Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces

by Philip B. Meggs, Philip B. Meggs

Specimens of 38 of the finest type families in the world are brought together in Typographic The Great Typefaces , making it an invaluable reference tool for graphic designers, editors, art directors, production managers, desktop publishers, and students. Each type family is shown in display and text specimens with complete fonts including italic and bold variations; extended families such as Futura and Univers include additional type weights and widths. Each type family's section opens with a full-page experimental design, created by an outstanding graphic designer to demonstrate its potential. The specimens are accompanied by a concise discussion of each type family's origins, charactertistics, and usage. Typographic specimens provide an opportunity to study typefaces, to select and plan typography, and to increase one's knowledge of letterforms. Drawing and tracing specimens remain excellent ways to understand type and create logos and other typographic designs. Study of specimens aids in the selection of fonts to be purchased for the font library. Typographic specimens introduce unfamiliar typefaces in printed form and aid in the development of connoisseurship. Comparative analysis of similar faces in printed form becomes possible. Over one hundred prominent designers and design educators were sent a ballot listing all major typefaces and were asked to vote for the type families that best fulfilled their personal criteria for typographic excellence. The typefaces contained in this book represent the results of this poll, providing a compendium of excellent typefaces that have stood the test of time. Typographic The Great Typefaces will provide information, inspiration, and a keener knowledge of typography. Akzidenz-Grotesk
American Typewriter
Baskerville
Bembo
Bodoni
Bookman
Caledonia
Caslon
Centaur
Century Schoolbook
Cheltenham
Clarendon
Didot
Folio
Franklin Gothic
Frutiger
Futura
Galliard
Gill Sans
Garamond
Goudy Old Style
Helvetica
Janson
Kabel
News Gothic
Optima
Palatino
Perpetua
Plantin
Sabon
Serifa
Stone Sans
Stone Serif
Stymie
Times New Roman
Trump Mediaeval
Univers
Zapf Book

Genres: Design

416 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

Philip Baxter Meggs was an American graphic designer, professor, historian and author of books on graphic design. His book History of Graphic Design is a definitive, standard read for the study of graphic design.
He has been called the most important historian of design since Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983). In contrast to Pevsner, he published a history of graphic design that went beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the first educators to create an overview of the history of graphic design that did not depend exclusively on the traditional structure of the history of the art, Meggs believed that graphic design would need to acquire an adequate understanding of the past and its relation with art.