Didone (typography)

Didone is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and is particularly popular in Europe. It is characterized by:

The category is also known as modern or modern face serif fonts, in contrast to old style serif designs, which date to the Renaissance period.

Didone types were developed by printers including Firmin Didot, Giambattista Bodoni and Justus Erich Walbaum, whose eponymous typefaces, Bodoni, Didot, and Walbaum, remain in use today. Their goals were to create more elegant, classical designs of printed text, developing the work of John Baskerville in Birmingham and Fournier in France towards a more extreme, precise design with intense precision and contrast, that could show off the increasingly refined printing and paper-making technologies of the period. (This type of lettering was already popular with calligraphers and copperplate engravers, but much printing in western Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century used typefaces designed in the sixteenth century or a relatively similar design.) These trends were also accompanied by changes to page layout conventions and the abolition of the long s. Historian Talbot Baines Reed called the style "trim, sleek, gentlemanly, somewhat dazzling".

In Britain and America, the lasting influence of Baskerville led to the creation of types such as Bell and Scotch Roman designs, in the same spirit as Didone fonts from the continent but less geometric; these like Baskerville's type are often called transitional serif designs. Later developments of this class have been called Scotch Modern and show increasing Didone influence.

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