Researchįrance was the epicentre of the fashion world in Europe, driving trends and styles for both men and women. Overall, the 1750 – 1850 was a pretty good century for font development, and you have these creative dudes to thank when you’re testing out every single font for your Google doc. It didn’t catch on until the 1830’s when Vincent Figgins brought it into popularity for use as a display font, or jobbing font. Unfortunately, Caslon didn’t really reap all the serif-less benefits of his new invention. What a different world! Would life as we know it exist without Helvetica, Arial, or Courier? Who is to say. Just imagine, for one brief moment, all the major fashion house logo redesigns that would not be possible without this man. William Caslon IV (remember the original William Caslon? This guy is related to him) did something pretty major when he designed the very first sans serif font in 1816. 1803 saw Robert Thorne design the first fat face type, which was followed in 1810 by Vincent Figgins’s Slab serif (or Egyptian) font. Giambattista Bodoni jumped on that achievement and created an inspired font called Didone serif. In the 1780’s Firmin Didot created the first modern typeface: Didot.
To mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first dated printing of a sans-serif typeface, a conference was held at Birmingham City University in September 2016.In Survey 4 we learned about the birth of some of very iconic fonts. In 1987 metal type was cast by Oxford University Press from the original matrices to print a special edition of reprinted type from the early nineteenth century crafted by Ian Mortimer. Howes revival is used for signage at Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Soane.
Several digital revivals of Caslons Egyptian have been made, for commercial use Cyrus Highsmith of Font Bureau adding an invented lower case and for private use by Justin Howes and James Mosley. These should not be confused with Stephenson Blakes unrelated "Grotesque" typefaces of the late nineteenth century.
Sans-serifs returned to printing when Vincent Figgins foundry started to issue a new series of sans-serifs starting around 1828, so the company revived the matrices and matching versions in other sizes of lower quality of execution were cut. The matrices of the Caslon sans-serif were acquired by the Stephenson Blake company when it took over the Salisbury Square Caslon company. Mosley suggests that it may have been created on commission by a specific client. Aside from its documented existence and survival, the reasons behind its creation are not clear, especially since no contemporary uses of it have been found. It appears sandwiched by larger and much more ornate typefaces, apparently not marketed with any prominence. The matrices survive in the collection of the Type Museum, London, with some replacement letters.Ĭaslons Egyptian typeface was shown in the foundrys specimen books, the earliest edition with a date dated 1816 although some possibly earlier. It is somewhat "classical" in style, being capitals-only, formal in design and not particularly bold although still bolder than conventional body text fonts, appearing similar to Soanes lettering. The "Egyptian" typeface was released by the Caslon type foundry of Salisbury Square, London, run by William Caslon IV. "Egyptian" is the only part of its name referring to its design: the first part of its name in specimen books, Two Lines English, is simply the standard name used at the time for its size, around 28 modern points. The term "Egyptian" has since become associated with slab-serif typefaces. The name "Egyptian" had become commonly used in England by 1816 to describe this style of lettering it may originate from the image of sans-serifs being historical in style, the Egyptomania of the period and the "blocky" nature of ancient Egyptian architecture. However, it was some decades before a printing typeface would be released in this style, now commonly used. Historian James Mosley, the leading expert on early sans-serifs, has suggested in his book The Nymph and The Grot that Soanes influence was crucial in spreading the idea of sans-serif letterforms around the end of the eighteenth century. Sans-serif lettering in block capitals had been developing in popularity over the past decades, initially due to interest in classical antiquity in which inscriptions often had minimal or no serifs, and come to be used by architect John Soane and copied by others, particularly in signpainting. The Two Lines English Egyptian typeface is a font created by the Caslon foundry of Salisbury Square, London around or probably slightly before 1816, that is the first general-purpose sans-serif typeface in the Latin alphabet known to have been created.