dot-font: Not Your Father’s Sans Serif

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

The rule of thumb says that serif typefaces are easier to read than sans-serif typefaces, especially in running text. This isn’t bad as rules of thumb go—might help you narrow down the choice of typefaces when designing a book—but it’s only a rough guide, not an ironclad rule. And it’s often wrong.

In recent years, a whole slew of new sans-serif typefaces have appeared, many of them based on the same Renaissance handwriting as some of our classic serif text faces. Although they’ve been designed by many different people, and each typeface is different, they’re sometimes grouped together under the name “humanist sans serifs.” Sometimes this name is just a catch-all for anything without serifs that looks vaguely comfy and readable—as opposed to angular, mechanical, or geometric—but at heart it describes typefaces based on the humanist handwriting of 15th-century Italy, the manuscript hand that preceded our earliest roman (and italic) types.

Despite the growing number of humanist sans serifs out there, they haven’t gotten a lot of attention as a class. And type users still tend to think that all sans serifs are either funky 19th-century grotesques (that’s the origin of Helvetica, though it’s been spruced up and had its quirky bits smoothed down) or strictly geometrical ruler-and-compass constructions (the classic example is Futura—or, later and more exuberantly, Avant Garde).

Four different styles of sans serif type (from left to right): a grotesque (HTF Knockout), a geometric (ITC Avant Garde), and two kinds of humanist sans serifs (Optima and Syntax)

Edward Johnston and Eric Gill

The tradition of humanist sans-serifs isn’t very old. It could be said to begin with Edward Johnston’s “block letter” for the London Underground, which was introduced in the early 20th century. Johnston’s inspiration was certainly calligraphic, but his typeface was designed for signage, and his capitals are based squarely on the ancient Roman letters carved into Trajan’s column.

More clearly humanist in form would be Eric Gill’s eponymous Gill Sans, which is very similar to the Johnston letter in the roman (Gill had worked with Johnston) but also has a real italic. As many book designers since the 1920s have demonstrated, Gill Sans, if it’s used carefully, can be a remarkably readable text face. (Today, in digital form, it has to be set a bit looser than the default letter-spacing in the digital fonts, in order to look the way it was intended to look.) The letters in Gill Sans are based on the letterforms of traditional roman and italic typefaces; but they have no serifs, and they are, generally, made up of strokes that all have the same thickness (or appear to).

Eric Gill’s popular Gill Sans is a combination of humanist and geometric letter forms

There is no reason why a sans-serif letter has to be monoline—that is, have only one thickness of stroke—but most of them are. It’s part of the cult of simplification and streamlining that inspired radical designers early in the 20th century to take up sans serif as the “modern” letter form, the letter for the Machine Age. And there’s undeniable power in that monoline form. It’s unfussy, forthright, and simple; it holds the space in a way that few serif letters do. Even today, most humanist sans-serif typefaces show very little variation in the thickness of their strokes.

Optima and Syntax

Hermann Zapf’s Optima, which he created in the 1950s, is often called a humanist sans serif, even though it’s based not on handwriting but on the lettering carved into the floor of the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Optima is most certainly “humanist” in its spirit, and its letter forms are traditional text forms. Optima is famous for being a not-quite-sans; although it has no serifs, its strokes are subtly modulated, so that the ends of apparently straight strokes are slightly wider than the middle of the same strokes. (We often see this curvature exaggerated, today, in signage that uses Optima. The common signage typeface seems to be a version of Optima that was developed for early photo-typesetting systems, which would fill in the corners and make the stroke ends look round if the curves weren’t increased to compensate. This compensation was done for text sizes, and for a typesetting technology that is now obsolete, but we’re stuck with the same exaggerated letterforms on cheaply done signs all over the world.)

Hermann Zapf’s Optima has no serifs, but its strokes are subtly curved and the underlying letter forms are traditional

The first truly, deliberately humanist sans-serif typeface may have been Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax (released in 1968), which takes the letter forms of old-style serif faces such as Bembo or Garamond and translates them into an elegant monoline text face. There’s a beauty to Syntax that makes you want to use it for text. I’ve seen it work especially well in conjunction with Sabon (a serif text face with similar forms), where the main text was in Sabon and ancillary material such as captions were in Syntax.

Hans Eduard Meier’s original Syntax is a sans serif typeface modeled on the letterforms of serif text faces

But I’ve always felt that there was something a little static about the elegance of Syntax, something that makes it wonderful for short text or in almost any kind of display use, but that doesn’t quite pull the reader’s eye forward when it’s used in long blocks of text. Fans of that old rule of thumb would say that it’s the lack of serifs that makes this so. (Syntax has just recently been updated and expanded by Meier and Linotype, adding new weights and even a related serif version and an informal “letter” version for correspondence. But it has preserved one quirk of the original: no true italic, just a sloped version of the roman.)

Poised on the Brink

This was the state of play, more or less, before the digital revolution in type. The humanist sans-serif was an exotic animal, encountered only rarely, and not considered part of the mainstream of typographic development. But this has all changed. In my next column I’ll take a look at some of the many humanist sans serifs now on the market, and try to figure out what makes them work.