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FontLists are collections of related fonts and families on the FontShop website, curated by the Font Identification and Type Research team (the people that also can help you find the typeface you need by identifying your sample). As the typefaces are hand selected for the FontLists and are continuously updated, certain collections can grow too big and need to be reshuffled. This recently happened with our Sans/serif Companions FontList, and last week I decided to split the main list into three handy collections: Text Faces, Slab Serifs, and Display Type. Time to get reacquainted with these very practical type systems.
FP Dancer is a compact type system consisting of a friendly rounded sans and a low contrast slab serif.
Most typefaces have relatives and belong to a family. A type family is a collection of related typefaces or styles which share common design traits and a common name. We all are familiar with the basic configuration – Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. However many users don’t know that the concept of coordinated type families is a fairly recent phenomenon. Originally italics were designs in their own right. They were space saving designs, unrelated to roman designs and used independently. Only by the sixteenth century did the italic assume its current role as emphasis, a variation on the roman design. The first related bold weights for text faces are even more recent – they date from the second half of the nineteenth century. Just like italics, bold weights can be used for emphasis within the text.
The size of the family is a crucial factor when deciding whether or not to use a certain typeface for a specific purpose. For example the MacOS system font Lucida Grande has no italic nor bold variant, which means you can’t apply any emphasis in text. Often system fonts have only a very limited range of styles, making them prohibitive, especially in publication design where larger families with many options are needed. Adrian Frutiger’s classic Univers was the first ever family of typefaces designed according to a rational system of coordinated weights and widths. Currently there are families that feature up to a staggering 15 weights, and others up to seven different widths. The wide spectrum of styles in large type families can be used to create harmonious designs with many variations, and to unify the structure of headlines in publications.
The Versa type system consists of a Serif and Sans variant, both in regular and Condensed widths.
Larger type families are commonly called super families or type systems. Some of those take it even one step further and offer related designs in different type classifications. Otl Aicher’s Rotis – the first ever co-ordinated type system, consisting of a Sans Serif, a Semi Sans, a Serif and a Semi Serif – was unique in its time, yet nowadays such type systems have become quite common. Members of super families share the same basic structure, the same skeleton if you will, and have matching x-heights and cap heights, ascender and descender lengths, and stroke width. This means you can switch from sans serif to serif to slab serif in a block of text and still retain a unified appearance. Type systems are particularly useful in publication design, corporate identities, annual reports, and so on; where body text has to work harmoniously with headlines, streamers, captions, tables, information graphics, and so on. So go take a look at our offerings in the Sans/Serif Companions FontList.
Read more about type families on The FontFeed.
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