From the course: Choosing and Using Web Fonts

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Identifying a Venetian font

Identifying a Venetian font

From the course: Choosing and Using Web Fonts

Start my 1-month free trial

Identifying a Venetian font

Nicolas Jenson's fonts are what we'd call humanist or Venetian fonts. Humanist fonts have forms that were created by the human hand. Today we have a Web font available called Adobe Jenson Pro. Let's take a closer look at it. Immediately noticeable is how much smaller Jenson Pro's x-height is compared to Georgia's. We can also see that Adobe Jenson Pro looks more like it was written with pen and ink. Look at Jenson Pro's lowercase b; look at where the bowl meets the stem. We can imagine a pen being pulled up out of the stem then around the bowl, creating this ribboning effect, and where the pen meets up with the stem again, it would create this pool of ink. Now compare it to Georgia's b, where the wide stroke in the bowl is more uniform, and there's a carefully designed spur at the bottom of the stem. Jenson feels more inky and handwritten. You can see the same ribboning in the c, and here in the e. The e is a dead giveaway for a Venetian font. It has a rising crossbar; this is a…

Contents