The typeface was designed in 2009 by Hannes von Döhren of HVD Fonts and kerning was done by Igino Marini of IKern. The grotesque font style has seen an uptick in popularity over the past few years and designers are coming up with new ways of interpreting this older sans serif style.īrandon Grotesque is a good example of a font style that is more grotesque than neo-grotesque. Akzidenz-Grotesque really paved the way for the neo-grotesque and was an inspiration for the more modern sans serifs. Akzidenz-Grotesk is thought to have been designed from the moderns Walbaum and Didot, however, without the ornate accoutrements. These characteristics are also used as ways to detect grotesque style fonts in general.Ī beautiful example of an early sans serif is Akzidenz-Grotesk also from the Berthold Foundry.
Berthold went on to produce many popular grotesques and these designs became a template for later grotesques, neo-grotesques and sans serifs in general. It was one of the first type specimens from the famous Berthold type foundry in Berlin. Famous GrotesquesĪn early grotesque was Ideal Grotesk. The Seven Line Grotesque was used exclusively for headlines and titles, while body text was still typeset using classic roman serif type. The type style was named "Seven Line Grotesque" and marks when the word grotesque was adopted for the early sans serif. William Thorowgood designed a heavy-weight sans serif soon after in 1832. These early sans serifs were used quite often in newspaper headlines, posters and brochures of the time. The foundry went on to develop the Caslon typeface which had a variety of weights including bold and slender. Basically, they were the punk to the serif as disco. They were called 'grotesque' because they were seen as quite ugly and obnoxious compared to their more ornate predecessors - the Modern Serifs and Roman type styles. Up until that time, it had been used to describe slab serifs only but with the arrival of the grotesque, it was used for this font style as well.įrom today's perspective, it may be surprising to know that these sans serifs were considered pretty renegade for their time. The font featured capitals only and was called "Two Lines English Egyptian." At this time there was an emphasis on marketing type styles, and 'Egyptian' was used to describe new and unusual fonts. The development of the grotesque font style really began with a later Caslon, William Caslon IV. His type foundry developed the first sans serif printing type and this Latin alphabet debuted in the 1816 Caslon specimen book. Valentin Haüy, the founder of the school, developed a tactile book system along with a typeface called the Haüy System, which was essentially an early sans serif. In 1785, another sans serif was developed for a school for blind children. The first sans serif was cut in 1748 by the foundry of William Caslon for the Oxford University Press and an academic work on Etruscan culture. Grotesques are not the first sans serifs, but the first to be popularized and to use lowercase letters with a Latin alphabet. Grotesques are usually geometric in design with simple letter forms and fairly even stroke weights and they are also often bolder and can be used as display type. These early sans serifs had less polish and more quirkiness than their more clinical and sleek contemporary counterparts, the Neo-Grotesques (think Helvetica). Grotesques have a slightly crude appearance and a lot of visual character.
You can recognize a grotesque in a few ways. Sans serifs from this time period and the following few decades are called grotesque and also sometimes Grotesk or Gothic. More specifically, grotesque refers to the set of sans serif fonts produced around 1815. From a broad view, grotesque is used as a synonym for sans serif fonts in general. What is a grotesque? Well, the definition of a grotesque is a bit nuanced.
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