O is for Old Style

Not talking about a beer label today, but a type classification for fonts like Garamond.

With 26 Days of Type I spent a lot of time talking about grotesques and slab serifs so far, and wanted to make sure I did not overlook the old style serif. Old style serif typefaces are based on designs popular between the 15th and 18th centuries for book printing. Some of these designs include:

• Bembo, a typeface based on 15th century Italian Renaissance printing.
• Garamond, any number of typefaces inspired by or ascribed to French designer and punchcuttter Claude Garamond.
• Janson, typefaces from the Dutch Baroque period.
• Palatino, a 1949 release designed by Hermann Zapf, based on Renaissance Humanist type.
• Sabon, a Garamond revival released in 1967, designed by Jan Tschichold.

Old styles can be characterized by a number of features. They tend to have lower contrast between thick and thin strokes, and usually have a shorter x-height than Transitional or Modern serif fonts. Sometimes the crossbar of the lowercase e is diagonal, as with Adobe Jenson. The axis of the round characters like o leans more sharply toward the left in old style serifs, as opposed to the vertical upright axis of a Modern type like Bodoni. (Transitional typefaces, like Georgia and Times New Roman are somewhere in between.)

With the term old style, I should also mention numbers. Oldstyle figures are one of two styles of numerals, also called non-lining or hanging figures. These numbers have varying heights and alignments, and are similar to lowercase characters, in that they have an x-height and ascenders and descenders. It’s much more common to see lining figures today, which are of uniform height and sit on a baseline. Many contemporary old style typefaces feature both kinds of numbers today.