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All in the (type) family
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Type is arranged by families; they are generalized groupings.
Fonts live within type families; they are individual and specific. For example, Arial is a member of the san-serif family. Fonts within the Arial clan include 10 point Arial, 12 point Arial Bold, 8 point Arial italic, and so on.
Some of the more common families are:
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Serif
Serifs are the little "feet" found on the ends of letterforms. The feet are important as they help the eye quickly define letters and words. Serif faces are easier to read. Time proven, in fact, as the Romans chiseled serif typefaces on their buildings! New Century Schoolbook was designed in the United States in the early 20th Century for use in -- you guessed it -- primary school textbooks. Notice the serifs are nearly vertical or horizontal, like building slabs. This type style recalls the Slab Serif or Eqyptian Serif fad in US type design of the 1890-1910 era.
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Sans serif
The art and literary movements of the early 20th Century, particularly those following World War I, brought us san-serif typefaces. As the name implies, the serifs or "feet" are missing, giving us a striped down, unemotional, nihilist typeface that reflected the European angst of that era. Today, san-serif type is everywhere. It's the darling of advertising designers and transportation signage creators.
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Script
Originally designed to put the "human" feeling back into the mechanical world of printing, scripts are both beautiful and evil. They can be easily over-used. And never, ever use all capital letters in a script typeface! Never, OK!
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Decorative
Some type is not meant to be read; well, at least in large text blocks. Decorative faces are pure personality. They are great for headlines, signage and other uses, but please don't set more than a paragraph or two in a decorative typeface.
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Engraved
This family is really a sub-set of decorative type. Often engraved faces are based on classical faces. This beauty is based on the work of John Caxton, the founder of the British printing and typography industry way back in 1602.
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Black Letter (as known as Fraktur)
Once upon a time, printing and type design were wrapped up in the political and economic birth of European nation-states in the 16th-17th centuries. A few examples of these "nationalistic" typefaces remain in Cyrillic (Russian and Slavic languages) and what we now call Black Letter, or Fraktur. Alas, the latter is a beautiful typeface frequently associated with Germany's Nazi era. Also popular in prison tattoos and gothic fairy tales! Use with care! And, again, please don't set words in all capital letters in Black Letter faces.
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Dingbats
(Wing Ding, Sweet Ding, Little Ding, Ding-a-ling -- oh, sorry, not that family....) Dingbats are symbols mascarading as letters. How fun!
The first example is Zapf Dingbats; the second Mini-Pics Lil' People.
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