alt Hacker NewsWhile trying to find earlier information on type design I stumbled on this gorgeous 1878 guide for sign painters.
https://archive.org/details/gri_33125007673623
As someone who is not a design snob (I tend to fall into the ontology snob bucket) the bit I liked is the way the types were categorized, there is the roman style and the egyptian style. And while roman was obvious "Ah yes like times new roman" egyptian was not familiar to me. Easy enough to figure out that it is what today we call sans-serif but I wonder when the term fell out of use?
Oh cool, I hadn't heard that term until you mentioned it. Apparently the name was in flux in the early days. The Wikipedia page for Sans Serif has an interesting footnote:
> master sign-painter James Callingham writes in his textbook "Sign Writing and Glass Embossing" (1871) that "What one calls San-serif, another describes as grotesque; what is generally known as Egyptian, is some times called Antique, though it is difficult to say why, seeing that the letters so designated do not date farther back than the close of the last century. Egyptian is perhaps as good a term as could be given to the letters bearing that name, the blocks being characteristic of the Egyptian style of architecture. These letters were first used by sign-writers at the close of the last century, and were not introduced in printing till about twenty years later. Sign-writers were content to call them "block letters," and they are sometimes so-called at the present day; but on their being taken in hand by the type founders, they were appropriately named Egyptian. The credit of having introduced the ordinary square or san-serif letters also belongs to the sign-writer, by whom they were employed half a century before the type founder gave them his attention, which was about the year 1810."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#cite_note-58