Display typeface

A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text.

Display typefaces will often have more eccentric and variable designs than the simple, relatively restrained typefaces generally used for body text. They may take inspiration from other genres of lettering, such as handpainted signs, calligraphy or an aesthetic appropriate to their use, perhaps ornamented, exotic, abstracted or drawn in the style of a different writing system. Several genres of font are particularly associated with display setting, such as slab serif, script font, reverse-contrast and to a lesser extent sans serif, although all of these may also used at small print sizes.

For the first centuries of printing, display type did not exist, with printing principally used for body text, with occasional larger titles and ornamented letters. Large size-typefaces were first used for purposes such as book titles and then developed as printing began to be used for posters and signs. Historian James Mosley has written that “big types had been cast in sand, using wooden patterns, for some centuries [by 1750] but there is evidence that English typefounders only began to make big letters for posters and other commercial printing towards 1770, when Thomas Cottrell made his 'Proscription or Posting letter of great bulk and dimension' and William Caslon II cast his 'Patagonian' or 'Proscription letters’.” The arrival of the poster spurred new designs of printed letter, such as sans-serifs (already used in custom lettering but effectively unused in printing before the 1830s), “fat face” Didone typefaces, and slab serifs, as well as the pre-existing blackletter styles already used both in printing and in signpainting. Many nineteenth-century display typefaces were extremely, aggressively bold and condensed in order to attract attention. Equally, some display typefaces such as Cochin and Koch-Antiqua have a particularly delicate build with a low x-height, and this style was very popular around the start of the twentieth century.

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