Guide to Latin Typefaces: 9 Types of Latin Typefaces

Latin typefaces are any specific typography styles and designs that use the 26-letter classical Latin alphabet. These typefaces serve as the foundation for many printed or web fonts designed for Latin-derived languages, such as English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

The Latin alphabet influenced typography because it was the earliest character set that was used in Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. The Latin alphabet went on to become the basis for western printing and typography. Today, the various Latin font families—like blackletter, humanist, slab serif, and Didone—are used in advertising, printing, design, and everyday word processing.

The origins of the Latin alphabet can be traced back to the Etruscan and Ancient Greek alphabets, with many of the same early characters still widely used in our alphabets today. Here is an overview of how the Latin alphabet influenced typography.

• It was used for the first printing press. With the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and movable Latin type, Western texts could be reproduced in large volumes at smaller costs than writing out every publication by hand. The Bible was the first substantial book Gutenberg printed, using blackletter type cut to replicate the handwriting of early fifteenth-century Germany, which had a formal appearance partly due to pens being held at a 45-degree angle.
• It allowed printers and typographers to experiment with style. Printers and typographers from the Renaissance to seventeenth-century France to nineteenth-century type foundries used the Latin alphabet to experiment with typography design. Italian Renaissance printers created letters that took on the appearance of the Latin handwriting of the era’s philosophers and scribes to create a new, sophisticated typeface. In the seventeenth century, King Louis XIV of France renovated the Imprimerie Royale (the French government’s printing press) and commissioned the French Academy of Sciences to create the typeface Roman du Roi, a suite of 86 typefaces that birthed a geometric, grid-based system n of creating type. In 1816, William Caslon IV’s type foundry developed the first sans serif printing type which was influenced by the typeface Didone.
• It became the standard for western letterforms. In the West, Didone became the standard of general-purpose printing during the nineteenth century. Named after type designers Firmin Didot (France) and Giambattista Bodoni (Italy), Didone is the product of an ongoing professional rivalry between the two men. The style was informed by handwriting using a pointed nib held at a 90-degree angle.

All font families belong to a larger typeface group:

1. 1. Blackletter: Blackletter typefaces (also known as Gothic or Old English typefaces) are defined by dramatic strokes and elaborate serif swirls. They are highly stylized and dense but still legible. Some forms of Blackletter type include Fraktur, Cursiva, Textualis, and Schwabacher.
2. 2. Humanist: Humanist typefaces, sometimes known as old-style or Venetian, are inspired by traditional letterforms that may alternate between thin and thick strokes. This font is characterized by loose letter spacing, wide counters, and a large x-height, making it more legible for small-sized text. This style of lettering mimics the angles at which a right-handed person holds a pen, giving it a calligraphy-like appearance. Traditionally, all humanist typefaces were serif fonts, but in recent years designers have created sans serif versions that retain certain calligraphic characteristics.
3. 3. Garalde (serif): Also known as Aldine, this group of typefaces takes its title from a composite of the names of French type cutter Claude Garamond and Italian scholar Aldus Manutius. They differ from humanist typefaces in their finer proportions, and have a left-leaning axis curve with bracketed serifs, as seen in font families like Palatino and Caslon.
4. 4. Transitional (serif): This serif typeface is characterized by a very strong contrast, near-vertical axis, flatter serifs, and refined details. Transitional typefaces straddle the line between older and more modern styles of type. Times New Roman is an example of a mixed or transitional typeface, along with Baskerville and Fournier.
5. 5. Didone: The Didone font family is characterized by narrow brackets and high contrast in stroke thickness. Didone fonts are not meant for dense body text or long-term reading, but can evoke a sense of luxury or elegance. Fonts like Didot and Bodoni are part of the Didone type family.
6. 6. Slab serif: Also referred to as Mechanical or Antique, slab serifs have broad and varied strokes, characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Slab serifs are often used for display purposes—to grab people’s attention on posters and billboards, though some were intended for use in smaller sizes with large chunks of text, such as on newsprint. They are also often used in typewriters (such as Courier), and monospaced, meaning the characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space.
7. 7. Grotesque: Grotesque, sometimes referred to as Gothic, is often used to describe any sans serif font, but the term should really be applied to the sorts of typefaces that originated in the nineteenth century and bear certain characteristics, like a strong contrast between thick and thin strokes and exaggerated shapes in strange places. Initially designed to be a bold type style for headlines and advertising, most early grotesques only have capital letters, with lowercase versions appearing later on.
8. 8. Geometric: Geometric typefaces are sans serif fonts that are constructed from simple geometric shapes, often optically adjusted by typographers to make the shapes seem more linear and legible. Notable early designs include Erbar by Jakob Erbar, Futura by Paul Renner, and Herbert Bayer’s Universal alphabet. This group is strongly associated with Germany’s famed Bauhaus art school.
9. 9. Neo-Grotesque: Neo-Grotesque fonts are the ultimate modernist typefaces—associated with the Swiss International Style that emerged in the mid-twentieth century and continues to be hugely popular today. Unlike traditional Grotesque letterforms, which were largely intended for bold headlines, Neo-Grotesque are neutral, legible typefaces that were designed with a range of uses in mind. Arial, Univers, and Helvetica (Neue Haas Grotesk) are three commonly used Neo-Grotesque typefaces.

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