Today’s Font Friday is about the first sans-serif typefaces in history and in the modern era, from the fascinating site “Graphic Design History.” The site has a vast amount of thoughtfully-organized information. Says site creator Nancy Stock-Allen, M.F.A.:
This site was first put on the web in 1999 as a quick outline of my lectures for my graphic design students. I was trying to find a way to engage the studio designer by subject, rather than timeline.
Stock-Allen succeeds markedly at this. I dare you to spend less than an hour engrossed with this site, once you dive in. (What’s that you say? You’re not a graphic designer? You’re normal? Give it a shot anyway! You might find a new obsession.)
These pages on sans serif type chronicle the use in antiquity, the emergence of the deliberate style in the late 18th century, and the various incarnations of the concept—and the designers that championed them—up to the 1960s. I’m coming back to this site, and I hope you will too!
The “Graphic Design History” site is copyrighted and also protected by Creative Commons licensing, so I’m sending you directly to the pages rather than copy/pasting here.
