![]() On one occasion, McDonald was muttering about “slabs of Slate” and generally complaining about not being able to find the right name for this new typeface. But when McDonald was in the final stages of the design, Robert Bringhurst – author of the acclaimed “Elements of Typographic Style” – happened to be visiting. From the beginning McDonald had trouble coming up with an appropriate name. “I had worked with Carl previously when he developed the condensed range for Slate,” says McDonald, “so I knew that the Egyptian Slate italics were in good hands.” The name Egyptian Slate came about in a rather unexpected way. McDonald provided the foundational “control characters,” and Crossgrove built on these to produce the finished designs. McDonald drew the roman designs he then collaborated with Carl Crossgrove to create the italic counterparts. ![]() ![]() ![]() Adjustments were needed on every character to compensate for the added visual weight of the serifs. Incorporating serifs into a sans serif design throws all the weights off.” To maintain visual parity between the two designs, McDonald had to change the basic weights of the new slab serif design. “I was surprised that Egyptian Slate held its own with Slate,” recalls McDonald, “but I was also stunned when I realized that it was going to be a lot more work to add the serifs than I initially thought. McDonald soon discovered that the openness of the letterforms in the Slate™ design allowed him to add the strong slab serifs without losing any of the character of the original design. Egyptian Slate fonts are available as either OpenType Std or OpenType Pro fonts the later options offers an extended character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. Available in six weights – from a svelte light to a commanding black – each upright member of the Egyptian Slate family has a complementary italic. Slate is a great sans serif design, and the addition of his Egyptian Slate to your typeface library will make it even more versatile.Įgyptian Slate is a solid and stylish slab serif design that will look superb in the spotlight of your choosing. Rod McDonald trimmed and adjusted his new Egyptian Slate design as it emerged from its sans serif predecessor, the Slate typeface family. The term Egyptian was adopted by French and German foundries, where it became Egyptienne.Just as the camera adds weight to human faces, serifs can add weight to typographic faces. However, the term Egyptian had previously been used to describe sans-serif types in England, so the term ‘Antique’ was used by British and American typefounders. The common metonym “Egyptian” is derived from a craze for Egyptian artifacts in Europe and North America in the early nineteenth century, which led typefounders producing Slab Serifs after Figgins’ work to call their designs Egyptian. While there was no relationship between Egyptian writing systems and slab serif types, either shrewd marketing or honest confusion led to slab serifs often being called Egyptians, and many early ones are named for the subject: Cairo, Karnak, and Memphis. Multicolored woodblock printed wallpaper could make a dining room in Edinburgh or Chicago feel like Luxor. Suites of contemporary parlor furniture were produced resembling furniture found in tombs. Slab serif printing type was first commercially introduced by Vincent Figgins under the name Antique, with copies of specimen dated 18.įollowing Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign and dissemination of images and descriptions via publications like Description de l’Égypte (1809) an intense cultural fascination with all things Egyptian followed. Though widely utilized in the field of computer science due to their fixed-width nature, the everyday use of typewriter-like fonts is declining in the wake of electronic publishing and the spread of electronic reading devices.Īs printed material began to branch out from the familiar realm of books, new typefaces were needed for use in advertising, posters, and flyers. Another common exception to this rule is in the use of monospaced text, many fonts for which are modeled on the typefaces used by typewriters. One recent exception to the general lack of the use of Slab Serif in body text is Egyptienne, a font designed for the The Guardian newspaper in the UK, which is used throughout the paper and within its body. Some consider slab serifs to be a subset of modern serif typefaces.īecause of their bold appearance, they are most commonly used in large headlines and advertisements but are seldom used in body text. Slab serif typefaces generally have no bracket (feature connecting the strokes to the serifs). Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular (Rockwell), or rounded (Courier). In typography, a slab serif (also called mechanistic, square serif or Egyptian) typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs.
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