Roaring Typography
1920
saw a dramatic change within typography. The Constructivist movement took hold with the goal of creating a new technological society. The movement promoted a scientific language of design with power and speed quickly becoming the themes of the newly found machine age. Shapes were streamlined and simplified curved letter forms were replaced with angular, sleek ones.
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
Typographic designers eschewed serifs and created new type-faces which according to Herbert Bayer, “reflected the notion of beauty in utility.� These new fonts were highly legible and especially served the commercial world.
Ernst Keller. das neue heim (the new home) - 1928
Empire Type Foundry Catalog #18 - 1923
It’s
amazing that the simple idea of dropping serifs at the ends of strokes didn't occur to many of the great typographers who experimented with their shapes and sizes so much. In part, it is due to the inertia of scribes' tradition who, with their quills, simply could not produce a reasonably clean cut of a stroke. Undoubtedly, old typographers also knew the fact that was later confirmed by experiments..
Serifs help the eye stick to the line and thus facilitate reading.
“ The biggest part of the serif persistence was, of course, due to
� plain habit
“Grot When the first examples of sans serif fonts finally appeared, they seemed so controversial that the first name given to them was "grotesque," and they were very rarely used except in advertising.
Grotesque, or Grotesk in German, is a style of sans-serif typeface from the 19th century. The name was coined by William Thorowgood, the first person to produce a sans-serif type with lower case, in 1832. Capital-only faces of this style were first available from 1816, made by William Caslon IV of the Caslon foundry under the name 2 Line English Egyptian.
otesque�