Oh great Straight Dope Type Mavens, I need your suggestions for a book illustration I’m working on. My idea is to convey different historical periods with distinct fonts. The categories are:
- Renaissance
- Luther’s Reformation
- Multiple Holy Wars
- Founding of the American Republic
- 1st Industrial Revolution
- Modern Science
I figure Renaissance would be a script-type font and Luther’s would be Germanic (Gothic). Modern Science might be a computer generated looking font. The rest I’m not so sure about. There are millions of fonts out there! Can you shorten my search my suggesting your favorites that might fit these categories?
Letterhead Fonts specializes in fonts that fit in a bit after the Industrial Revolution (more turn of the century stuff) but a lot of people still associate with that earlier time period regardless. I wouldn’t necessarily call their fonts good - they’re missing polish here and there - but for headlines they’ll do just fine. Something like Antique Half Block would make me think of the Industrial Revolution.
For the American Republic the font that comes to mind is plain old Caslon or Baskerville - there wasn’t much fancy in the newspapers back then. So you again might want to go with something stereotypically associated with the time period even if it’s not historically accurate. Something like Engravers MT (it makes people think of American money and postage stamps). You could go in the other direction and find a handwritten font that makes you think of the scripts of the period. Something like National Archive. You are thinking of doing script for the Renaissance though which may make it difficult to visually separate them.
I’m not that well versed in Textualis vs Cursiva vs Rotunda and so forth and which style is used when and all that, but they would most likely satisfy 1, 2, and 3. The downside of course being if I can’t tell them apart at a glance neither will most any normal person, even if they are accurate.
Maybe there could be a spot for Bernhard Modern somewhere in there. When in all caps with plenty of spacing it makes me think of older eras without at all going the heavy handed gothic route.
Garamond is also a very old typeface that a lot of printed documents would have been set in but it is also a highly legible and often used typeface, even today. It would be difficult to make it feel old for your purposes without a lot of other visual fluff to back it up, but it could be done. Think wide spaced all-capital headlines maybe, like the title pages of very old books.
Macca26 thanks for your suggestions. I will give them a try!