The three examples of Rockwell I have chosen are 1. Rockwell is used primarily for display rather than long bodies of text. Rockwell is a versatile font, which can also be used for a range of things from light print design to a very bold type for logo development. There are nine different variations of Rockwell available including italics, different weights and condensed versions. Later smaller versions were made using metal as an alternative to the serif and sans serif fonts at the time. These fonts were very intricate which made them difficult to carve out of wood but were also very common in areas that used wood faces. Early versions were created in the 19 th usually out of wood. Slab serifs are useful for headlining and other designs that require a steady, bold typeface because of their mono-weighted tendencies. Rockwell’s serifs are unbracketed and similar in weight to the horizontal strokes of the letters. Rockwell is an example of a slab serif typeface, which is very similar to Franklin Gothic. In addition to their striking similarities, there was also an early Monotype document that mistook Rockwell for Stymie Bold, which continues to cause confusion after all of these years. It is common that Stymie Bold and Rockwell designs are often confused for one another because they are very similar. In 1934 Frank Hinamn Pierpont teamed up with Monotype Design Studio to construct and release the Rockwell typeface family which included differences in spacing, weighting and subtle changes in glyph formation. Later that year, the font was redrawn by Benton in a heavier style and renamed Stymie Bold. He added several new characters to the original Litho Antique face and named it Rockwell Antique, which was published in 1931. This font was then revived by Morris Fuller Benton of American Type Founders in the 1920’s. Litho Antique and other similar types starting getting popular in Europe in the decade following its creation. Every generation spawned its own blue-ribbon roster of font founders and designers, and the categories expanded to suit another dozen styles that captured the imagination of graphic designers all over the world.Rockwell is a condensed typeface which was modeled after a 1910 font called Litho Antique designed by William Schraubstadter of the Inland Type Foundry. Other very familiar slabs in the Clarendon genre are Century Schoolbook ( Morris Fuller Benton, 1924-35) and Cheltenham, which probably has more iterations than any of the other Clarendon style fonts! This concludes the “official” categorization of type families and geners - but in no way ends the story.Īs the 19th century gave way to the 20th century, the world of fonts and type families exploded. The most famous member of this sub-family is Clarendon, by Robert Besley, named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford, and reworked by the Monotype foundry in 1935. These are often used in newspaper work, because their sturdy serifs hold up well under adverse printing conditions. The Clarendons or Ionics are an offspring of the slab serif typefaces in which the serifs are bracketed. Memphis (Weiss, 1930), Serifa (Adrian Frutiger, 1968) and Silica (Stone, 1990). There are many, many other slab serif faces : ( Trump, 1930), The genre got its name from the Egyptian style slab serif. Adrian Frutiger‘s 1977 Glypha, Herb Lubalin‘s 1974 Lubalin Graph (derived from his Avant Garde). There is some debate about the origin of slab serif typefaces: did they originate by somebody adding serifs to a sans face, or were they conceived independently?īut even if they had a separate genesis as a family, it is certainly the case that many of the most common and popular slab serif forms have been created by adding slab serifs to sans faces by the same designer (e.g. These faces have block-like rectangular serifs, sticking out horizontally or vertically, often the same thickness as the body strokes. Continuing the history of typography we now discover many sans serif type faces and how they became modified with serifs to become the Slab Serif or Egyptian classification with fonts like Rockwell, Clarendon and others.Ĭontinuing from the previous page, Part Five of “A Brief History of Typography”
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