Unserifed letters have a history at least as long, and quite as distinguished, as serifed letters. Unserifed capitals appear in the earliest Greek inscriptions. They appear at Rome in the third and second centuries BC, and in Florence in the early Renaissance. Perhaps it is no more than an accident of history that the unserifed letters of the fifteenth century Florentine architects and sculptors were not translated into metal type in the 1470s.
At Athens and again at Rome, the modulated stroke and bilateral serif were the scribal trademarks and symbols of empire. Unserifed letters, with no modulation or, at most, a subtle taper in the stroke, were emblems of the Republic. This link between unserifed letterforms and populist or democratic movements recurs time and again, in Renaissance Italy and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in northern Europe.
Unserifed types were first cut in the eighteenth century, but they were cut at first for alphabets other than Latin. A sanserif Latin printing type was cut for Valentin Haüy, Paris, in 1786 - but Haüy’s type was meant to be invisible. It was designed to be embossed, without ink, for the blind to read with their fingers. The first unserifed Latin type for the sighted - cut by William Caslon IV, London, about 1812 - was based on signwriter’s letters and consisted of capitals only. Bicameral (upper- and lowercase) unserifed roman fonts were aparently first cut in Leipzig in the 1820s.
Most, though not all, of the unserifed types of the nineteenth century were dark, coarse, and tightly closed. These characteristics are still obvious in faces like Helvetica and Franklin Gothic, despite the weight-reductions and other refinements worked on them over the years. These faces are cultural souvenirs of some of the bleakest days of the Industrial Revolution.
During the twentieth century, serifs have evolved… in retrospect it seems that both type designers and founders were for many years strangely reluctant to believe that one could simply write a humanist letter and leave the serifs off.
