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What is so special about a type face? How does a type face affect the visual impact, ‘presentability’ and readability? Look around and have a closer look at the printed materials we have. Or browse through today’s news paper. You will be surprised to see the plurality (a large indefinite number) of type faces used for news articles as well as advertisements. In this issue of Renaissance, we will see how type face works.
Font or Type Face?
Font and Type Face are two words inadvertently used to denote one and the same. Historically, there was only Font. The word Font came from the Middle French word ‘fonte’, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed)" and referring to letters of a typeface produced by casting molten metal at a type foundry. Later on as the popularity increased there were more and more fonts added with differences in their appearance. There is no specific information on why and when fonts are being called Type Face. The dictionary explains both Font and Type Face as the following: “A specific size and style of type within a type family”.
History of Fonts
The history of fonts dates back to Neolithic age (around 10,000 BC), where the man’s journey out of the unknown and the thirst for knowledge paved way to pictorial expression of his knowledge, which was later called ‘Logograms’. There were
well developed writing systems in China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and some other countries. Between 1400 -1000 BC, type face got phenomenal facelift with the Phoenicians forming 22 letters alphabet and later with the Greek’s addition of the 5 vowels (a. e. i, o, u).
The Middle Ages (fourth to fifteenth centuries) was a time of extensive writing and design. The carriers of written characters and text were clay, stone,wood, silk, papyrus, and then parchment. The invention of duplicable printing first in China, then in Korea with movable metal type, and finally Gutenberg’s invention of letterpress replaced the hitherto handwritten texts which required rewriting in order to be passed on.
 While at first old types were simply molded in lead for the new technology, new typefaces soon developed which have retained their formal elegance and character as model typefaces to this day. Some of the most prominent type face designers of those times are Claude Garamond (1480–1561), Nicolas Jenson (1420–1480) and Aldus Manutius (1459–1515).
Today with the advent of digital technology, fontography, or the art of making types, plays important role in the study of layout and graphic design.
Classification of fonts
There are around 11 distinct styles for entire type face family. Discussing all of those 11 classifications is out of the scope of this article. So we will discuss only the very basic classification. Those are Serif fonts and Sans Serif fonts. The best example for a Serif font is Times New Roman and for Sans Serif the example is Arial or Helvetica. Let us look how different they are. See Figure 2. Serif is the term used to describe the short line at the end of the main strokes of a character. So the small curve at the ends of each letter is what we call the ‘Serif”. Have a closer look at the font type Arial. You will find that the curves at the ends are missing in this type face. That is why we call it Sans Serif fonts. The Old French word ‘Sans’ means ‘without’. Thus ‘Sans Serif’ means ‘Without Serif’
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