The Slab Serif or Egyptian is also home to further subsets of typeface styles, like the Fat Faces which are fundamentally Didones (or Moderns) on steroids. What I’m getting at is that the early Slab Serifs weren’t discreet. If the Didones are a lissome Audrey Hepburn, then the Slab Serifs are those guys one sees all too often on construction sites around the globe - trousers half-way down their posteriors. Those posters were a riot of big type, often a half-dozen different styles on a single page. The difference can be expressed as a maxim: text types when enlarged can be used for headings display types, if reduced, cannot be used for text setting.-Walter Tracy** …there is sometimes a lack of understanding of the fundamental difference between types designed for display and types meant for text. the Steam Press, 1814), advertisers in particular were looking for a type that stood out from crowd a type that shouted, look at me! Thus was born the the display face-type for use at large sizes, for short bursts of copy. But with mechanization, and major innovations in printing technology (e.g. Until this time, type was designed to serve one purpose-it was designed for long stretches of texts, for books. Like the industrial revolution, the Slab Serif was born in Britain, and was no doubt inspired by a new wave of advertising, and those beefy letter forms that could be found on just about every billboard, pamphlet, and poster of the day. The nomenclature has absolutely nothing to do with Egyptian Hieroglyph Slab Serifs-because there’s no such thing. What’s with the name Egyptian? Upon Napoleon’s return from a three-year Egyptian expedition and publication in 1809 of Description de l’Égypt, Egypt was all the rage, and it appears that type founders simply used a term that was on everyone’s lips, a term that was in vogue. Welcome to the early 1800s and the birth of the Slab Serif, otherwise known as Egyptian, Square Serif, Mechanical or Mécanes.
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