Circus fonts (and the birth of sans-serif fonts)
A Coursera course “Ideas from History of Graphic Design” by California Institute of Arts teaches me something interesting about those tacky, visually-cluttered typefaces during the Victorian era (such as Tuscan-style fonts shown above).
Design problems back in the 19th century
We all know that images attract attention far more effectively than letters. Back in those days in the 19th century, when photography was still in its infancy, illustrations were prohibitively expensive to print. The ongoing industrialization and urbanization, however, increased the need for any advertisement posters to stand out and catch attention in the middle of visual clutters of the city.
Circus fonts as a solution
A solution that 19th-century poster designers came up with were those fancy typefaces that look rathe tacky today. An example is this circus poster in the 1860s:
All different elaborated typefaces represent circus features. They create a sense of a variety of fun that comes with the circus.
As a result, even today, this kind of typefaces are associated with circus: there is a free font collection of circus fonts.
Birth of sans-serif fonts
Plus, one side-effect of this 19th-century design trend was the invention of sans-serif fonts. Since all these fancy-looking typefaces took up a lot of space in posters, there was a need for space-saving typefaces in small prints for detail information. The answer was to ditch serifs from letters: that was the birth of sans-serif fonts.
History lessons
If we draw some history lessons from these 19th-century typeface inventions, the use of Victorian elaborate typefaces such as those circus fonts should be limited in a situation where you cannot use any image for some reason. If you use both circus fonts and attention-grabbing images, then it’ll look bad-tasted.
And when you use lots of circus fonts to grab attention, then sans-serif fonts can be a choice for small prints on detail information.
Learning about the historical origin and background of design elements such as typefaces helps us figure out what design elements to use for what purpose in a fundamental, not trend-seeking superficial, way. From time to time, I will share what I’ve learned from history.
