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Posted by Andy Dingley on 12/20/06 11:32
Blinky the Shark wrote:
> What's a humanist font?
It's one that doesn't require belief in a theistic mandate as the
source of axiomatic ethical principles, but that's not important right
now.
Early 20th century sans-serif typefaces were on the ugly side. They'd
been developed as a reaction against Victorian curlicues, but hindsight
suggests that they overdid it. Helvetica was one of the early
offenders, leading to the group being named "Grotesque". When Modernism
really got started though we saw typefaces like Futura which rejected
many of the ancient principles of calligraphy in favour of constant
width lines for all strokes. These became known as the "Geometric"
typefaces.
Humanist fonts were an attempt to redress this. They re-introduced
traditional pen calligraphy practices such as basing letter shapes on
an oval rather than a circle and in varying stroke widths around the
bowl of a letter. Shapes and proportions also varied between fonts at
different sizes of the same typeface, a practice that appalled the
Geometric advocates. Gill Sans is one of the best known and most
politically motivated, but not the most representative. Goudy Sans is
perhaps the "classic" Humanist typeface. Lucida is also classed as
Humanist typeface, but not particularly distinctive as such. As Jukka
mentioned, the classic give-away for a Humanist typeface is the
lowercase "g" being composed of a pair of distinct separated ovals
above each other, rather than a circle with a single stroke descender.
If you see this "double bubble" you're probably seeing a Humanist
typeface, although not all of them (e.g. Lucida) use it.
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