"Shaded" or hatched designs have also been made which appear grey when viewed at a distance. An early genre of display type, inline sans-serifs were also very popular in lettering of the inter-war period. “Shadowed”, “engraved”, “inline” or “handtooled” lettering, with a blank space in the centre intended to suggest three-dimensional letters in relief.Lettering with a design intended to seem hand-drawn, such as script fonts or designs with swashes.Styles of display typeface Ĭommon genres of display typeface include: Walter Tracy comments that in adapting a text face to display use such as in a headline "a judicious closing-up of the letters" improves the appearance. Many modern digital typeface families such as Neutraface, Neue Haas Grotesk, and Arno include both text styles and display companion optical sizes with a more delicate design. With phototypesetting and digital printing methods allowing fonts to be printed at any size, it has become possible to use fonts in situations where before hand-lettering would be most common, such as on business logos and metal fabricated lettering. Equally, some display typefaces such as Cochin and Koch-Antiqua have a particularly delicate build with a low x-height, and this style was very popular around the start of the twentieth century. An important development that followed was pantograph-engraved wood type, which allowed cheap printing of large type on posters. Many nineteenth-century display typefaces were extremely, aggressively bold or condensed in order to attract attention. At the same time, new designs of letter began to appear around the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as "fat face" typefaces (based on serif faces of the period, but much bolder), slab serifs (first seen from Vincent Figgins around 1817), sans-serifs (already used in custom lettering but effectively unused in printing before the 1830s) and new blackletter faces.
New technologies, notably riveted "sanspareil" matrices made printing at large sizes easier from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Historian James Mosley has written that “big types had been cast in sand, using wooden patterns, for some centuries but there is evidence that English typefounders only began to make big letters for posters and other commercial printing towards 1770, when Thomas Cottrell made his 'Proscription or Posting letter of great bulk and dimension' and William Caslon II cast his 'Patagonian' or 'Proscription letters’.” The arrival of the poster and greater use of signage spurred the arrival of new kinds of letterform, both as lettering and in print. Signs were created as custom handlettering. Typefaces not intended for body text remained rooted in conventional letterforms: roman type, script typeface or blackletter. Printing was used primarily to print body text, although there might be use of some larger-sized letters for titling. įor the first centuries of printing, display type generally did not exist. They are often only uppercase, and have stroke widths optimized for large sizes. Titling fonts are a subset of display typefaces which are typically used for headlines and titles. Walter Tracy defines display typefaces in the metal type sense as "sizes of type over 14 point" and in design that "text types when enlarged can be used for headings, display types, if reduced, cannot be used for text setting."
Several genres of font are particularly associated with display setting, such as slab serif, script font, reverse-contrast and to a lesser extent sans serif.
They may take inspiration from other genres of lettering, such as handpainted signs, calligraphy or an aesthetic appropriate to their use, perhaps ornamented, exotic, abstracted or drawn in the style of a different writing system. ĭisplay typefaces will often have more eccentric and variable designs than the simple, relatively restrained typefaces generally used for body text. A number of common genres of display typefaceĪ display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text.