{"id":51695,"date":"2019-06-17T15:57:07","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T22:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/?p=51695"},"modified":"2024-04-18T05:20:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-18T12:20:02","slug":"old-style-roman-typeface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/old-style-roman-typeface","title":{"rendered":"The Return of the Old Style Roman Typeface"},"content":{"rendered":"

While human beings have been creating letters and symbols since ancient times, modern typography truly soared after the popularization of the printing press in Europe. To understand where Old Style fonts come from, and how they became popular in the first place, let’s revisit the earliest chapters in the history of typography.\n

<\/span>Leaving Blackletter Behind<\/span><\/h2>

\nThe year was 1440:<\/a> Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg had left his home city of Mainz and started experimenting with printing from a small workshop in Strasbourg, France. Hundreds of years earlier the Chinese<\/a> had developed moveable type as a technology, but Gutenberg took it one step further with lead types and a special box of letter blocks called a type case<\/a>.\nDetermined to perfect his process, Gutenberg moved back to Germany and printed his famous Forty-two-Line Bible<\/a>. By 1500<\/a>, printing presses had spread aggressively through Western Europe, producing more than twenty million book copies.\n\"\"Gutenberg Bible, Lenox copy in the New York Public Library. CC BY-SA 2.0.<\/a><\/q>\nBeing German, the early European printers leaned on the Blackletter<\/a> style that was popular in their country at the time. The Germanic Gothic<\/a> or Blackletter style is heavier, angular, and constructed with a broad nib.\n

<\/figure>\n \nAs you can imagine, as these presses arrived in countries like Italy and France, printers started to design type that fit their own aesthetic preferences. That’s how Humanist, and later Old Style fonts, emerged.\n<\/p>

<\/span>From Humanist to Old Style<\/span><\/h2>

\nBy the time the printing press reached (modern-day) Italy, a cultural movement called humanism<\/a> was becoming popular. After centuries of prohibition, censorship, and war, Venice was leaving the Middle Ages by bringing back traditional Roman culture and values. Human achievements and independence took center stage again.\nPart of that humanism involved celebrating the handwriting style traditionally found in Roman statues and monuments. There was only one problem: that style was all uppercase, therefore illegible when it came to long texts. Those characters are also known as Imperial Roman capitals or Capitalis Monumentalis<\/em><\/a>.\n

<\/figure>\n \nFortunately, humanists started repurposing the uppercase letterforms by adding lowercase letters, reviving a 9th-century style known as Carolingian<\/a> or Caroline minuscule.\nEnter Nicolas Jenson, credited<\/a> by many as the creator of the first true Roman font. Jenson, a medalist by trade, had opened a workshop in Venice after learning about printing in Germany.\n\"\"Eusebius, Evangelica. Jenson, Venice, 1470. Via Tom Nealon, Hilobrow<\/a><\/q>\nThese serifed letterforms became the baseline for type design. While the earliest forms preserved a distinctively humanist character, serif typefaces would become more geometric and proportional over time.\nToday, we classify serif fonts based on unique features that evolved from that original Humanist style. Over time, type designers have created Old Style, Transitional, Modern, and Slab Serifs. Old Style type families were part of the first wave of refinement, and we’ll look at some of their defining features next.\n<\/p>

<\/span>Old Style Fonts: Main Features<\/span><\/h2>

\nBefore Old Style fonts, Humanist (also known as Venetian<\/em>) typefaces mimicked handwriting. Letters were fluid and looked a lot like a scribe<\/a> or author had written them by hand. In contrast, Old Style (also known as Garalde<\/em>) fonts departed from this style, looking cleaner and slightly more geometric. Rather than look like a person wrote them, Old Style fonts were created to appear more refined and mechanically made.\n

<\/figure>\n \nOld Style fonts were a slight move towards symmetry and away from the organic and handcrafted.\n
<\/figure>\n \nToday, type designers are still invested in this style and continue to create fonts inspired by it. While these new renditions were obviously not created in 15th century Europe, if they are patterned to match these traits, they are still considered as Old Style fonts:\n<\/p>