Let us begin with an Old Style Serif. You probably have no clue who this guy is. His name is Nicholas Jenson or Nicholas probably it would be the right name because he was French. He studied in Germany and then came to Venice and invented a book as we know it. Now, as you probably know, the book printing was invented in Germany by Guttenberg, but Guttenberg's books looked like this. They were printed in Gothic, well, handwriting essentially, script. Now, this guy was trying to be rational. He was trying to produce a book with a much more modern look. And in order to do this, he took a handwriting script from the ninth century A.D. a Carolingian script. And he combined it with, Romans, of course, had no lowercase while Carolingian script had no uppercase. And he put them together and came up with books as we know them. The first typeface is called Luminari. And this is a rather [honest attempts to replicate that Carolingian handwriting from the ninth century. The second is called Adobe Jenson, which once again, is a rather honest attempt to replicate Jenson's method type. And the first letter is just a typical Roman D. And if you put them together, if you overlay them, you will see that they are almost the same. This is essentially the same script. So this is what Jenson's book looked like, as opposed to Gutenberg's, very fresh, very modern. And this is more or less how books look like to this day and age. And they were printed in something called, Old-Style Serif. Perhaps the most popular, Old-Style Serif typeface is called Garamond after a French typesetter. Very popular design, lots of variations. The second possibility is Palatino, which was executed by a German Calligrapher called Hermann Zapf. The third one is called Centaur. It is on all the previous typefaces exist both on your Macs and Windows machines. Centaur is another take on Jetson's type style. Then there's American Goudy, American Hoefler and a type that is called Cormorant which is free and to which is available in amazing 45 styles. And I encourage you at least to try some of this just to feel how it looks like on a page. We've not use those kinds of types very frequently, and I think they deserve better, they deserve more. Next. If you look at. The old style humanist type face really closely, you will see that it is very crude, it is rough,because of the technology of the time. If you try and put a perfect triangle inside that later A you will see that the letter itself is not perfect at all. So guess what happens next? People with rulers come. Like for example Fra Luca Pacioli and other people like Leonardo for example, they were in search of perfect proportions and [INAUDIBLE] also and they tried to find perfect proportions for typefaces. And then they were failed as far as I'm concerned. But they optimized the typefaces. They streamlined the design, they made it much more rational, I would say. Much more emotional, much less emotional, much less warm but much more geometric. If you look at the first letter a, you will see that it is essentially a handwritten letter. The second one, not so much, it's a Baroque typeface, still classified as old style. But then a tectonic shift, if you will, happens. The second letter is transitional and it is clearly not handwritten. I don't know if you can see that with a letter A, let me show you the letter B. 200- 300 years between those two letters, you can see the progress. The serifs become much more accentuated. And the old style typefaces were a product of that handwriting era, and they carried a lot of that inheritance, a lot of that baggage. They were trying to look like handwritten fonts. Transitional fonts do not care anymore. All they care is efficiency, effectiveness. They are just trying to be a letter e without any sort of artificial baggage from the past. As a result, you have a type face which is much less emotional. Much more rational and this is the choice that you have. So transitional serif is associated with Industrial Revolution. With newspapers, mass-produced, books, very efficient very effective. Please do not use Times New Roman, this is a perfect font in and of itself It was produced by the newspaper Times. But it just suffers from gross reuse and should I say misuse. If you want a perfect metric replacement, Tinos is a good choice. But if you're not looking for a seamless Transition, you might want to go for Georgia or Century Schoolbook. PT Serif is a very nice Russian design. Minion is probably the most popular font for book printing. Perpetua is a well executed type face produced by British calligrapher Who we will mention further on his name is Aaron Gill. And there are a lot of transitional typefaces which look so much better than Times New Roman. Play with them make your own choice, thank you.
