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 he first half of 20th century is the end of the Modern era,
the moment when revived typefaces were flooding the typography
mainstream. But it was also the time when a completely different
font design was booming, called sans serif (which is French for
"without serifs"). It wasn't an absolutely new idea at that time,
since first sans serif faces had appeared in the beginning of 19th
century; but never before this seemingly peripheral and exotic trend
claimed so much importance as in 1920s and 30s.
Actually, it is amazing that the simple idea of dropping
serifs at the ends of strokes didn't occur to the great many
typographers who experimented with their shapes and
sizes so much. In part, it is due to the inertia of scribes' tradition
who, with their quills, simply could not produce a reasonably clean cut
of a stroke. Undoubtedly, old typographers also knew the fact that
was later confirmed by experiments: Serifs help the eye to stick to the
line and thus facilitate reading.
But the biggest part of the serif persistence was, of course, due to
plain habit. When the first examples of sans serif fonts finally
appeared, they seemed so controversial that the first name given to them
was "grotesque," and they were very rarely used except in
advertising. And so it remained until the newest trends in art and
industrial design, most notably the German Bauhaus movement of 1920s
(influenced by earlier Russian constructivism), required adequate means
of typographic expression. These movements stressed utilitarian
aspects in design, claiming that a thing becomes beautiful only
when---and because---it serves a practical purpose, denying any
attempts to artificially "adorn" it.
The most influential type design of that epoch, the Futura font
created in Germany in 1928, displayed the core of the Bauhaus ideology:
strictly geometric outline, lacking any embellishments and just barely
conforming to the historical shapes of letters. The resulting
blend of geometric consistency and aesthetic awkwardness may be
disputable, but it was at least something quite new, and therefore
impressive, at that time. Now we're much more accustomed to the
look of Futura (and its many derivatives), but the inborn radicalism of
the font still shows through.
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| | Fig. 5:
Futura In The Past, or A Triumph of Geometry: developed by Paul
Renner in 1928, this font may be called the starting point of sans serif
history in our century |
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As any other radical movement, the "new sans serif" typography of the
1920s couldn't do without auguring an imminent death of all serif fonts
whatsoever. This didn't happen, of course. Moreover, Futura
itself didn't manage to become so neutral and familiar in the mass
perception as to become a standard sans serif font for all
occasions. (Instead, this position was taken by Helvetica, a
typical "no-nonsense," "no-big-deal" font that became ubiquitous almost
to the point of being misused and nauseating.) However, it cannot
be denied that Futura played an important role in sans serif becoming a
mainstream type style, an accepted contrasting pair for the time-proven
serif fonts.
Of course, sans serif proliferation was also due to the higher demand
for display typefaces in all media, the demand which is much more severe
than at any time in the past. The most natural use of a sans serif
font is still for display purposes (ads, titles, logos, labels of all
sorts), although it can be successfully used for body text as well.
It is interesting to note that the development of sans serif
typefaces in this century went in a direction opposite to that of the
serif type development of previous centuries. Indeed, we've seen
how serif faces have gone from arty and liberal Old Style, through
neutral Transitional design, to the rigid, mannered Modern
typefaces. Conversely, sans serif fonts started from Futura with
its artificial look, then were for a long time dominated by neutral
"transitional" Helvetica, and recently a number of distinctively liberal
(and, in some classifications, even termed "humanist") sans serif faces
became popular. Thus, the 20th century process of sans serif
humanization is a negation, a mirror image, a contrasting
parallel for the earlier process of serif dehumanization in
15th-19th centuries---just as sans serif itself is a contrasting match
for serif.
So what are the features of humanist sans serif faces? One of the
first such designs was Frutiger (a.k.a. Freeset, developed in 1976); at
first sight similar to Helvetica, this font reveals to a careful
investigation some "anti-geometric" features, such as uneven width of
strokes (especially in bold variants), non-perpendicular cuts, and
slightly bent off tips of strokes (e.g. the bottom of the vertical
stroke in "d"). All these subtleties were intended to smooth out
the too harsh edges of the generic sans serif design and improve
legibility of characters, and their net result is a relatively warm and
friendly-looking typeface---especially if we compare it to the apathetic
Helvetica or phrenetic Futura.
The trends that were hinted at in Frutiger were later fully developed
in a family of fonts now extremely popular both on the Web and in print
design. The original typeface of this family, called Meta, was
developed in 1984 by German designer Erik Spiekermann. In Meta and
its offsprings, strokes have slightly varying width (the creator's goal
was that in small sizes, thinner strokes should not "drop out" but, on
the contrary, become undistinguishable from the thicker ones) and, in
compensation for the missing serifs, vigorously bent-off tips of
vertical strokes in letters like "d" or "n." Both uppercase and
lowercase characters are narrower than in most other sans serif fonts
(i.e. letters are inscribed into rectangles, not squares). Perhaps
here we have an example showing how far can we go in "humanizing" sans
serifs and borrowing serif-specific features, while remaining within the
sans serif paradigm.
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| | Fig. 6:
Officina Sans is another Meta-like font designed by Spiekermann |
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Interestingly, the problems that the designer tried to resolve with the
new typeface were purely practical---Spiekermann's goal was to create an
economic font readable in a wide variety of sizes and conditions.
Here's what the designer himself writes in his article:
Meta has been hailed as "the typeface for the nineties"; young
designers seem to appreciate its rugged charm, which owes a lot to the
detailed requirements of small type on bad paper. It was never
designed to be a trendy typeface, rather it was designed to solve
specific problems. Maybe it is that honest, unpretentious
background which appeals to graphic designers and typographers around
the world.
Here's a truly enlightening comparison: Note how the two approaches
to a "purely utilitarian" font design, differing only by the fact that
one was rather theoretic and the other driven by practical needs,
resulted in two fonts as different as Futura and Meta.
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