Typography

...

Then comes the Modern typeface. This was attributed to Frenchman Firmin Didot in 1784. His types were soon followed by the archetypal Didone from Bodoni. He drew his influence from Giambattista Bodoni, Romains du Roi (with its flat, unbracketed serifs) and the types of John Baskerville. This type which drew influence from so many older type came of as a unique type– like a high and abrupt contrast between thick and thin strokes, also abrupt (unbracketed) hairline (thin) serifs. It has vertical axis with horizontal stress and small aperture.

After this in the early 1800s, the Slab Serif was born in Britain. This type was also known as Egyptian, Square Serif, Mechanical or Mécanes. Though it has absolutely nothing to do with Egyptian Hieroglyph. With the industrial revolution there was a new wave of advertising which required a beefy letter forms that could be found on just about every billboard, pamphlet, and poster of the day; hence comes the Slab Serif. Once such typeface is Fat Face which is based on Didone but with thicker strokes and triangular serifs; more like an obese Didone. It could be said the Didones were parodies of Baskerville‘s types, then the Fat Face types are parodies of parodies.

By the mid-1800s, another sub-set of the Slab Serif class of types began to emerge— the Clarendons. Unlike Fat Face it tried to fit itself as text faces. Hence, contrast was reduced, the serifs thinned somewhat and the height was upped for legibility at those smaller sizes. But today these slab serifs have seen many modern variations like even thinner strokes or rounded edges.

Lastly comes the Sans Serif almost near the 20th century; which had neutral thick and thin strokes and removed the Serifs to create something new. Beside this the graphic and script typeface also came into play which were basically the cursive handwritten types based on actually handwritings. Today they are mainly used as decorative type.

Even now people are trying to come up with new types for better usage. The whole evolution also shows the with time, place and needs the type have evolved. Though we only talked about the English type but the evolution factor remains same for all other type.