Slab serif

Some such as Memphis and Rockwell have a geometric design with minimal variation in stroke width: they are sometimes described as sans-serif fonts with added serifs.

[citation needed] Slab serif lettering and typefaces appeared rapidly in the early nineteenth century, having little in common with previous letterforms.

As the printing of advertising material began to expand in the early nineteenth century, new and notionally more attention-grabbing letterforms became popular.

[7] Slab-serif type was perhaps first introduced by London typefounder Vincent Figgins under the name "Antique", appearing in a type-specimen dated 1815 (but probably issued in 1817).

[8][1][b] Writing in 1825, the printer Thomas Curson Hansard wrote with amusement that slab-serif and other such display types were 'the outrageous kind of face only adapted for placards, posting-bills, invitations to the wheel of Fortune...Fashion and Fancy commonly frolic from one extreme to another.

A lighter style of slab serif with a single width of strokes was called 'engravers face' since it resembled the monoline structure of metal engravings.

For example, Linotype's Legibility Group, in which most newspapers were printed during much of the twentieth century, were based on the "Ionic" or "Clarendon" style adapted for continuous body text.

[26][27][28] More loosely, Joanna, TheSerif, FF Meta Serif and Guardian Egyptian are other examples of newspaper and small print-orientated typefaces that have regular, monoline serifs (sometimes more visible in bold weights) but a general humanist text face structure not particularly influenced by nineteenth-century stylings (as Clarendons are).

[citation needed] In the Italienne model, also known as French Clarendon type, the serifs are even heavier than the stems, forging a dramatic, attention-drawing effect.

These faces originated in monospaced format with fixed-width, meaning that every character takes up exactly the same amount of horizontal space.

Early examples include Memphis, Rockwell, Karnak, Beton, Rosmini, City and Tower, several of which were influenced by geometric sans-serifs of the 1920s and 30s, especially Futura.