Fat face

In typography, a fat face letterform is a serif typeface or piece of lettering in the Didone or modern style with an extremely bold design.

"[3][4][5][a] While decorated typefaces and lettering styles existed in the past, for instance inline and shadowed forms, the fat faces' extreme design and their issue in very large poster sizes had an immediate impact on display typography in the early nineteenth century.

Historian James Mosley describes a fat face as "designed like a naval broadside to sock its commercial message ... by sheer aggressive weight of heavy metal.

Versions were executed as roman or upright, italics and with designs inside the main bold strokes of the letter, such as a white line, patterns or decorations such as fruits or flowers.

[34] He had been an apprentice to Thomas Cottrell,[35] who pioneered large-size poster types, before setting up his own company, often called the Fann Street Foundry, in North London.

[29][37][38][39] From his study of specimen books, Sébastien Morlighem does not believe that the escalating trend was entirely driven by Thorne: "a lesser-known, yet decisive, contribution came from the Caslon foundry"[40] and that "it is more accurate to see that several people – punchcutters, founders, printers, publishers – were involved in its development and popularisation".

Whereas early poster types and titling capitals were generally only upright, fat faces were made in roman and in italics.

[48][49] In the United States Barnhurst and Nerone comment that fat face newspaper nameplates were in fashion in the 1810s; later they were often replaced by blackletter.

[50] Mosley has particularly praised those of Vincent Figgins' foundry (digitised by Matthew Carter as Elephant, above): "exaggeration puts a huge strain on the designer if the result is to retain any coherence at all.

Decorated fat face typefaces were cut in wood and reproduced by dabbing, or stereotype, a technique in which the wooden pattern is driven into molten metal just at the point of solidifying.

[64] He suggested that the fine detail of Pouchée's ornamented letters was not practical for job printing work at the time and that some of the designs were too large for playbills and handbills, their likely market.

[72] Fat faces returned to some popularity in the twentieth century, in the UK as part of the Victoriana style promoted by John Betjeman and others in the 1930s.

Elephant is a digital fat face typeface by Matthew Carter based on the typefaces of Vincent Figgins . [ 1 ]
London poster, c. 1840s
Early theatre poster, 1808: all text is in fonts similar to body text faces.
1818 poster; complete change in style. Fat face, or at least bold, letterforms used throughout; the main heading is in an inline italic design.
Fat face types have the thin horizontals of modern-face types like Bodoni (top), but much thicker vertical strokes.
Early typeface in what became the fat face style by Robert Thorne in his 1803 specimen [ 25 ]
An early example, not particularly bold, of c. 1816. [ 31 ] This style of 'W' was common in roundhand calligraphy. [ 32 ] [ 33 ]
1838: variation of letterform from ultra-bold down to merely bolder than average in the extended text
An extremely bold fat face design from A.W. Kinsley & Co., Albany , 1829. The counters have been reduced to abrupt, tiny slits.
The 1841 Caslon foundry specimen uses "VANWAYMAN" as a sample text for its swash capitals.
Mid-century poster by Lewitt - Him , an example of the revival of fat faces in graphic design around this time. The "f"s are "non-kerning" , a style that only became popular from the middle of the nineteenth century. [ 73 ]