Design Nomenclature / Type
Slab serif
Also called Egyptian, mécane, square serif
- Type
- 2D
Faces whose serifs are heavy rectangles roughly the weight of the stems, with contrast near nil. Two branches that behave differently: bracketed Clarendons, which are workable text faces, and unbracketed geometrics like Memphis and Rockwell, which are display faces wearing text clothes.
Not to be confused with
- DidoneThe high-contrast romans of around 1800 — Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum. Exactly vertical stress, abrupt and extreme thick-to-thin, unbracketed hairline serifs meeting the stem at a right angle, ball terminals, tight fitting. Cut for smooth paper and precise presses; on anything coarser, or any low-density screen, the hairlines vanish.
- GrotesqueThe nineteenth-century sans serifs — Akzidenz-Grotesk, Franklin Gothic, News Gothic. Slight irregularity between letters, a squarish rather than circular bowl, closed apertures, a spurred G, and a lowercase g that is usually single-storey with an open tail. Warmer and less systematic than what followed.
Origin
Called Egyptian from the 1810s on — Napoleon's Egyptian campaign had made anything Egyptian saleable, and the types have nothing whatever to do with Egypt.