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67-411: Clarendon has a bold, solid structure, similar in letter structure to the "modern" serif typefaces popular in the nineteenth century for body text (for instance showing an 'R' with a curled leg, and ball terminals on the 'a' and 'c'), but bolder and with less contrast in stroke weight. Clarendon designs generally have a structure with bracketed serifs, which become larger as they reach the main stroke of

134-496: A Roman type so that it could be easily switched in for emphasis. The typeface was reworked by Monotype , with a redesigned release as "New Clarendon" in 1960. Hermann Eidenbenz cut a version in 1953, issued by Haas and Stempel, and later, Linotype. Freeman Craw drew the Craw Clarendon family, a once popular American version released by American Type Founders in 1955, with light, bold and condensed variants. Aldo Novarese drew

201-435: A coincidence. For similar reasons they were also called Egyptian or Reversed Egyptian , Egyptian being an equally arbitrary name for slab serifs of the period.) Intended as attention-grabbing novelty display designs rather than as serious choices for body text, within four years of their introduction the printer Thomas Curson Hansard had described them as 'typographic monstrosities'. Derivatives of this style persisted, and

268-476: A complementary, more balanced reading experience on paper. An eccentric method of reworking and parodying Didone typefaces has long been to invert the contrast, making the thin strokes thick and the thick strokes thin. First seen around 1821 in Britain and occasionally revived since, these are often called reverse-contrast fonts. They effectively become slab serif designs because of the serifs becoming thick. In

335-658: A distinct design in its own right" while Hoefler comments that it is now "chiefly associated with bracketed faces of the Century model". A decline of interest in Clarendons for display use did, however, take place in the early twentieth century: by 1923, American Type Founders , which specialised in creating demand for new designs of display face, could argue "Who remembers the Clarendons[?]" in its specimen book, and did not show them (aside from some numerals) in its 1,148 pages. In addition,

402-723: A natural requirement of printing technology at the time of Didone typefaces' first creation in metal type, since each size of metal type would be custom-cut, but declined as the pantograph , phototypesetting and digital fonts made printing the same font at any size simpler; a revival has taken place in recent years. French designer Loïc Sander has suggested that the dazzle effect may be particularly common in designs produced in countries where designers are unfamiliar with how to use them effectively and may choose Didone fonts designed for headings. Many modern Didone digital revivals intended for professional printing, such as Parmagiano, ITC Bodoni and Hoefler & Frere-Jones ' Didot and Surveyor, have

469-698: A range of optical sizes, but this is less common on default computer fonts. Among default Didone fonts on computer systems, Century Schoolbook on Windows is oriented towards body text use, while the Didot revival on OS X was specifically intended for display use and not for body text. The shape of nineteenth-century Didone designs, with their narrow apertures , has been suggested as a major influence on many early sans-serif fonts such as Akzidenz-Grotesk and its derivatives such as Helvetica , developed in Europe some years after their introduction. An example of this influence

536-403: A recurrence to sound taste. Positive retrogession is against nature and any tendency in this direction will most assuredly correct itself. The adherents of the old irregular alphabets, which were made so because scarcely anyone was capable of making them better, might just as reasonably advocate a return to the rough and unplaned machinery of the first locomotive steam engines, taking as their model

603-456: A release named Consort, cutting some additional weights (a bold and italics) in the 1950s. The original materials were transferred to the Type Museum collection when Stephenson Blake left the printing business in 1996. Designs for wood type copying Clarendon were made from the mid-1840s onwards. Most hot metal typesetting companies offered some kind of slab serif; Linotype offered it duplexed to

670-718: A scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford to read History in 1929. In 1936 she curated the touring exhibition Abstract and Concrete , the first showing of abstract art , and of the work of Mondrian , in England . She taught at London's Central School of Art and Design 1964–81, where, with Nicholas Biddulph, she created the Central Lettering Record, an archive of lettering in every medium. Her books include Nineteenth century ornamented types and title pages (Faber & Faber 1938; 2nd edition, as Nineteenth century ornamented typefaces , 1976), Jacob's Ladder:

737-530: A thing of the past. Herod is out-heroded every week in some new fancy which calls itself a letter ... I do not deny that may of our modern fancy letters are graceful ... nor am I bold enough to suggest that at this time of day they can be dispensed with. But I admit to some misgivings at the lengths to which the craze is carrying us, and the almost total abandonment of traditional models which it involves." Frederic Goudy , an Arts and Crafts movement-inspired printer turned type designer, had similar reservations about

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804-574: A type foundry, and this 'Swindon Egyptian' differed in some aspects, most obviously the numerals used for the cabside numberplates. The typeface is currently used by Public Transport Company  [ pl ] in Poznań , Poland as the typeface of fleet vehicles ' numbering, and on trams for displaying the route number. A custom variation of the typeface is used to display dollar amounts and other lettering on Wheel of Fortune 's wheel. Didone (typography) Didone ( / d i ˈ d oʊ n i / )

871-545: A white line in the centre of the thick strokes. He hoped this design, Goudy Open , would leave a lighter colour (density of ink) on the paper. Nonetheless, Didone designs have remained in use, and the genre is recognised on the VOX-ATypI classification system of typefaces and by the Association Typographique Internationale (AtypI). The genre remains particularly popular for general-purpose use in

938-531: Is 'dazzle', where the thick verticals draw the reader's attention and cause them to struggle to concentrate on the other, much thinner strokes that define which letter is which. For this reason, using the right optical size of digital font has been described as particularly essential with Didone designs. Fonts to be used at text sizes will be sturdier designs with thicker 'thin' strokes and serifs (less stroke contrast) and more space between letters than on display designs, to increase legibility. Optical sizes were

1005-464: Is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the 19th century. It is characterized by: The term "Didone" is a 1954 coinage, part of the Vox-ATypI classification system. It amalgamates the surnames of the famous typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni , whose efforts defined the style around the beginning of

1072-401: Is a modernisation reminiscent of Clarendon revivals from the 1950s. It attempts to adapt the style to use in a much wider range of settings, going so far as to be usable for body text. The following terms have been used for Clarendons and related slab serifs. Common meanings have been added, but they have often not been consistently applied. Many modern writers as a result ignore them and prefer

1139-409: Is also traditionally associated with wild-west printing; it is commonly seen on circus posters and wanted notices in western movies. However, it was actually used in many parts of the world at the time. The concept, now called as reverse-contrast or reverse-stress type, predated Clarendon altogether. It began, possibly around 1821 in Britain, as a parody of the elegant Didone types of the period. It

1206-490: Is much less pleasing, it has lost emphasis and confidence, and gains only in plausibility." Besley registered the typeface in 1845 under Britain's Ornamental Designs Act of 1842. The patent expired three years later, and other foundries quickly copied it. Besley was nonetheless successful in business, and became the Lord Mayor of London in 1869. Theodore De Vinne, a printer who wrote several influential textbooks on typography in

1273-409: Is the narrow apertures of these designs, in which strokes on letters such as a and c fold up to become vertical, similar to what is seen on Didone serif fonts. Matthew Carter 's Scotch Roman -inspired computer font Georgia is notable as an extremely distant descendant of Didone typefaces. In Georgia, the stroke contrast is greatly reduced and the bold made much bolder than normal in order for

1340-673: The Arts and Crafts movement and antiquarian-minded printers such as William Morris , rejected austere, classical designs of type, ultimately in favour of gentler designs. Some of these were revivals of typefaces from between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century such as revivals (with varying levels of faithfulness to the originals) of the work of Nicolas Jenson , William Caslon 's " Caslon " typefaces and others such as Bembo and Garamond . Others such as "Old Styles" from Miller and Richard , Goudy Old Style and Imprint were new designs on

1407-571: The Bauer Type Foundry in 1955. Ray Larabie , of Typodermic, released the Superclarendon family in 2007, using obliques instead of italics. A wide, display-oriented design with small caps and Greek and Cyrillic support, it is bundled with macOS . Sentinel, from Hoefler & Frere-Jones , another typeface family based on Clarendon with italics added, was released in 2009. Intended to have less eccentric italics suitable for body text use, it

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1474-414: The sans-serif , slab-serif and new styles of bold blackletter, but also Didone-style letters that emboldened or decorated the roman type form. Known as ' fat faces ', these showed magnified contrast, keeping the thin parts of the letter slender while magnifying the vertical strokes massively. Other "effect" typefaces were sold such as patterned letterforms which added a pattern to the bold parts of

1541-719: The "classic style" of nineteenth-century scientific printing with a family based on an American Monotype Company Modern face. Many newspapers were founded in the nineteenth century, and many newspaper typefaces have remained rooted in nineteenth-century models of type. Linotype's popular Legibility Group of the 1930s, for many years the model for most newspaper printing worldwide, remained based on this model but toughened-up to increase clarity. American Type Founders ' Bodoni typeface, introduced around 1907-1911, became hugely popular for news headlines. Writing in 2017, digital font designer Tobias Frere-Jones wrote that he had kept his font design for The Wall Street Journal based on

1608-603: The 1840s, but they were often quite lumpy in design and quite poorly matched to the body text face they were intended to complement. Mosley has written that "the Clarendon type of the Besley foundry is indeed the first type actually designed as a 'related bold' – that is, made to harmonize in design and align with the roman types [regular weight typefaces] it was set with...Before the launch of Clarendon type printers picked out words in slab-serifs or any other heavy type." However, because of

1675-515: The 19th century, these designs were called Italian because of their exotic appearance, but this name is problematic since the designs have no clear connection with Italy; they do slightly resemble capitalis rustica Roman writing, although this may be a coincidence. They were also called Egyptian , an equally inauthentic term applied to slab serifs of the period. Intended as attention-grabbing novelty display designs more than as serious choices for body text, within four years of their introduction

1742-442: The Clarendon design was particularly popular and its name rapidly copied. Historian James Mosley suggests that an inspiration for these designs may have been the style of handlettered capitals used by copper-plate engravers. Besley's original Clarendon design was quite compressed, unlike most later 'Clarendons' intended for display setting, which are often quite wide. One of the original target markets for Besley's Clarendon design

1809-489: The Clarendon design's strong reputation for quality, it was rapidly copied. Historian Nicolete Gray considered the earlier "Ionic" face from the Caslon Foundry in the same style more effective than Besley's: "[Besley's] became the normal, but it was certainly not the first…in 1842 Caslon have an upper and in 1843 a lower case with the characteristics fully developed, but of a normal width…Besley's [more compressed] Clarendon

1876-554: The Egizio family for Nebiolo , in Turin , Italy . The design included matching italics. David Berlow, of the Font Bureau , released a revival as Belizio in 1998. The Clarendon Text family, with italics inspired by Egizio, was released by Patrick Griffin of Canada Type. Volta, sold as Fortune in the U.S., a modern view of Clarendon, was designed by Konrad Friedrich Bauer and Walter Baum for

1943-432: The art: It is ... marvellous to think that, after the much desiderated correction [to letters] had been applied, an attempt should recently have been made to introduce these old irregular letters again to the public notice, for the vagaries of fashion have of late brought into use in the printing trade several kinds of old-faced types ... and the infection has in some degree been caught by the sign-writer ... we have thus, on

2010-467: The best and most significant Clarendons are twentieth century designs" and highlights the Haas and Stempel foundry's bold, wide Clarendon display face as "a classic that for many people is the epitome of the Clarendon style." Slab serif lettering and typefaces originated in Britain in the early nineteenth century, at a time of rapid development of new, bolder typefaces for posters and commercial printing. Probably

2077-472: The concept of very thick serifs ultimately merged with the Clarendon genre of type. The advantage of French-Clarendon type was that it allowed very large, eye-catching serifs while the letters remained narrow, suiting the desire of poster-makers for condensed but very bold type. Fine printers were less impressed by it: DeVinne commented in 1902 that "To be hated, it needs but to be seen." Because of their quirky, unusual design, lighter and hand-drawn versions of

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2144-456: The design to render well on a low-resolution computer monitor, but the general letter shape and ball terminals of Scotch Roman designs are preserved. He also developed the Scotch Roman revival Miller for print use. Given these unusual design decisions, Matthew Butterick , an expert on document design, recommended that organizations using Georgia for onscreen display license Miller to achieve

2211-451: The eighteen-fifties being a time of "batteries of bold, bad faces" and said that "the types cut between 1810 and 1850 represent the worst that have ever been." Driven by the increasing popularity of advertising, whether printed or custom lettering , the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the development of bold lettering and the arrival of types of letterform that were not simply larger versions of body text faces. These included

2278-497: The fat face letter, and the pre-existing inline types with a line inside the type. Didone fonts began to decline in popularity for general use, especially in the English-speaking world, around the end of the nineteenth century . The rise of the slab serif and sans-serif genres displaced fat faces from much display use, while the revival of interest in "old-style" designs reduced its use in body text. This trend, influenced by

2345-452: The first slab-serif to appear in print was created by the foundry of Vincent Figgins , and given the name "antique". Others rapidly appeared, using names such as "Ionic" and "Egyptian", which had also been used as a name for sans-serifs . (At the time typeface names were often adjectives, often with little purpose to their name, although they may have been in this case reference to the "blocky", geometric structure of ancient architecture. There

2412-480: The lasting influence of Baskerville led to the creation of types such as the Bell , Bulmer and Scotch Roman designs, in the same spirit as Didone fonts from the continent but less geometric; these like Baskerville's type are often called transitional serif designs. Later developments of the latter class have been called Scotch Modern and show increasing Didone influence. Didone typefaces came to dominate printing by

2479-740: The late nineteenth century, wrote that its name was a reference to the Clarendon Press in Oxford (now part of Oxford University Press ), who he claimed immediately used it for dictionaries, although later authors have expressed doubt about this. With its growing popularity for display use, new versions often changed these proportions. By around 1874, the Fann Street Foundry (now Reed and Fox) could offer in its specimen book Clarendon designs that were condensed, "thin-faced" (light weight), extended, "distended" (extra-wide) and shaded. Revivals continued in

2546-516: The letter. Mitja Miklavčič describes the basic features of Clarendon designs (and ones labelled Ionic, often quite similar) as: "plain and sturdy nature, strong bracketed serifs, vertical stress, large x-height, short ascenders and descenders, typeface with little contrast" and supports Nicolete Gray 's description of them as a "cross between the roman [general-purpose body text type] and slab serif model". Gray notes that nineteenth-century Ionic and Clarendon faces have "a definite differentiation between

2613-437: The lettering style. While he mentioned Bodoni in his book Elements of Lettering , he wrote that it was a style "for which the writer cannot develop any enthusiasm", adding: "his pages [had] the brilliance of a fine engraving. The writer dislikes Bodoni's types, because none of them seem free from a feeling of artificiality" As an experiment in this period, Goudy attempted to 'redeem' Didone capitals for titling purposes by leaving

2680-432: The letters crowd together; the normal mid nineteenth-century book is typographically dreary. The Victorians lost the idea of good type to read." Historian G. Willem Ovink has described late nineteenth-century Didone types as "the most lifeless, regular types ever seen". Stanley Morison of the printing equipment company Monotype , a leading supporter of the revival of "old-style" and transitional typefaces, wrote in 1937 of

2747-512: The market of slab serifs was disrupted by the arrival of new "geometric" slab-serifs inspired by the sans-serifs of the period, such as Beton and Memphis . However, a revival of interest did appear after the war both in America and Europe: Vivian Ridler commented that "What seemed pestiferous thirty years ago is now regarded as rugged, virile and essential for an advertising agency's self-respect." A variety of Clarendon revivals have been made since

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2814-406: The middle of the nineteenth century, although some "old style" faces continued to be sold and new ones developed by typefounders. From around the 1840s onwards, interest began to develop among artisanal printers in the typefaces of the past. Many historians of printing have been critical of the later Didone faces popular in general-purpose printing of the nineteenth century, especially following

2881-487: The nineteenth century. The category was known in the period of its greatest popularity as modern or modern face , in contrast to "old-style" or "old-face" designs, which date to the Renaissance period. Didone types were developed by printers including Firmin Didot , Giambattista Bodoni and Justus Erich Walbaum , whose eponymous typefaces, Bodoni , Didot , and Walbaum , remain in use today. Their goals were to create more elegant designs of printed text, developing

2948-504: The nineteenth-century model because it "had to feel like the news." Among popular faces in modern use, the typeface family Century is inspired by later American Didone designs, although compared to many in the Didone genre it has quite a low level of stroke contrast, suitably for its purpose of high legibility in body text. Typefaces of the period have often been revived since for cold type and digital composition, while modern typefaces along

3015-455: The old "Puffing Billy" , now so carefully preserved in the Patent Museum at South Kensington . One influential example in the late nineteenth century was William Morris 's Kelmscott Press, which commissioned new custom fonts such as his Golden Type on medieval and early Renaissance models. Many fine press printers imitated his model, and while some printers such as Stanley Morison in

3082-422: The one hand, a hard, an irregular and unfinished letter; and on the other, a graceful, symmetrical and highly finished letter ... there is some indication that this absurdity, like all fashions that have their birth in bad taste, is happily passing away, and the modern letter is again asserting its superiority. It has always been the case in the arts that, after periods of extravaganza and bizzarerie , there has been

3149-417: The original design, often adapting the design to different widths and weights. The original Clarendon design, a quite condensed design, did not feature an italic , and many early Clarendon designs, such as wood type headline faces, have capitals only with no lower-case letters, leaving many options for individual adaptation. The original Clarendon became the property of Stephenson Blake in 1906, who marketed

3216-424: 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. The effective use of digital Didone typefaces poses unique challenges. While they can look very elegant due to their regular, rational design and fine strokes, a known effect on readers

3283-606: The printer Thomas Curson Hansard had described them as 'typographic monstrosities'. Nonetheless, somewhat toned-down derivatives of this style persisted in popular use throughout the nineteenth century, and are commonly associated with 'wild west' printing on posters. They ultimately became part of the Clarendon genre of slab-serif typefaces, and these later designs are often called French Clarendon designs. Period specimen books: Nicolete Gray Nicolete Gray (sometimes Nicolette Gray ) (20 July 1911–8 June 1997)

3350-471: The printing of Greek (the Didot family were among the first to set up a printing press in the newly independent country ). It also is often seen in mathematics, as the open-source standard mathematical typesetting programmes TeX and LaTeX use the Computer Modern family as default. The system's creator, Donald Knuth , deliberately created the system with the intention of producing an effect inspired by

3417-420: The reaction of the twentieth century against Victorian styles of art and design. Nicolete Gray has described later Didone typefaces as depressing and unpleasant to read: "the first modern faces designed around 1800 and 1810 are charming; neat, rational and witty. But from that time onwards nineteenth-century book types grow more and more depressing; the serifs grow longer, the ascenders and descenders grow longer,

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3484-540: The same lines include Filosofia and the open-source Computer Modern . Some later Didone families have focused on subgenres of the period, such as Surveyor , inspired by labels on maps. Fat face typefaces remained popular for display use in the mid-twentieth century with new designs such as Monotype's Falstaff and Morris Fuller Benton 's Ultra Bodoni; Matthew Carter 's Elephant is a more recent version. In print, Didone fonts are often used on high-gloss magazine paper for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar , on which

3551-486: The same pattern. An early example of the distaste some printers had for the modern type style was French printer Louis Perrin, who would eventually commission some new typeface designs on a traditional model. He wrote in 1855 (tr. James Mosley ): You ask me what kind of whim leads me to revive types of the sixteen century today.... I often have to reprint old poetry [from the sixteenth century] and this task invariably makes me oddly uneasy. I cannot recognise in my proofs

3618-466: The sixteenth century or relatively similar, conservative designs. ) These trends were also accompanied by changes to page layout conventions and the abolition of the long s . Typefounder Talbot Baines Reed , speaking in 1890 called the new style of the early nineteenth century "trim, sleek, gentlemanly, somewhat dazzling". Their designs were popular, aided by the striking quality of Bodoni's printing, and were widely imitated. In Britain and America,

3685-407: The style were popular for uses such as film posters in the 1950s and 60s. A variety of adaptations have been made of the style, Robert Harling 's Playbill and more recently Adrian Frutiger 's Westside, URW++ 's Zirkus and Bitstream's P. T. Barnum. A radically different approach has been that of Trilby by David Jonathan Ross, who has written on the history of the genre. Released by Font Bureau , it

3752-608: The term slab-serif, providing individual descriptions of the features of specific designs. Craw Clarendon Bold was used by the United States National Park Service on traffic signs , but has been replaced by NPS Rawlinson Roadway . A heavy bold Clarendon variant was used for the cast brass locomotive nameplates of the Great Western Railway . This was however drawn within the Swindon drawing office , not by

3819-451: The thick and the thin strokes", unlike some other more geometric slab serifs. Slab serif typefaces had become popular in British lettering and printing over the previous thirty-five years before the original Clarendon's release, both for display use on signage, architectural lettering and posters and for emphasis within a block of text. The Clarendon design was immediately very popular and

3886-425: The twentieth century found his work excessive, it was heavily imitated. Talbot Baines Reed in 1890, shortly before his company cast type for Morris, commented on a desire among typefounders to move back to earlier models: "types appeared leaning this way and that, flowery and stringy, skeleton and fat, round and square ... until it became almost a merit that the original shape was barely recognisable. I am not describing

3953-525: The twentieth century, particularly in the 1950s. The label "Ionic", originally also used for display faces, has become associated with typefaces with some Clarendon/slab-serif features but intended for body text, following the success of several faces with this name from first Miller & Richard (intended to be slightly bolder than contemporary expectations for body text proportions) and then Linotype (its 1922 release Ionic No. 5 , extremely successful in newspaper printing). Millington notes that "Ionic became

4020-402: The verses … our present day punches, which are so precise, so correct, so regularly aligned, so mathematically symmetrical ... no doubt have their merits, but I should prefer to see them kept for printing reports on the railway. A revival of interest in the old styles of letter in Britain around 1870 was, however, criticised by master signpainter James Callingham in his contemporary textbook on

4087-547: The work of John Baskerville in Birmingham and Fournier in France towards a more extreme, precise design with intense precision and contrast, that could show off the increasingly refined printing and paper-making technologies of the period. (Lettering along these lines was already popular with calligraphers and copperplate engravers, but much printing in western Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century used typefaces designed in

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4154-401: Was a British scholar of art and lettering . She was the youngest daughter of the poet, dramatist and art scholar Laurence Binyon and his wife, writer, editor and translator Cicely Margaret Pryor Powell. In 1933, she married Basil Gray (1904–1989), with whom she had five children, two sons and three daughters, including Camilla Gray . She attended St Delilah's School where she won

4221-445: Was created by inverting the contrast of these designs, making the thin strokes thick and the thick strokes thin. The result was a slab serif design because of the serifs becoming thick. (In the 19th century, these designs were called Italian because of their exotic appearance, but this name is problematic since the designs have no clear connection with Italy; they do slightly resemble capitalis rustica Roman writing, but this may be

4288-545: Was featured heavily in President Barack Obama 's 2012 campaign website advertisements. Besley* from Indestructible Type is an open-source revival with variable font versions. In the late nineteenth century the basic Clarendon face was radically altered by foundries in the United States , resulting in the production of the 'French Clarendon' type style, which had enlarged block serifs at top and bottom. This style

4355-551: Was limited separation between the name of typefaces and genres; if a font proved popular it would often be pirated and reissued by other foundries under the same name.) Compared to Figgins' "antique", the Clarendon design uses somewhat less emphatic serifs, which are bracketed rather than solid blocks, that widen as they reach the main stroke of the letter. Besley's design was not the first font with this style by at least three years, as typefaces labelled "Ionic" had already appeared in this style (other typefaces would copy this name), but

4422-487: Was rapidly copied by other foundries to become in effect an entire genre of type design. Clarendon fonts proved extremely popular in many parts of the world, in particular for display applications such as posters printed with wood type . They are therefore commonly associated with wanted posters and the American Old West . A revival of interest took place in the post-war period: Jonathan Hoefler comments that "some of

4489-419: Was to act as a bold face within body text, providing a stronger emphasis than the italic type that had been used for centuries for this purpose, and in this it matches the quite condensed body text faces of the period. (The modern system of issuing typefaces in families with a companion bold of matched design did not develop until the twentieth century.) Slab serifs had already begun to be used for bold type by

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