Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

Sans Serif

In 1816 William Caslon iv created a “two-line Egyptian” typeface in which he took off all the serifs because he hated slab serifs. This face was not a big hit. It wasn’t until the Bauhaus school of design was formed in 1919 that sans serifs (typefaces without serifs; “sans” is French for “without”) began to be popular. Under the Bauhaus motto of “form follows function,” typefaces were stripped down to their bare essentials, to their simplest, most functional forms, epitomized in the font Futura. This new school of design influenced the world.

Sans serifs, of course, have no serifs at all. Also, the strokes that create the letterforms have almost no visible transition from thick to thin (there are a very few exceptions, such as the ...