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Typography · Serif classes

Slab serif

Heavy, square serifs: Egyptians, Clarendons, typewriter slabs.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?

styles make it: 24
as a defining choice: 0
as a usual one: 7
now and then: 17
avoid it: 0

Styles that often use it 7

A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.

Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering1800–present · Global / networkedLetters painted by trained sign writers on fascias, windows, walls, vehicles and showcards, from Victorian gold leaf on glass to Mexican rótulos, Indian bazaar boards and Ghanaian barbershop signs.
Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type1810–1900 · Western Europe, North AmericaThe commercial jobbing print of the industrial century: posters, playbills, auction notices and ephemera built from a flood of new display types (fat faces, Egyptians, grotesques, Tuscans and condensed wood type).
Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino)1879–present · Southern EuropeThe Spanish bullfight poster in its illustrated form, from Marcelino de Unceta's lithographs (from 1879) to the Valencian house of Ortega, which supplied rings across Spain.
Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22)1922–1929 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe print side of São Paulo's Modernismo (1922-29), set in jobbing print shops.
Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism1953–1990 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe design of Mexico City's literary and cultural press, shaped from the 1950s by the Barcelona-born exile Vicente Rojo: México en la Cultura, the Revista de la Universidad, Plural, La Jornada and the covers of Ediciones Era.
Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism1956–1967 · North AmericaThe record-sleeve language of Blue Note Records, set by art director Reid Miles, who designed some 350 twelve-inch LP covers between about 1956 and 1967, often around Francis Wolff's session photographs.
Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters)1969–1975 · Latin America & CaribbeanPosters for the Peruvian military government's agrarian reform, made in Lima from 1969 by Jesús Ruiz Durand and colleagues at the state's reform publicity office.

Styles that use it now and then 17

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.

Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 15 of 24
All capsin 19 of 24
Restrained accentsin 17 of 24
Condensed displayin 10 of 24
Offset printingin 17 of 24
Eclectic mixingin 12 of 24

Other choices in typography