Oblique Type
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Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as
italic type In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography. Owing to the influence f ...
. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different
glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...
shapes; it uses the same glyphs as
roman type In Latin script typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of Typeface, historical type, alongside blackletter and Italic type, italic. Sometimes called normal or regular, it is distinct from these two for its upright style (relative to the ...
, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles. Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design. Type designers have described oblique type as less organic and calligraphic than italics, which in some situations may be preferred. Contemporary type designer Jeremy Tankard stated that he had avoided a true italic 'a' and 'e' in his design
Bliss BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known system language until C debuted a few years later. Since then, C ...
due to finding them "too soft", while Hoefler and Frere-Jones have described obliques as more "keen and insistent".


Obliques and italics

Italic designs are not just the slanted version of the regular (roman) style; they are influenced by handwriting, with a single-storey ''a'' and an ''f'' that descends below the line of text. Some may even link up, like cursive (joined-up) handwriting. Obliques by contrast are "simply" sloped. In addition, italic styles are often quite noticeably narrower than roman type, while oblique styles are not.


Specific typefaces

Few typefaces have both oblique and italic designs, as this is generally a fundamental design choice about how the font should look. A font designer normally decides to design their font with one or the other.


Serif fonts

Historically, it was normal for all Latin-alphabet
serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...
fonts to have true italics, but in the late nineteenth century some "sloped romans" were created by European and American foundries, particularly for display type and headings. Notable typefaces in this style include
Bookman Old Style Bookman is a serif typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both Display typeface, display typography, for trade printing such as advertising, and less commonly for body text. In ...
in metal type (although not many recent versions), Linn Boyd Benton's "self-spacing" type and the Central Type Foundry's "De Vinne" wedge-serif display face. European examples included Genzsch Antiqua from Genzsch & Heyse. Almost all modern serif fonts have true italic designs. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of type foundries such as
American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typogr ...
and Genzsch & Heyse offered serif typefaces with oblique rather than italic designs, especially display typefaces, but these designs (such as Genzsch Antiqua) have mostly disappeared. An exception is American Type Founders' Bookman, offered in some releases with the oblique of its metal type version. An unusual example of an oblique font from the inter-war period is the display face Koch Antiqua. With a partly oblique lower case, it also makes the italic capitals inline in the style of blackletter capitals in the larger sizes of the metal type. It was developed by Rudolph Koch, a type designer who had previously specialised in to
blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter or black-letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for ...
font design (which does not use italics); Walter Tracy described his design as "uninhibited by the traditions of roman and italic". The printing historian and artistic director
Stanley Morison Stanley Arthur Morison (6 May 1889 – 11 October 1967) was a British typographer, printing executive and historian of printing. Largely self-educated, he promoted higher standards in printing and an awareness of the best printing and typefaces ...
was for a time in the inter-war period interested in the oblique type style, which he felt stood out in text less than a true italic and should supersede it. He argued in his article ''Towards an Ideal Italic'' that serif book typefaces should have as the default sloped form an oblique and as a complement a
script typeface Script typefaces are based on the varied and often fluid stroke created by handwriting. They are generally used for display or trade printing, rather than for extended body text in the Latin alphabet. Some Greek alphabet typefaces, especially ...
where a more decorative form was preferred. He made an attempt to promote the idea by commissioning the typeface Perpetua from
Eric Gill Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsma ...
with a sloped roman rather than an italic, but came to find the style unattractive; Perpetua's italic when finally issued had the conventional italic 'a', 'e' and 'f'. Morison wrote to his friend, type designer
Jan van Krimpen Jan van Krimpen (12 January 1892, in Gouda, South Holland, Gouda – 20 October 1958, in Haarlem) was a Dutch typographer, book designer and type designer. He worked for the printing house Joh. Enschedé, Koninklijke Joh. Enschedé. He also wo ...
, that in developing Perpetua's italic "we did not give enough slope to it. When we added more slope, it seemed that the font required a little more cursive to it." A few other type designers replicated his approach for a time: van Krimpen's Romulus and William Addison Dwiggins'
Electra Electra, also spelt Elektra (; ; ), is one of the most popular Greek mythology, mythological characters in tragedies.Evans (1970), p. 79 She is the main character in two Greek tragedies, ''Electra (Sophocles play), Electra'' by Sophocles and ''Ele ...
were both released with obliques. Morison's
Times New Roman Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned for use by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers. The typeface was conceived by Stanl ...
typeface has a very traditional true italic in the style of the late eighteenth century, which he later wryly commented owed "more to Didot than dogma".


Sans-serif fonts

Many
sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...
typefaces use plainer oblique designs instead of italic ones. This is especially true with
grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German, as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...
designs like
Helvetica Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely-used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the f ...
, which have a spare, industrial aesthetic, and geometric ones like Futura. (As many sans-serif fonts were intended for use on headings and posters, especially early ones, some were not designed with italics at all because these were considered unnecessary.) Humanist sans-serif typefaces, however, often use true italic styles since they are more influenced by calligraphy and traditional serif fonts. Notable humanist sans-serif typefaces include
Gill Sans Gill Sans is a Sans-serif#Humanist, humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype Imaging, Monotype in 1928. It is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Johnston (typeface), Underground Alphabet", t ...
, Goudy Sans, FF Meta and FF Scala Sans; all have italic designs. Adrian Frutiger and other prominent designers have defended obliques as more appropriate for the aesthetic of sans-serif fonts, while
Martin Majoor Martin Majoor (born 14 October 1960) is a Dutch type designer and graphic designer. As of 2006, he had worked since 1997 in both Arnhem, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland. Biography Early life Majoor was born in 1960 in the town of Baarn, in th ...
has supported the use of true italics.


Automated obliques, or "fake italics"

Some computer programs handling text may simply generate an oblique form, a "fake italic", by slanting the normal font when they find no italic or oblique style installed. It may not be clear to the user where the oblique form comes from (whether it is a correctly installed oblique font or an automatically slanted design, which may look worse) unless they check their installed fonts. Slanting the regular style to create an oblique was particularly often done on early computer and phototypesetting systems in the 1970s and -80s to save time and memory space, especially in lower-quality printing of
ephemera Ephemera are items which were not originally designed to be retained or preserved, but have been collected or retained. The word is etymologically derived from the Greek ephēmeros 'lasting only a day'. The word is both plural and singular. On ...
and newspapers.


See also

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References


Notes


External links


Typographica: Ain't What ITC Used to Be

Compare "Univers 65 Bold Oblique" and "Univers 66 Bold Italic"


{{typography terms Typography de:Kursivschrift#Kursive vs. kursivierte Schriften