From the course: Choosing and Using Web Fonts

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Identifying an Old Style font

Identifying an Old Style font

From the course: Choosing and Using Web Fonts

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Identifying an Old Style font

From 1530 to 1750, printers all over Europe and in the colonies created fonts we call old style fonts. Old style fonts continued to reference the human hand behind the letters. That is, they continued to have characteristics related to letters written with pen and ink, but the type designers also embraced the materials of printing technology. They moved further away from the calligraphic forms we saw in Venetian fonts, like Jenson. They were inspired by what they could do with metal. Letters became crisper; more refined. If we were to look at fonts from France, Italy, Holland, and England, we'd see each region had their own idiosyncratic forms influenced by aesthetics as much as technology. There is a range of what old style fonts look like, and unfortunately, I can't show you all of them. Today, we're going to look at three different old style fonts, starting with the work of William Caslon, an English type designer who was influenced by Dutch type design. This is a portion of a…

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