Sans-serif - WikiHQ

thumb|class=skin-invert-image|Sans-serif typeface

thumb|class=skin-invert-image|Serif typeface

thumb|class=skin-invert-image|Serifs<br>(coloured in red)

thumb|class=skin-invert-image|From left to right: a [[Ming (typefaces)|Ming serif typeface with serifs in red, a Ming serif typeface and an East Asian gothic sans-serif typeface]]

In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: , , , , and .

Sans-serif typefaces have become the most prevalent for display of text on computer screens. On lower-resolution digital displays, fine details like serifs may disappear or appear too large. The term comes from the French word , meaning "without" and "serif" of uncertain origin, possibly from the Dutch word meaning "line" or pen-stroke. In printed media, they are more commonly used for display use and less for body text.

Before the term "sans-serif" became standard in English typography, a number of other terms had been used. One of these terms for sans-serif was "grotesque", often used in Europe, and "gothic", which is still used in East Asian typography and sometimes seen in typeface names like News Gothic, Highway Gothic, Franklin Gothic or Trade Gothic.

Sans-serif typefaces are sometimes, especially in older documents, used as a device for emphasis, due to their typically blacker type color.

==Classification<span class="anchor" id="Classification"></span>==

For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into three or four major groups, the fourth being the result of splitting the grotesque category into grotesque and neo-grotesque.

Grotesque typefaces have limited variation of stroke width (often none perceptible in capitals). The terminals of curves are usually horizontal, and many have a spurred "G" and an "R" with a curled leg. Capitals tend to be of relatively uniform width. Cap height and ascender height are generally the same to produce a more regular effect in texts such as titles with many capital letters, and descenders are often short for tighter line spacing.

Examples of grotesque typefaces include Akzidenz-Grotesk, Venus, News Gothic, Franklin Gothic, IBM Plex and Monotype Grotesque. Akzidenz Grotesk Old Face, Knockout, Grotesque No. 9 and Monotype Grotesque are examples of digital fonts that retain more of the eccentricities of some of the early sans-serif types.

According to Monotype, the term "grotesque" originates from , meaning "belonging to the cave" due to their simple geometric appearance. The term arose because of adverse comparisons that were drawn with the more ornate Didone and Roman typefaces that were the norm at the time.

Neo-grotesque

thumb|right|[[Helvetica, originally released by Haas Type Foundry (as Neue Haas Grotesk) in 1957. A typical neo-grotesque.]]

Neo-grotesque designs appeared in the mid-twentieth century as an evolution of grotesque types. They are relatively straightforward in appearance with limited stroke width variation. Similar to grotesque typefaces, neo-grotesques often feature capitals of uniform width and a quite 'folded-up' design, in which strokes (for example on the 'c') are curved all the way round to end on a perfect horizontal or vertical. Helvetica is an example of this. Unlike earlier grotesque designs, many were issued in large families from the time of release.

Neo-grotesque type began in the 1950s with the emergence of the International Typographic Style, or Swiss style. Its members looked at the clear lines of Akzidenz-Grotesk (1898) as an inspiration for designs with a neutral appearance and an even colour on the page. In 1957 the release of Helvetica, Univers, and Folio, the first typefaces categorized as neo-grotesque, had a strong impact internationally: Helvetica came to be the most used typeface for the following decades.

Geometric

thumb|right|[[Futura (typeface)|Futura, originally released by Bauer Type Foundry in 1927. A typical geometric sans-serif]]

Geometric sans-serif typefaces are based on geometric shapes, like near-perfect circles and squares. Common features are a nearly-circular capital 'O', sharp and pointed uppercase 'N' vertices, and a "single-storey" lowercase letter 'a'. The 'M' is often splayed and the capitals of varying width, following the classical model.

The geometric sans originated in Germany in the 1920s. Two early efforts in designing geometric types were made by Herbert Bayer and Jakob Erbar, who worked respectively on Universal Typeface (unreleased at the time but revived digitally as Architype Bayer) and Erbar (). In 1927 Futura, by Paul Renner, was released to great acclaim and popularity.

Geometric sans-serif typefaces were popular from the 1920s and 1930s due to their clean, modern design, and many new geometric designs and revivals have been developed since.

Developing popularity

thumb|An inscription at the neoclassical [[grotto at Stourhead in the west of England dated to around 1748 (replica shown), one of the first to use sans-serif letterforms since the classical period]]

thumb|An early 1810 "neoclassical" use of sans-serif capitals to represent antiquity, by [[William Gell]]

Towards the end of the eighteenth century neoclassicism led to architects increasingly incorporating ancient Greek and Roman designs in contemporary structures. Historian James Mosley, the leading expert on early revival of sans-serif letters, has found that architect John Soane commonly used sans-serif letters on his drawings and architectural designs. Soane's inspiration was apparently the inscriptions dedicating the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy, with minimal serifs.

These were then copied by other artists, and in London sans-serif capitals became popular for advertising, apparently because of the "astonishing" effect the unusual style had on the public. The lettering style apparently became referred to as "old Roman" or "Egyptian" characters, referencing the classical past and a contemporary interest in Ancient Egypt and its blocky, geometric architecture.

Mosley writes that "in 1805 Egyptian letters were happening in the streets of London, being plastered over shops and on walls by signwriters, and they were astonishing the public, who had never seen letters like them and were not sure they wanted to". However, the style did not become used in printing for some more years. (Early sans-serif signage was not printed from type but hand-painted or carved, since at the time it was not possible to print in large sizes. This makes tracing the descent of sans-serif styles hard, since a trend can arrive in the dated, printed record from a signpainting tradition which has left less of a record or at least no dates.)

The inappropriateness of the name was not lost on the poet Robert Southey, in his satirical Letters from England written in the character of a Spanish aristocrat. It commented: "The very shopboards must be... painted in Egyptian letters, which, as the Egyptians had no letters, you will doubtless conceive must be curious. They are simply the common characters, deprived of all beauty and all proportion by having all the strokes of equal thickness, so that those which should be thin look as if they had the elephantiasis." Similarly, the painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary on 13 September 1805 of seeing a memorial engraved "in what is called Egyptian Characters".

Around 1816, the Ordnance Survey began to use 'Egyptian' lettering, monoline sans-serif capitals, to mark ancient Roman sites. This lettering was printed from copper plate engraving. Although it is known from its appearances in the firm's specimen books, no uses of it from the period have been found; Mosley speculates that it may have been commissioned by a specific client.

A second hiatus in interest in sans-serif appears to have lasted for about twelve years, until Vincent Figgins' foundry of London issued a new sans-serif in 1828. Thereafter sans-serif capitals rapidly began to be issued from London typefounders.

Much imitated was the Thorowgood "grotesque" face of the early 1830s. This was arrestingly bold and highly condensed, quite unlike the classical proportions of Caslon's design, but very suitable for poster typography and similar in aesthetic effect to the (generally wider) slab serif and "fat faces" of the period. It also added a lower-case. The term "grotesque" comes from the Italian word for cave, and was often used to describe Roman decorative styles found by excavation, but had long become applied in the modern sense for objects that appeared "malformed or monstrous". The term "grotesque" became commonly used to describe sans-serifs.

Similar condensed sans-serif display typefaces, often capitals-only, became very successful. Sans-serif printing types began to appear thereafter in France and Germany.

A few theories about early sans-serifs now known to be incorrect may be mentioned here. One is that sans-serifs are based on either "fat face typefaces" or slab-serifs with the serifs removed. It is now known that the inspiration was more classical antiquity, and sans-serifs appeared before the first dated appearance of slab-serif letterforms in 1810. Mosley describes this as "thoroughly discredited";

Sans-serif lettering and typefaces were popular due to their clarity and legibility at distance in advertising and display use, when printed very large or small. Because sans-serif type was often used for headings and commercial printing, many early sans-serif designs did not feature lower-case letters. Simple sans-serif capitals, without use of lower-case, became very common in uses such as tombstones of the Victorian period in Britain.

The first use of sans-serif as a running text has been proposed to be the short booklet Feste des Lebens und der Kunst: eine Betrachtung des Theaters als höchsten Kultursymbols (Celebration of Life and Art: A Consideration of the Theater as the Highest Symbol of a Culture),]]

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sans-serif types were viewed with suspicion by many printers, especially those of fine book printing, as being fit only for advertisements (if that), and to this day most books remain printed in serif typefaces as body text. This impression would not have been helped by the standard of common sans-serif types of the period, many of which now seem somewhat lumpy and eccentrically shaped. In 1922, master printer Daniel Berkeley Updike described sans-serif typefaces as having "no place in any artistically respectable composing-room." In 1937 he stated that he saw no need to change this opinion in general, though he felt that Gill Sans and Futura were the best choices if sans-serifs had to be used.

Through the early twentieth century, an increase in popularity of sans-serif typefaces took place as more artistic sans-serif designs were released. While he disliked sans-serif typefaces in general, the American printer J. L. Frazier wrote of Copperplate Gothic in 1925 that "a certain dignity of effect accompanies... due to the absence of anything in the way of frills", making it a popular choice for the stationery of professionals such as lawyers and doctors. As Updike's comments suggest, the new, more constructed humanist and geometric sans-serif designs were viewed as increasingly respectable, and were shrewdly marketed in Europe and America as embodying classic proportions (with influences of Roman capitals) while presenting a spare, modern image.

Futura in particular was extensively marketed by Bauer and its American distribution arm by brochure as capturing the spirit of modernity, using the German slogan "die Schrift unserer Zeit" ("the typeface of our time") and in English "the typeface of today and tomorrow"; many typefaces were released under its influence as direct clones, or at least offered with alternate characters allowing them to imitate it if desired.

Grotesque sans-serif revival and the International Typographic Style

thumb|A 1969 poster exemplifying the trend of the 1950s and 1960s: solid red colour, simplified images and the use of a grotesque face. This design, by Robert Geisser, appears to use Helvetica.

In the post-war period, an increase of interest took place in "grotesque" sans-serifs. Writing in The Typography of Press Advertisement (1956), printer Kenneth Day commented that Stephenson Blake's eccentric Grotesque series had returned to popularity for having "a personality sometimes lacking in the condensed forms of the contemporary sans cuttings of the last thirty years." Leading type designer Adrian Frutiger wrote in 1961 on designing a new face, Univers, on the nineteenth-century model: "Some of these old sans-serifs have had a real renaissance within the last twenty years, once the reaction of the 'New Objectivity' had been overcome. A purely geometrical form of type is unsustainable."

Of this period in Britain, Mosley has commented that in 1960 "orders unexpectedly revived" for Monotype's eccentric Monotype Grotesque design: "[it] represents, even more evocatively than Univers, the fresh revolutionary breeze that began to blow through typography in the early sixties" and "its rather clumsy design seems to have been one of the chief attractions to iconoclastic designers tired of the... prettiness of Gill Sans". The style of design using asymmetric layouts, Helvetica and a grid layout extensively has been called the Swiss or International Typographic Style.

Other names

thumb|Three sans-serif "[[italic type|italics". News Gothic has an oblique. Gothic Italic no. 124, an 1890s grotesque, has a true italic resembling Didone serifs of the period. Seravek, a modern humanist typeface, has a more organic italic which is less folded-up.]]

Early

"Egyptian": The name of Caslon's first general-purpose sans-serif printing type; also documented as being used by Joseph Farington to describe seeing the sans-serif inscription on John Flaxman's memorial to Isaac Hawkins Brown in 1805, though today the term is commonly used to refer to slab serif, not sans-serif.
"Antique": Particularly popular in France; and from the extended adjective term of "Germany", which was the place where sans-serif typefaces became popular in the 19th to 20th centuries. Early adopters for the term includes Miller & Richard (1863), and (1865).  In China, Japan and Korea, East Asian gothic typefaces are a type style characterized by strokes of even thickness and lack of decorations, thus akin to sans-serif styles in Western type design.

Recents

"Lineale", or "linear": The term was defined by Maximilien Vox in the VOX-ATypI classification to describe sans-serif types. Later, in British Standards Classification of Typefaces (BS 2961:1967), lineale replaced sans-serif as classification name.
"Simplices": In Jean Alessandrini's (preliminary designations), the term (plain typefaces) is used to describe sans-serif on the basis that the name 'lineal' refers to lines, whereas, in reality, all typefaces are made of lines, including those that are not lineals.
"Swiss": It is used as a synonym to sans-serif, as opposed to "roman" (serif). The OpenDocument format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) and Rich Text Format can use it to specify the sans-serif generic typeface ("font family") name for the font files used in a document. Presumably refers to the popularity of sans-serif grotesque and neo-grotesque types in Switzerland.
"Industrial": Used to refer to grotesque and neo-grotesque sans-serifs that are not based on "artistic" principles, as humanist, geometric and decorative designs normally are.

Gallery

File:Old Bridge Marker on Quay Road, West Looe (geograph 6945617 by T Jenkinson).jpg|Simple carving, Cornwall, 1689

File:Irish national balloon and parachute jump in 1848 (cropped).jpg|Dublin 1848, caps-only heading with crossed V-form 'W'

File:GoodSenseCorsetWaists1886page153.gif|Corset advertisement using multiple grotesque typefaces, United States, 1886

File:Nationaler Frauendienst.JPG|Light sans-serif being used for text, Germany, 1914

File:Patriotischer Landes-Hilfsverein vom Roten Kreuze - Laibach 1916.jpg|Small art-nouveau flourishes on 'v' and 'w'. Ljubljana, 1916.

File:Time (Ireland) Act 1916.jpg|Italic, Dublin, 1916

File:3-2 Sammlung Eybl (Slg.Nr. 2268) Plakat 4. Kriegsanleihe 1916.jpg|Nearly monoline and stroke-modulated sans; Austrian war bond poster, 1916

File:Sátori Lipót Odette 1918.jpg|Broad block capitals. Hungarian film poster, 1918.

File:1920 poster 12000 Jewish soldiers KIA for the fatherland.jpg|Monoline sans-serif with art-nouveau influenced tilted 'e' and 'a'. Embedded umlaut at top left for tighter linespacing.

File:Affiche CM Font-Romeu Roux.jpg|Art Deco thick block inline sans-serif capitals, inner details kept very thin. France, 1920s.

File:Votation Kursaals 1928.jpg|Berthold Block, a thick German sans-serif with shortened descenders, allowing tight linespacing. Switzerland, 1928.

File:Cartazlamp.jpg|Artistic sans-serif keeping curves to a minimum (the line 'O Governo do Estado'), Brazil, 1930

File:Imperial Airway Switzerland Poster (19471597542).jpg|Lightly modulated sans-serif lettering on a 1930s poster, pointed stroke endings suggesting a brush

File:Airace.jpg|Geometric sans-serif capitals, with sharp points on 'A' and 'N'. Australia, 1934.

File:Metrolite and Metroblack.jpg|Dwiggins' Metrolite and Metroblack typefaces, geometric types of the style popular in the 1930s

File:Posters and art processes LCCN98507145.jpg|Stencilled lettering apparently based on Futura Black, 1937

File:"Cancer Danger Signals" - NARA - 514028.jpg|A 1940s American poster. The curve of the 'r' is a common feature in grotesque typefaces, but the 'single-storey' 'a' is a classic feature of geometric typefaces from the 1920s onwards.

File:1952 Jersey holiday events brochure.jpg|1952 Jersey holiday events brochure, using the popular Gill Sans-led British style of the period

File:Hans Michel 1964, Nr.1, Die Teuflischen.jpg|Swiss-style poster using Helvetica, 1964. Tight spacing characteristic of the period.

File:KAS-Berlin-Bild-33085-2.jpg|Ultra-condensed industrial sans-serif in the style of the 1960s; Berlin, 1966

File:Initiative armement 1972.jpg|Neo-grotesque type, Switzerland, 1972: Helvetica or a close copy. Irregular baseline may be due to using transfers.

File:Wenn die Hoffnung stirbt Filmplakat.jpg|Tightly spaced ITC Avant Garde; 1976

File:Veterans Day Poster 1980.jpg|Governmental poster using Univers, 1980

File:Pamphlet; The medical consequences of nuclear war Wellcome L0075369.jpg|Anti-nuclear poster, 1982

File:9. AUFF.jpg|1997 film festival poster, Ankara

File:14. AUFF.jpg|Distorted sans-serif in the "grunge typography" style, Ankara, 2002

File:Alan Kitching on Press at The Guardian.jpg|Letterpress poster by Alan Kitching, 2015

File:Segment of Ribbons sculpture feat. Lucy Moore.jpg|Segment of Ribbons by Pippa Hale using sans-serif

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Explanatory notes

References

External links

The sanserif: the search for examples (lecture by James Mosley)
The true source of the sans (lecture to ATypI by Jon Melton)
The Sans Serif in France: The Early Years (1834–44) (lecture by )
Panorama: A of 19th century poster type (presentation by Pierre Pané-Farré to Ésad Amiens)
Grotesque: The Birth of The Modern Sans Serif in The Types of The Nineteenth Century (Lecture at Cooper Union by Sara Soskolne)