Typography · Sans-serif classes
Humanist sans
Pen-derived proportions: Gill Sans, Frutiger, Myriad.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?
- styles make it
- 14
- as a defining choice
- 4
- as a usual one
- 4
- now and then
- 6
- avoid it
- 0
Styles defined by it 4
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
- London Transport DesignThe design programme Frank Pick built for London's Underground from 1908 and the London Passenger Transport Board (1933–40), continued by Harold Hutchison (1947–66).
Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)The cover system of Penguin Books, London, from 1935 until Germano Facetti left in 1972.
Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type DesignA twenty-first-century type culture that redraws Arabic as a family matched to a Latin companion in weight, proportion and contrast, so the two scripts can share a page, screen or sign as equals.
- Frutiger AeroThe glossy, optimistic look of consumer technology from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, retrospectively named in 2017 by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute after Windows Vista's Aero interface and Adrian Frutiger's humanist sans.
Styles that often use it 4
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Scandinavian FunctionalismNordic functionalism (funkis) arrived in graphic form with Sigurd Lewerentz's posters and winged emblem for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition.
ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist GraphicsThe graphics of New York's AIDS activist movement: the SILENCE=DEATH poster of 1987, a pink triangle above white capitals on black, and the posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards and bus ads of Gran Fury (1988–1995), ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry'.
Flat DesignAn interface and illustration language that stripped screens of simulated materials, replacing bevels, gloss and textures with solid fields of colour, clean sans-serif type and reduced pictograms.
Plain Tobacco PackagingA packaging language written into law to strip tobacco of persuasion.
Styles that use it now and then 6
An occasional choice in these styles.
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Rational & objectivein 11 of 14
- Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 12 of 14
- Measured densityin 10 of 14
- Straight photographyin 10 of 14
- Authoritative & institutionalin 10 of 14
- Icons & pictogramsin 8 of 14
Other choices in typography
- Humanist & Garalde serif
- Transitional serif
- Didone
- Slab serif
- Grotesque & neo-grotesque
- Geometric sans
- Rounded sans
- Blackletter
- Script
- Brush & pen calligraphy
- Hand-lettering
- Ornamented display
- Condensed display
- Stencil
- Monospace
- Bitmap & pixel
- Experimental & distorted
- All caps
- Lowercase only
- Type as image
- Flush left, ragged right
- Rotated & vertical setting
- Eclectic mixing
- Tight setting
- Wide letterspacing