Roaring Typography

1920 1921 1922 1923 1924

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.

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.

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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”

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.