Types of fonts

Letters finished with serifs, the small strokes at the ends. The oldest styles, called old-style or Garalde, keep a broad pen’s slanted stress and gentle contrast, as in EB Garamond. Transitional faces, such as Libre Baskerville, stand more upright and sharper. Didones, such as Bodoni Moda, push contrast to hairline serifs and a vertical stress. Slab serifs, such as Roboto Slab and Arvo, trade the fine finish for heavy square blocks.

Letters without serifs. Grotesques, the sans serifs of the nineteenth century, have slight contrast and a few quirks, as in Archivo; neo-grotesques such as Inter smooth them into an even, neutral texture. Geometric sans serifs, such as Montserrat and Jost, build letters from circles and straight lines. Humanist sans serifs, such as Open Sans and Fira Sans, keep the proportions and open shapes of handwriting.

Letters that imitate writing. Formal scripts, such as Great Vibes and Pinyon Script, follow copperplate: slanted and joined, with the thick and thin strokes of a pointed pen. Casual scripts, such as Pacifico and Dancing Script, look brushed or written in a hurry. Handwriting fonts, such as Caveat and Indie Flower, look like a person’s own print. FontKind files them all under handwriting.

Faces made for large sizes: headlines, posters, logos and packaging. They include fat faces, such as Abril Fatface; heavy slabs, such as Alfa Slab One; decorative faces, such as Bungee and Black Ops One; pixel faces, such as Press Start 2P; and blackletter, such as UnifrakturMaguntia. Set them big and keep the lines short: detail that sings in a headline turns to noise in a paragraph.

Every character takes the same width, as on a typewriter, so text lines up in columns. Coding fonts, such as JetBrains Mono and Fira Code, make similar characters easy to tell apart. Typewriter faces, such as Courier Prime, keep the old slab look. Others, such as Space Mono and DM Mono, bring the fixed width into headlines.

The five kinds are the categories Google Fonts uses, and the ones FontKind files every font under. Older classifications, such as Vox-ATypI’s, split the serifs more finely and name blackletter and scripts apart. And in everyday speech, a font’s styles often means something else: the regular, italic, bold and other weights of one family. People also search by a look that cuts across the kinds, such as cursive, gothic, bubble or pixel: FontKind gathers each of those among its font styles.

Knowing the kind narrows a search, but the styles inside it are what give a font away. Two sans serifs can differ as much as a geometric and a grotesque, which is why font anatomy names the details that tell them apart.

• Round 10
  The balance test: Odd one out

  Four close sans serifs and one R whose leg is drawn differently: a grotesque’s details give it away.

Serif fonts Sans serif fonts Handwriting fonts Display fonts Monospace fonts

What are the five main types of fonts?

Serif, sans serif, script (or handwriting), display and monospace. Each has styles of its own, such as old-style and slab among serifs, or geometric and humanist among sans serifs.

What type of font is Times New Roman?

A serif, usually classed as transitional: a newspaper face drawn for The Times of London and first used in 1932.

What type of font is Helvetica?

A sans serif, and the best-known neo-grotesque, drawn in Switzerland in 1957.

• Kerning
  Drag a letter into place, then see how the typeface spaces the pair.
• Ligatures
  Switch ligatures on and off in real fonts, from fi to code arrows.
• Glyphs
  One character, 24 glyphs: see what a font actually draws.
• Serif vs sans serif
  The same letters in both, measured: serifs, contrast and when to use each.
• Font anatomy
  Pick a part of a letter to light it up, from the x-height to the overshoot.
• Font vs typeface
  One typeface, 36 fonts, two files: the design and what carries it.
• TTF vs OTF
  Quadratic or cubic curves: what a .ttf and an .otf hold, and which to use.
• WOFF vs WOFF2
  The same font packed for the web: six popular fonts weighed in each format.

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