death or soon after. While some records such as Christophe Plantin 's exist of what exact types were cut by Garamond himself, many details of his career remain uncertain: early estimates placed Garamond's date of birth around 1480, but modern opinion proposes much later estimates. A document called

5202-440: The capitals large relative to the lower case, while the top serifs on the ascenders of letters like 'd' have a downward slope and ride above the cap height . The axis of letters like the ‘o’ is diagonal and the bottom right of the italic 'h' bends inwards. Garamond types have quite expansive ascenders and descenders; printers at the time did not use leading . Besides general characteristics, writers on type have generally praised

SECTION 50

#1732782697551

5304-447: The capitals. Opinions of Jannon's engraving quality have varied; Warde found them "so technically brilliant as to be decadent" and "of slight value as a book face" (the surviving Jannon sizes were intended as display faces, cut at 18pt or larger) and Vervliet described them as "famous not so much for the quality of the design but as for the long-term confusion it created", although many reproductions of his work were successful in printing in

5406-617: The character as it is not normal in French . Many French renaissance typefaces used abroad had the character added later, along with the 'J' and 'U': these were often very visibly added by lesser craftsmen, producing an obvious mismatch. Granjon added a 'W' and 'w', both with three upper terminals, to Garamond's Breviare roman in 1565 for Plantin. The foundry of Guillaume Le Bé I which held many of Garamond's punches and matrices passed to Guillaume Le Bé II, and came to be managed by Jean-Claude Fournier, whose son Jean-Pierre in 1730 purchased it. (His younger brother, Simon-Pierre Fournier, rapidly left

5508-468: The classic search for silent and transparent form". Modern Garamond revivals also often add a matching bold and 'lining' numbers at the height of capital letters, neither of which were used during the Renaissance; Arabic numerals in Garamond's time were engraved as what are now called text figures , styled with variable height like lower-case letters. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches ,

5610-488: The clear, bold nature of the large serifs, slab serif designs are often used for posters and in small print. Many monospace fonts , on which all characters occupy the same amount of horizontal space as in a typewriter , are slab-serif designs. While not always purely slab-serif designs, many fonts intended for newspaper use have large slab-like serifs for clearer reading on poor-quality paper. Many early slab-serif types, being intended for posters, only come in bold styles with

5712-461: The collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum survive almost intact. Mosley comments: The upheavals of the Revolution coincided with the major shift in the style of printing types that is associated with the family of Didot, and the stock of old materials abruptly lost its value, except as scrap. Punches rust, and the copper of matrices is recyclable. All traces of the early types that had been in

5814-471: The creation of a pool of high-quality punches and matrices, many of which would remain used for the next two centuries. Little is known about Garamond's life or work before 1540, although he wrote in a preface of having cut punches for type since childhood. He worked for a variety of employers on commission, creating punches and selling matrices to publishers and the government. Garamond's typefaces were popular abroad, and replaced Griffo's original roman type at

5916-447: The cross stroke is angled, not horizontal; an "M" with two-way serifs; and often a relatively dark colour on the page. In modern times, that of Nicolas Jenson has been the most admired, with many revivals. Garaldes, which tend to feature a level cross-stroke on the "e", descend from an influential 1495 font cut by engraver Francesco Griffo for printer Aldus Manutius , which became the inspiration for many typefaces cut in France from

6018-474: The difference can be offset by careful setting". Sans-serif are considered to be more legible on computer screens. According to Alex Poole, "we should accept that most reasonably designed typefaces in mainstream use will be equally legible". A study suggested that serif fonts are more legible on a screen but are not generally preferred to sans serif fonts. Another study indicated that comprehension times for individual words are slightly faster when written in

6120-490: The earlier "modernised old styles" have been described as transitional in design. Later 18th-century transitional typefaces in Britain begin to show influences of Didone typefaces from Europe, described below, and the two genres blur, especially in type intended for body text; Bell is an example of this. Didone, or modern, serif typefaces, which first emerged in the late 18th century, are characterized by extreme contrast between thick and thin lines. These typefaces have

6222-420: The early twentieth century are actually based on the work of a later punchcutter, Jean Jannon , whose noticeably different work was for some years misattributed to Garamond. The most common digital font named Garamond is Monotype Garamond . Developed in the early 1920s and bundled with Microsoft Office , it is a revival of Jannon's work. Some distinctive characteristics in Garamond's letterforms are an 'e' with

SECTION 60

#1732782697551

6324-437: The end of the eighteenth century and appear in the major French type foundry specimen books of the eighteenth century, of Delacolonge, Lamesle, and Gando. In Delacolonge's book, many fonts were shown "mutilated" or as "bastard" fonts: with replacement characters, specifically cut-down descenders to allow tighter linespacing. According to James Mosley French renaissance romans remained popular for slightly longer than italics, due to

6426-408: The even quality of Garamond's type: John A. Lane describes his work as "elegant and executed with consummate skill...to a higher standard than commercial interest demanded"; H. D. L. Vervliet wrote that in his later Gros-Canon and Parangonne types (meaning sizes of around 40pt and 18pt respectively) he had achieved "a culmination of Renaissance design. The elegant line and subdued emphasis show

6528-489: The family business and became a major exponent of modern ideas in printing, including standardised point sizes and crisp types influenced by contemporary calligraphy.) In 1756, Jean-Pierre Fournier wrote of his collection of vintage equipment that "I am the owner of the foundry of Garamond, the Le Bé family and Granjon. I shall be happy to display my punches and matrices to all those who are lovers of true beauty ... these are

6630-533: The hands of the trade typefounders like Le Bé, Sanlecque and Lamesle in Paris vanished completely. No relics of them were saved anywhere, except in commercial centres that had become relative backwaters, like Antwerp, where the Plantin-Moretus printing office piously preserved the collection of its founder ... the term caractères de l'Université became attached by default to the set of apparently early matrices that had survived, its provenance forgotten, in

6732-756: The idea of italics having capitals sloped to complement the roman, he "solved successfully the problem of a balanced inclination of the capitals, a feature much ahead of the designs with a more irregular slope of his Viennese and Mainz predecessors...and even compared to...Garamont. A proper optical harmony of the angle of slope is characteristic for all Granjon’s Italics; it allowed the compositor to use whole lines of capitals without causing too much giddiness." Granjon also cut many swash capitals , which Vervliet describes as "deliciously daring" and have often been copied, for instance in Robert Slimbach's revivals for Adobe (discussed below). Besides Garamond, Granjon and

6834-629: The italics are Granjon's. (Some books published by Garamond in 1545 use a very common italic of the period, not cut by him.) Garamond cut type for the Greek alphabet from the beginning of his recorded career: on 2 November 1540 he contracted to cut a series of Greek faces for the French government, to be used in printing by Robert Estienne. The resulting typeface, known as the Grecs du roi , are very different from his Latin designs: again influenced by Greek typefaces used by Manutius (they were cut in three sizes,

6936-418: The key differentiation being width, and often have no lower-case letters at all. Examples of slab-serif typefaces include Clarendon , Rockwell , Archer , Courier , Excelsior , TheSerif , and Zilla Slab . FF Meta Serif and Guardian Egyptian are examples of newspaper and small print-oriented typefaces with some slab-serif characteristics, often most visible in the bold weights. In the late 20th century,

7038-446: The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a return to the designs of Renaissance printers and type-founders, many of whose names and designs are still used today. Old-style type is characterized by a lack of large differences between thick and thin lines (low line contrast) and generally, but less often, by a diagonal stress (the thinnest parts of letters are at an angle rather than at the top and bottom). An old-style font normally has

7140-475: The main glyph, strongly altering appearance of the glyph. Consequently, it is sometimes advised to use sans-serif fonts for content meant to be displayed on screens, as they scale better for low resolutions. Indeed, most web pages employ sans-serif type. Recent introduction of desktop displays with 300+ dpi resolution might eventually make this recommendation obsolete. As serifs originated in inscription, they are generally not used in handwriting. A common exception

7242-422: The masters used to stamp matrices , the moulds used to cast metal type. Garamond cut types in the 'roman', or upright style , in italic , and Greek . In the period of Garamond's early life roman type had been displacing the blackletter or Gothic type which was used in some (although not all) early French printing. Though his name was generally written as 'Garamont' in his lifetime, the spelling 'Garamond' became

7344-479: The mixed stock of materials of the national printing-office. Garamond's reputation remained respected, even by members of the Didot family whose type designs came to dominate French printing. A revival of interest in 'old-style' serif typefaces took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This saw a revival of the Imprimerie royale typefaces (the office was now called the Imprimerie nationale following

7446-404: The modern characteristics of Roman type, for instance an 'h' with a nearly straight right leg, serifs on the outside of the capital 'M' and 'N', and 'e' with level cross stroke, by the 1530s. Popular roman typefaces include Bembo , Baskerville , Caslon , Jenson , Times New Roman and Garamond . The name roman is customarily applied uncapitalized distinguishing early Italian typefaces of

7548-480: The most commonly used form after his death. H. D. L. Vervliet, the leading contemporary expert on French Renaissance printing, uses Garamont consistently. The roman designs of Garamond which are his most imitated were based on a font cut around 1495 for the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by engraver Francesco Griffo . This was first used in the book De Aetna , a short work by poet and cleric Pietro Bembo which

7650-681: The ordinary" in this usage, as in art 'grotesque' usually means "elaborately decorated". Other synonyms include "Doric" and "Gothic", commonly used for Japanese Gothic typefaces . Old-style typefaces date back to 1465, shortly after Johannes Gutenberg 's adoption of the movable type printing press . Early printers in Italy created types that broke with Gutenberg's blackletter printing, creating upright and later italic styles inspired by Renaissance calligraphy. Old-style serif fonts have remained popular for setting body text because of their organic appearance and excellent readability on rough book paper. The increasing interest in early printing during

7752-503: The paper retains the detail of their high contrast well, and for whose image a crisp, "European" design of type may be considered appropriate. They are used more often for general-purpose body text, such as book printing, in Europe. They remain popular in the printing of Greek, as the Didot family were among the first to establish a printing press in newly independent Greece. The period of Didone types' greatest popularity coincided with

7854-601: The property of the French government. They were extremely influential and directly copied by many engravers for other printers, becoming the basis of Greek typeface design for the next two centuries. Although the Grecs du roi style was popular in Greek printing for the next two centuries, it is problematic for modern setting of body text, due to changing tastes in Greek printing: they are slanted, but modern Greek printing often uses upright type, and because Garamond's types were designed assuming that ligatures would be manually selected and inserted wherever needed; later metal types on

7956-421: The rapid spread of printed posters and commercial ephemera and the arrival of bold type . As a result, many Didone typefaces are among the earliest designed for "display" use, with an ultra-bold " fat face " style becoming a common sub-genre. Slab serif typefaces date to about 1817. Originally intended as attention-grabbing designs for posters, they have very thick serifs, which tend to be as thick as

8058-628: The same line as roman type with a design complementary to it. Examples of contemporary Garalde old-style typefaces are Bembo , Garamond , Galliard , Granjon , Goudy Old Style , Minion , Palatino , Renard, Sabon , and Scala . Contemporary typefaces with Venetian old style characteristics include Cloister , Adobe Jenson , the Golden Type , Hightower Text , Centaur , Goudy's Italian Old Style and Berkeley Old Style and ITC Legacy. Several of these blend in Garalde influences to fit modern expectations, especially placing single-sided serifs on

8160-593: The same model used fewer ligatures. Digital 'Garamond' releases such as Adobe's with Roman and Greek character sets often re-interpret the Greek, for instance with upright characters. A commercial digitisation from Anagrafi Fonts, KS GrequeX , uses the OpenType format to include over 1100 abbreviations and ligatures, more than Garamond cut. According to Lane the most influential Grecs du roi copies were those of Granjon and Haultin, but others may have been cut by Jean Arnould and Nicolas de Villiers, amongst others. Another

8262-439: The same ones Manutius used), they were based on the elegant handwriting of Cretan scribe Angelo Vergecio , who used many ligatures and traditional contractions in his writing, and include an extraordinarily large number of alternate characters to faithfully replicate it. Arthur Tilley called the books printed from them "among the most finished specimens of typography that exist". The Grecs du roi punches and matrices remain

8364-579: The same style. Fonts from the original period of transitional typefaces include early on the " romain du roi " in France, then the work of Pierre Simon Fournier in France, Fleischman and Rosart in the Low Countries, Pradell in Spain and John Baskerville and Bulmer in England. Among more recent designs, Times New Roman (1932), Perpetua , Plantin , Mrs. Eaves , Freight Text , and

8466-566: The serifs are called either yǒujiǎotǐ ( 有脚体 , lit. "forms with legs") or yǒuchènxiàntǐ ( 有衬线体 , lit. "forms with ornamental lines"). The other common East Asian style of type is called black ( 黑体/體 , Hēitǐ ) in Chinese and Gothic ( ゴシック体 , Goshikku-tai ) in Japanese. This group is characterized by lines of even thickness for each stroke, the equivalent of "sans serif". This style, first introduced on newspaper headlines,

8568-466: The single roman type used in De Aetna to a range of sizes. These typefaces, with their "light colour and precise cut" were extremely influential and other Parisian printers immediately introduced copies. The largest size "Gros-canon" (42.5pt) particularly became a "phenomenon" in Paris: never before had a roman type been cut in so large a size. The designs copied Manutius's type even to the extent of copying

8670-623: The term "humanist slab-serif" has been applied to typefaces such as Chaparral , Caecilia and Tisa, with strong serifs but an outline structure with some influence of old-style serif typefaces. During the 19th century, genres of serif type besides conventional body text faces proliferated. These included "Tuscan" faces, with ornamental, decorative ends to the strokes rather than serifs, and "Latin" or "wedge-serif" faces, with pointed serifs, which were particularly popular in France and other parts of Europe including for signage applications such as business cards or shop fronts. Well-known typefaces in

8772-408: The term (or much use of Jannon's matrices at all) exists before the nineteenth century, and it may originate from a generic term of the eighteenth century simply meaning older or more conservative typeface designs, perhaps those preferred in academic publishing. The old-style typefaces of Garamond and his contemporaries continued to be regularly used and kept in the stock of European typefounders until

8874-463: The time enjoyed an unstable independence as a principality at a time when the French government had conceded through the Edict of Nantes to allowing a complicated system of restricted liberties for Protestants. The French Royal Printing Office (Imprimerie Royale) appears to have bought matrices from him in 1641 in three large sizes, roman and italic at roughly 18, 24 and 36 point sizes. (The contract

8976-458: The twentieth century. Jannon cut far more types than those surviving in the Imprimerie collection: before the misattribution to Garamond, he was particularly respected for his engraving of an extremely small size of type, known for his workplace as sédanoise , which was popular. By the nineteenth century, Jannon's matrices had come to be known as the Caractères de l'Université (Characters of

9078-624: The type style. The book The British Standard of the Capital Letters contained in the Roman Alphabet, forming a complete code of systematic rules for a mathematical construction and accurate formation of the same (1813) by William Hollins , defined 'surripses', usually pronounced "surriphs", as "projections which appear at the tops and bottoms of some letters, the O and Q excepted, at the beginning or end, and sometimes at each, of all". The standard also proposed that 'surripsis' may be

9180-417: The typeface design, "sloped capitals were (and stayed) a weakness in his designs." Garamond's italics were apparently not as used as widely as Granjon's and Haultin's, which spread widely across Europe. For example, on the 1592 Berner specimen, most of the romans were by Garamond but at least all but one, and probably all, of the italics are Granjon's. Similarly in the 1643 Imprimerie royale specimen, most of

9282-726: The types that made the reputations of the Estiennes, Plantin and the Elzevirs ," and referred to an inventory that he said was in his possession that had been drawn up after Garamond's death in 1561. (The comment was made in a journal during a public dispute with a printer of more modern tastes who preferred to remain anonymous and may have been his younger brother.) The 1561 inventory does not survive, although some later inventories do; by this point Fournier's foundry may have become rather inactive. Old-style serif typefaces by Garamond and his contemporaries finally fell out of use altogether with

9384-459: The vertical lines themselves. Slab serif fonts vary considerably: some such as Rockwell have a geometric design with minimal variation in stroke width—they are sometimes described as sans-serif fonts with added serifs. Others such as those of the "Clarendon" model have a structure more like most other serif fonts, though with larger and more obvious serifs. These designs may have bracketed serifs that increase width along their length. Because of

9486-564: Was François Guyot, who moved from Paris to Antwerp and then London. In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer Jean Jannon released a specimen of typefaces in the Garamond/Granjon style. Jannon wrote in his specimen that: Seeing that for some time many persons have had to do with the art [of printing] who have greatly lowered it ... the desire came upon me to try if I might imitate, after some fashion, some one among those who honourably busied themselves with

9588-500: Was Manutius' first printing in the Latin alphabet. Historian Beatrice Warde has assessed De Aetna as something of a pilot project , a small book printed to a higher standard than Manutius' norm. Among other details, this font popularised the idea that in printing the cross-stroke of the 'e' should be level instead of slanting upwards to the right like handwriting, something imitated in almost all type designs since. French typefounders of

9690-486: Was a widespread custom for many years to attribute almost any good sixteenth-century French font" to Garamond. As a result, while "Garamond" is a common term in the printing industry, the terms "French Renaissance antiqua" and " Garalde " have been used in academic writing to refer generally to fonts on the Aldus-French Renaissance model by Garamond and others. In particular, many 'Garamond' revivals of

9792-473: Was an extremely busy period for typeface creation. Many fonts were cut, some such as Robert Estienne's for a single printer's exclusive use, others sold or traded between them (increasingly over time). The many active engravers included Garamond himself, Granjon, Guillaume Le Bé , particularly respected for his Hebrew fonts, Pierre Haultin , Antoine Augereau (who may have been Garamond's master), Estienne's stepfather Simon de Colines and others. This period saw

9894-522: Was made by Arthur Nicholls in London. Garamond died in 1561 and his punches and matrices were sold off by his widow. Purchasers included the Le Bé type foundry in Paris run by the family of Guillaume Le Bé and Christophe Plantin, who was in Paris at the time; the Frankfurt foundry often referred to by historians as Egenolff-Berner also came to acquire materials of Garamond's. Le Bé's son is known to have written to Plantin's successor Moretus offering to trade matrices so they could both have complementary type in

9996-426: Was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 15th century, based on the pairing of inscriptional capitals used in ancient Rome with Carolingian minuscules . Early roman typefaces show a variety of designs, for instance resembling what would now be considered blackletter. Printers and typefounders such as Nicolas Jenson and Aldus Manutius in Venice and later Robert Estienne in France codified

10098-409: Was not mentioned in contemporary sources: Vervliet suggests that these 'Estienne typefaces' were not cut by Garamond and that his career began somewhat later. Vervliet suggests that the creator of this set of typefaces, sometimes called the 'Estienne Master', may have been a 'Master Constantin', recorded in the Le Bé Memorandum as a master type engraver of the period before Garamond but about whom nothing

10200-550: Was the source of the Jannon materials in the Imprimerie Nationale before the government's purchase order came to light. Jannon's types and their descendants are recognizable by the scooped-out triangular serifs on the top left of such characters as 'm', 'n' and 'r', which curve to a steeper slant in Jannon's design compared to Garamond's. The italics are also very different from Garamond's own or Granjon's, being much more ornate and with considerable variation in angle of

10302-494: Was used outside France as a name for 10pt type, often in Dutch as 'Garmond'. Many modern revival fonts based on French renaissance printing are influenced by the work of Robert Granjon (c. 1513–90), particularly in italic. An engraver with a long and wide-ranging career, Granjon's work seems to have ranged much more widely than Garamond's focus on roman and Greek type, cutting type in italic, civilité (a cursive blackletter), and for

10404-483: Was well known for his proficiency in this genre. However, although Garamond himself remains considered a major figure in French printing of the sixteenth century, historical research has increasingly placed him in context as one artisan punchcutter among many active at a time of rapid production of new typefaces in sixteenth-century France, and research has only slowly developed into which fonts were cut by him and which by contemporaries; Robert Bringhurst commented that "it

#550449