Display typeface

A number of common genres of display typeface.

A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text.^[1]

Display typefaces will often have more eccentric and variable designs than the simple, relatively restrained typefaces generally used for body text.^[2][3][4][5] They may take inspiration from other genres of lettering, such as handpainted signs, calligraphy or an aesthetic appropriate to their use, perhaps ornamented, exotic, abstracted or drawn in the style of a different writing system.^[6][7][8] Several genres of font are particularly associated with display setting, such as slab serif, script font, reverse-contrast and to a lesser extent sans serif, although all of these may also used at small print sizes.^[9][10]

Historical background

For the first centuries of printing, display type did not exist, with printing principally used for body text, with occasional larger titles and ornamented letters. Large size-typefaces were first used for purposes such as book titles and then developed as printing began to be used for posters and signs. Historian James Mosley has written that “big types had been cast in sand, using wooden patterns, for some centuries [by 1750] but there is evidence that English typefounders only began to make big letters for posters and other commercial printing towards 1770, when Thomas Cottrell made his 'Proscription or Posting letter of great bulk and dimension' and William Caslon II cast his 'Patagonian' or 'Proscription letters’.”^[11] The arrival of the poster spurred new designs of printed letter, such as sans-serifs (already used in custom lettering but effectively unused in printing before the 1830s), “fat face” Didone typefaces, and slab serifs, as well as the pre-existing blackletter styles already used both in printing and in signpainting.^[12][13][14] Many nineteenth-century display typefaces were extremely, aggressively bold and condensed in order to attract attention.^[15][16] Equally, some display typefaces such as Cochin and Koch-Antiqua have a particularly delicate build with a low x-height, and this style was very popular around the start of the twentieth century.^[17]

With phototypesetting and digital printing methods allowing fonts to be printed at any size, it has become possible to use fonts in situations where before hand-lettering would be most common, such as on business logos and metal fabricated lettering. Many modern digital typeface families such as Neutraface, Neue Haas Grotesk, and Arno include both text styles and display companion optical sizes with a more delicate design.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Styles of display typeface

Common genres of display typeface include:

• lettering with a design intended to seem hand-drawn, such as script fonts or designs with swashes^[22]
• “shadowed”, “engraved”, “inline” or “handtooled” lettering, with a blank space in the centre intended to suggest three-dimensional letters in relief. An early genre of display type, inline sans-serifs were very popular in lettering of the inter-war period.^[23] "Shaded" or hatched designs have also been made which appear grey when viewed at a distance.^[24]
• unusual or abstract redesigns of the alphabet, such as those drawn by the Bauhaus school of design and Milton Glaser’s Baby Teeth
• “distressed” lettering, intended to seem damaged or distorted, such as Shatter or Electric Circus^[25]
• Ultra-light or ultra-bold adaptations of conventional letterforms, such as "fat face" types, Cooper Black or Gill Kayo
• Mixed case lettering that mixes upper- and lower-case letters in unexpected ways for an unconventional effect
• Reverse-contrast typefaces that invert the contrast of conventional writing, with the horizontals made thicker than the verticals.^[26][27]
• Lettering made to suggest an aesthetic, such as modernism, the natural world, or another genre of lettering. Examples of the latter include use of stencil or embossing tape fonts to suggest an industrial aesthetic.
• “mimicry” or “simulation” typefaces intended to suggest another writing system. These are often used by restaurants.^[28][29]

A more prosaic genre of display typefaces is those intended for signage, such as Johnston, Highway Gothic, Transport and Clearview. These often have adaptations to increase legibility and make letters more distinct from each other. For example, Johnston and Transport have a curl on the lower-case ‘L’ to distinguish it from an upper-case ‘i'.^[30]

Note that these genres may also be seen in custom lettering, with which this topic overlaps. Older examples of lettering are often custom-drawn, rather than fonts.^[31][32][33]

References