To Sans Or Not Sans...
Serifs or Sans Serifs? We have all learned when to use certain fonts. How to use them, and most importantly where. As I take look around in magazines, logos, Kendall College of Art and Design, it seems like more designer are using sans serif fonts. Why are do you think they are doing this. It just a trend? Dose it look better that serifs. Does it look better for the time? Are serifs old fashion and maybe out of date. 100 years ago you would be lucky to find any san serif on a storefront. Look closely at your own work do you use more sans serif or more serif fonts. Do think one looks better than the other? Or maybe I’m full of shit and nothing has changed?
posted by Anonymous @ 2:19 PM
3 Comments:
Good point, indeed. This is a trend that began a few years ago, in part as a backlash to the overdesign experienced in the 1990s resulting from excessive Photoshop.
Emigre magazine 64 (2003), entitled, “Rant,” began the discussion of “design by default.” In his review of the issue, Dmitri Siegel wrote:
“Perhaps the outrage over so-called ‘default design’ is merely the latest installment in this intergenerational soap opera. Yet default design is an informed reaction to changes in the technology of typesetting and the focus of typographers. The latest version of Adobe InDesign (coincidentally advertised in the back of Rant) can hang quotes and optically adjust margins with some finesse. These tricks of the trade – once benchmarks of typographic refinement – are becoming defaults themselves. Many young designers are wary of directing their efforts toward these fussy formal details. They have seen that type of purely visual exploration yield dissatisfying or inconsequential results for a generation of designers.”
For further reading on “default design:”
HELVETICA
NEUTRAL
And the opposing voice to this trend? Emigre’s own Zuzana Licko designed Mrs Eaves, one of the most popular serifs fonts in decades. And Denise Gonzalez Crisp, designer and professor at NC State, keeps track of the reemergence of decoration and ornament in graphic design: DECORATIONAL
Personally, I'll stick with Modernism.
Andrew brings up two great words to remember:
Jan Tschichold
And Mr Albers was correct: we read words by form, not by letters. Another reason serif fonts are best for lots of reading (as Travis points out in text books, newspapers, and Lucky magazine...) -- the spaces around the characters are more open and unique.
Long live "Die neue Typographie!"
A brief history of sans serif type (source, Emigre.com):
The first known specimen of sans serif type appeared in 1816, in England. It was called "egyptian" - not "sans serif," as we would refer to it today. Subsequent sans serif types issued by English foundries were called "grotesque." Similarly in Germany, early sans serif types were known as "grotesk." In America, serifless types came to be known widely but confusingly as "gothic." It was a poor choice of words for the American typographic lexicon, since the term also means "blackletter" - often dubbed "Old English" in the vernacular. (News Gothic and Franklin Gothic, two sans serif staples of the American newspaper industry for the better part of the last hundred years, are far from being Teutonic in origin. They could surely never be mistaken for the printing types Gutenberg used.)
Grotesque (sans serif) types have a checkered past. They are among both the most imaginative and the most imitative faces cut for either text or display typography. Unlike the first roman types, which were made specifically for book printing, grotesque faces were made for use in advertising. Judging from old type specimen books, the range of deviation from prior typographic forms was greater than the range of outright mimicry. It is important to remember that in the first part of the 19th century, grotesques constituted a new category of types: a veritable frontier for adventurous type designers. It was a field day for the peddlers of printed publicity. Referring to, and often copying, the early successful models was common practice, but there was still plenty of ground for new ideas to be tried.
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