T is for Transitional
Published by Nick at
We covered Old Style serifs already, in which we learned the difference between Old Style, Transitional, and Modern/Didone. Now let’s dig deeper into Transitional serif typefaces.
Transitional typefaces were pioneered in the late 18th century and remain popular today for newspaper and book printing. Compared to Old Style serifs, Transitionals typically feature taller x-heights, more contrast between strokes, and a more upright stress axis on rounded characters like the o. The default numerals in these fonts are usually lining figures, which means they sit at the same baseline and are the same height. I used to have a hard time classifying certain fonts as either Old Style or Transitional, but the key characters I pay attention to are the a, e, o, and t.
Times New Roman is a Transitional serif based off Plantin, which in turn was based off an older Old style called Gros Cicero1.
Italics in Transitional typefaces usually have a more direct relationship to the upright forms. Compare the lowercase p in the Plantin and Times New Roman samples.
Times New Roman and Georgia are default serif fonts available to nearly every web browser and are both Transitional typefaces. Other popular Transitional designs include:
Baskerville, a serif developed in the 1750s by English type designer John Baskerville.
Century, a family of typefaces developed by American Type Founders in the late 19th century. This is the official font for U.S. Supreme Court briefs.
Perpetua, a typeface designed by Eric Gill and released through Monotype in the early 1930s.
Matthew Carter has long been one of my favorite type designers, and his three serif designs Charter, Georgia, and Miller are exemplary Transitional typefaces. Charter was designed for low resolution printing (fax machines and 300 dpi laser printers) and released in 1987. Georgia was commissioned by Microsoft to be a legible font on computer monitors at small sizes, and was released in 1993.
In this sample, you can see three designs by Matthew Carter, all with similar x-heights and proportions.
Miller was being developed at the same time as Georgia, but was released a bit later in 1996. Miller is a true “Scotch Roman” design, one of my favorite sub-classifications of Transitional typefaces. Georgia and Miller are so similar. One of the giveaways is the ball terminal on the “ear” of the lowercase g in Miller, or by examining the italics. Georgia’s italicized lower case g is a single-story g, and Miller features thinner, longer serifs on it’s italics.
Italic styles for Charter, Georgia and Miller.
More Transitionals
- Financier, a typeface drawn for the 2014 redesign of the Financial Times, released by Klim Type Foundy.
- Harriet, by Okay Type. “It’s sort-of a contemporary reimagining of Baskerville with a dash of Scotch Roman.”
- Nimbus Roman by URW.
- PS Fournier by Typofonderie. A tribute to the typefaces of Pierre Simon Fournier, prolific French type designer in the 18th century.
- Source: Where Did Times New Roman Come From? by Meredith Mann, New York Public Library.