What's In A Font?

A brief history of the sculpted word

Our lives are covered in typography. With the near-extinction of handwritten text from modern life, nearly every word we read is a typeface — a particular design handcrafted and often hand carved by humans. But why is text designed the way it is? Why don’t iMessages look like Renaissance manuscripts? And why are we stuck with Arial and Times New Roman? Through some of history’s most influential typefaces, here’s a brief journey through nearly 600 years of typography.

While the story of printed text began in eleventh century China, our Latinate history starts in 1440, when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Seeking to emulate handwritten manuscripts, he created a typeface that closely mimicked contemporary German calligraphy, a style now called Blackletter or Gothic script. You’ll know it if you’ve ever seen The New York Times’ logo or a can of Liquid Death: bold, intricate lettering with sharp, angular lines and dramatic differences in stroke weight. For legibility’s sake, we won’t use the style here. 

Given its glaring impracticality, Blackletter’s reign was short lived. Not only difficult to read, the style is laborious to carve and uses excessive amounts of ink and paper, so printmakers turned to a different calligraphic inspiration, Italian Humanist script, and began to forge the Serif style as it’s known today. Serifs (the decorative little strokes at the end of letter lines) lie at the heart of typography’s development. More than mere ornamental flourishes, they can improve the reading experience by guiding the eye from one character to the next, making them the ideal form for long texts like novels or newspapers such as this one. The manipulation (and eventual omission) of these little lines is fundamental to centuries of typeface history.

We’ll begin with Garamond. Created by engraver Claude Garamond around 1550, it is by no means the first serif type, but is among the oldest typeface families still widely popular today. Garamond is an example of Old Style, characterised by mild contrast between thick and thin strokes, a slight diagonal axis in letters like ‘O’ (though much less than its predecessors), and bracketed serifs (meaning slight curves leading into the serif bars). These typefaces, along with successors like Baskerville, still maintain relevance today, and Garamond itself has been used as the typeface of the Harry Potter books and Abercrombie & Fitch logo. The St Andrews logo uses a similar Old Style typeface in Palatino.

Fast forward two centuries and we arrive at Bodoni. Bodoni is classified as a Modern or Didone typeface — a style with far more stroke contrast, a strictly vertical axis, unbracketed serifs, and ball terminals (rounded stroke ends). It became highly popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and while they’re rarely used for large bodies of text, the style still maintains that popularity today, often associated with elegance. In popular culture, the Bodoni typeface has become immortalised through the iconic capital letters of VOGUE, ZARA, and MAMMA MIA!

This brings us to the bane of every student’s existence: Times New Roman. The typeface’s story began in 1931, when The Times newspaper commissioned designers Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent to create a new body text for their paper — one that was both robust, compact, and easy to read. The result was just that: a narrow, highly legible type that could fit lots of text into their paper’s columns. The typeface became popular in book printing, eventually leading Microsoft to ultimately make it the default font for Word in 1992 — the last nail in the coffin for students everywhere.

Of course, not all fonts have serifs, and most digital text today is sans-serif. Sans-serif text has existed as long as the written word, but was shunned by printers for centuries, denounced as ugly, vulgar, and (most importantly) not what the Romans did. But with the widespread change of the early twentieth century, sans-serif slowly grew legitimate. The modernised, industrial world demanded both innovation and simplicity from its text, manifested through typefaces like Johnston Sans in the London Underground and the austerely geometric Futura, inspired by the Bauhaus movement and now visible in every Wes Anderson movie. These typefaces help legitimize the style, but it wasn’t until 1957 that sans-serif truly took off, when Swiss designer Max Miedinger designed the font you read now: Helvetica. In a time demanding clear, unornamented, modern aesthetics, Helvetica caught the moment. It became the staple font of mid-century advertising everywhere and is still the most popular typeface in the world, seen today through brands like WhatsApp, Jeep, and the New York City subway system.

Helvetica’s success is fundamental to the widespread adoption of similar sans-serif forms today. The all-too-common Arial you are reading now was created to mimic Helvetica, one of many subsequent iterations that bring us to our present moment, along with Microsoft Word’s default Aptos and Apple’s own SF Pro spelling out the apps on your home screen. The style has clear practical benefits: its simplicity suits a pixelated screen, and its strong legibility makes it accessible to all audiences. Whether you’re a fan of such ornamental sterility or not, sans-serif is here to stay.

But there’s one more typeface we’d be remiss to forget, undoubtedly the most infamous typeface of all time. No doubt you’ve recognised it already. Comic Sans was created in 1994 by Microsoft designer Vincent Connare for Microsoft Bob, a software interface designed for children and new internet users which featured a talking dog guiding the user around. Believing the dog’s speech bubbles shouldn’t be in Times New Roman, Connare reportedly created Comic Sans in 3 days, mimicking handwritten text from graphic novels. The font never made it into the programme, and Microsoft Bob was soon discontinued, but Comic Sans couldn’t be killed. It spread through further Microsoft programmes and became iconic in its childish, facetious eccentricity. This has led to frequent controversy over its misuse, from World War II memorials to domestic violence pamphlets to the presentation revealing the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle in 2012. A movement exists to ban the font altogether, with one of its founders declaring that the font is akin to “turning up to a black-tie event in a clown costume”. Nevertheless, Comic Sans is probably not going anywhere either.

There are many more stylistic developments and infinitely more typefaces not covered here, of course, and with so much at our current disposal, it’s easy to view the story of typography as complete. But as long as culture moves forward, so too will the sculpted word. As the Klim Type Foundry writes, “The alphabet is not a problem to be solved by a typeface. It is a concept made concrete through countless written and designed letterforms [...] not defined by a single typeface but expressed through all of them.” We don’t know what the fonts of the future will look like, but they won’t merely be what we’ve seen already.

You might say this is far too much time dedicated to fonts — that no matter what typeface one uses, the text is always the same. But does every font in this article read the same? As Comic Sans has shown us, text is, for better or worse, a deeply aesthetic experience. While the words themselves may not change across fonts, our reception does. James Cameron learned this much when he used Papyrus in Avatar. Text isn’t just transactional. From aesthetics to cultural history, there’s a lot more going on in between the lines.

Photos by Madeleine Rea and Elise Liu