Sketch of parts of letters showing different serif parts and design styles.

Hail the serif

Bruno Maag
6 min readDec 30, 2021

Swiss typography has a few things to answer for, one of them is that since the 1960s serif type has been regarded as the dusty and poor relative that is best kept in the closet. Swiss typography has also raised a couple of generations of graphic designers in a blinkered, almost religious, belief that only sans serif type can do the job, and more specifically the neo-grotesques. This follows the teachings that the ornaments must not be used, and that only grid structures and geometry can come close to that unattainable perfection. I, too, can find beauty in some well-crafted designs that are based on this theory that lauds function over form but struggle when this becomes the dogma for the vast majority of design output.

I would like to take a moment and discuss serif typefaces which come in all sizes and shapes, not unlike humans, with each style having an expression and function. To understand all this one also has to understand some of the history of the evolution of type Armed with this understanding we can confidently apply serif typefaces into a contemporary context, both in print and in digital environments.

Serif typefaces broadly speaking come in four basic genres: old style (renaissance antiqua), transitional (baroque antiqua), modern (classicistic antiqua) and slab serif. Some of them also have subcategories but that is an entire essay all by itself. This chronological classification indicates somewhat the stylistic features of the typefaces but as designs from the mid-20th century onwards started to mix up different features this chronological classification can only be used as a broad descriptor.

A sample of Roman inscription lettering in stone viewed on the left from a sideways angle, and perpendicular on the right. The lettering is in all capitals as at that time lowercases were not invented yet.
A Roman inscription showing Capitalis Monumentalis, the Imperial style lettering. The left is viewed from an angle to give a bit more definition to some of the characters as the light strikes. Note the varying width proportions with round characters quite generous, and straight and diagonal ones much tighter. The serifs are quite beautiful. The lettering artist of the time clearly knew their business: the letters are well formed and proportioned, and the spacing is even.
Image by Bruno Maag

Serifs first appeared over 2,000 years ago in Roman inscriptions. There is a great debate as to why the serif is there in the first place: is it an ornamental device or does it need to be there to facilitate the stone carver to create a clean stroke termination? I don’t have the answer for that, and I don’t really mind either way. I think they look great and give us ample opportunity to create emotional expressions.

In the earliest days of printing with moveable type Blackletter was the dominant style. Serifs appeared from around 1460 south of the Alps in the publications of people such as Aldus Manutius and Nicholas Jensen with type designs based on round hand calligraphy with a broad nibbed pen. The nature of the pen very much dictates the structure of the serif and the contrast of the strokes in a letter, producing an overall sturdy type that could withstand the abuse of relatively poor paper and ink quality, and the letterpress process. Round hand calligraphy flourished during the Renaissance and hence renaissance antiqua as an alternative name for old style. Within about 100 years this type style proliferated across all of Europe, and today typefaces such as Garamond, Caslon and Plantin are well known and used.

A print sample of a type from the Renaissance period showing setting in different sizes with a good mixture of capitals and lowercases to illustrate the design features of this type style
A snapshot of the frontispiece of a publication by Pietro Perna of 1578. The capitals in this typeface are modelled after the Roman capitals, and very nicely show the influence of the broad nibbed pen with the stress of the curve being in the lower left and upper right. Overall, the type is a Garalde style design, signified by the high sitting horizontal e-crossbar and the slightly asymmetric vertical serif on ‘T’.
Image by Bruno Maag

In the early 18th century Baroque emerged as a new art expression, replacing the somewhat austere forms of the Renaissance with opulent shapes and superfluous elements; in its extreme it is Rococo which I find fabulous and much underrated. Better understanding of structural engineering and building materials allowed Baroque to manifest in architecture. Printing technologies improved dramatically, alongside paper and ink quality, facilitating a new type, the transitional — or baroque antiqua. Still loosely based on the principles of the broad nibbed pen, influences of the pointed pen can already be detected. Overall, strokes tend to be more filigrane, and typefaces have an airy and flighty appearance. Rumours have it that when John Baskerville first introduced his type readers, who were used to seeing the sturdy old styles, exclaimed that reading this new fangled typography would make you blind! How marvellous.

A print sample of the Baskerville type with the first line in Italics and subsequent lines in Roman type. The setting is in Latin giving a good overview of different characters and their features.
A nice sample of Baskerville type. Note how the stress of the curves in some letters has become vertical while others still have a slight angle to them as in the sample above. Also, the cap width proportions are no longer as varied as in the Roman capitals. Contrast between thick and thin strokes is higher and serifs are less chunky. Image by Michele Patanè

Baroque was relatively short lived, and toward the end of the 18th century Classicism entered artistic expression. An austerity of form returned, as if in reaction against the excesses of Baroque, with antique Greek art and architecture as models. Once more technologies across industries improved and this allowed for the modern style of type to emerge. The type structures are rooted in the pointed nib pen providing fine lines and when pressure on the nib is applied strokes swell. This results in very high contrasted strong verticals and thin horizontals, and curves that don’t have the rigidity of the previous broad nib pen but appear more fluid. Bodoni is probably the best known typeface of this type but Walbaum, Didot and Fournier all emerged around the same time. For me, a particularly fine example is the Romaine du Roi by Grandjean, with its slightly eccentric double serifs, and the peculiar spur on the ‘l’.

A printing sample of this typeface in French language with an illustration of the construction of the lowercase ‘b’, showing the high contrast of vertical to horizontal strokes.
Romaine du Roi, the sample taken from the book ‘Printing Types’ (see below). This type style now has all rounds on a vertical stress and generally capitals have even width proportions. As can be seen on the right, the stroke contrast is very high, and serifs are very thin. The Romaine du Roi is also very unique in having a double sided serif at ascender level. Other types in this style are Bodoni, Walbaum, Didot.

With the industrial revolution beginning in the early part of the 19th century demands of commerce and capitalism demanded advertising, and with advertising came a demand for a wider diversity of type styles. The slab serif was born, with all its glorious variations that we know so well from Spaghetti Western wanted posters. Structurally, slab serifs are based on the construction of the modern style typefaces, except that all the thin lines are made heavier to give the appearance of a monolinear design. The best known examples are Rockwell and Clarendon, and if you don’t get excited by a black weight of a slab serif I cannot help you.

A synopsis of capital, lowerase, numbers and punctuation characters in two different sizes for Clarendon Bold. This is a typeface with heavy strokes and relatively little contrast between stroke variations.
Clarendon (Bold) is a typical slab serif of the mid-19th Century. These design style derive from the high contrast modern (Classicistic) designs in their structure by expanding the thin strokes to a visually similar thickness of the bold ones. This style very much evokes the industrialist spirit of the time. Slab serifs are also sometimes referred to as ‘Egyptienne’, the name deriving from the fashion that was all things Egypt at the time.
Image by James Puckett under the Creative Commons license.

From the beginning of the 20th century type designers and font foundries started with subtle hybridisation of serif styles, either because of a specific artistic fancy or because of necessity to fit the typeface onto the mechanical typesetting devices, such as the Linotype and Monotype type casters. The real modernisation of serif happened with the Apple Macintosh, when designers were freed of mechanical constraints, and in many instances adherence to stylistic features were thrown to the wind. In the last 30 years designers have created many wonderful and contemporary serif fonts.

The argument against using serif fonts is that UI and other digital environments need sans serifs to work well. This argument may have been true 25 years ago when screen resolutions were 72 or 96 dpi, and displays were black and white only. For the last 10 years screen technology has improved dramatically and today the average smartphone will have at least 200 dpi resolution using sub-pixel or other advanced rendering systems. Serif typefaces today display perfectly well in those environments but again, one has to look at a reputable and knowledgeable foundry to make fonts that ensure the technical accessibility of fonts. All it takes is to have an open mind to serif typefaces, and enjoy looking through printed or digital specimens from many talented type designers.

No more excuses. Hail the serif.

More ‘hail the serif’ is to come to dispel some of the myths around legibility.

The ‘Printing Types’ by Daniel Berkeley Updike is a detailed and entertaining account of typographic history across Europe from Gutenberg to William Morris.

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Bruno Maag

Bruno Maag is an expert typographer with over forty years of expertise in his field. He founded Dalton Maag Ltd, the world’s leading studio for typeface design.