The Concept of Stripping Down the Serifs?

[Fournier]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Do you know who is the first designer which used to strip down a traditional serif typeface? I know a contemporary example: František Štorm removes the serifs of the XVII th century Jannon Roman.
Jannon Antiqua
http://www.stormtype.com/family-jannon.html
Jannon Sans
http://www.stormtype.com/family-jannon-sans.html

[Nick Shinn]

Britannic (Wagner & Schmidt, 1901)

[Fournier]

Can you elaborate on Britannic and its 'core' reference?
Thanks in advance.

[Mark Simonson]

Clearface/Clearface Gothic, by M. F. Benton?

[Vladimir Tamari]

The way you phrased your question is interesting - "stripping down the serifs" sounds as if one is peeling some vegetable to get rid of some rough texture or hard parts. I think the process with which a traditional type or script turns into a san-serif is fascinating and has occurred in almost all the scripts I have encountered - Arabic, Japanese, Thai, etc etc. In Japanese for example the brush-strokes which have thick and thin could be made mono-width, and the stroke endings which often twist into a tiny this edge are neglected. More than just stripping extra detail, san-serif as it has become to be used means finding the generic essential shape of the letter of a script and presenting it free of the traditional marks left by tools such as a chisel, bamboo pen, quill or brush. I have tried to do that for Arabic 50 years ago and am just now finishing the font!

[Fournier]

I wonder if a designer ever tried to strip down the serifs of the traditional era typefaces?
Turn Jenson, Garamond, Kis, Caslon, Fournier, Baskerville, Didot naked and 'sans' and with a satisfying result from readability and design perspectives.
Imagine this superfamily package:
Garamond, Garamond Semi Serif, Garamond Sans, Garamond Semi Sans.
If only Slimbach could do the task.

[nina]

Well, Martin Majoor has done this type of work. He has written about his particular approach to deriving sans from serif designs on his website: http://www.martinmajoor.com/6_my_philosophy.html

IIRC Syntax was one of the first, if not the first, published sans-serif directly derived from a Renaissance [serif, text] design. There’s also the (unpublished) sans that Van Krimpen made to match his Romulus in the 1930s.

[eliason]

Syntax was *directly* derived from a Renaissance design? Which one?

[nina]

Um, no, sorry, should have said “model” not design. Not that I’d know of, at least.

[Fournier]

"Meier described Syntax as being a sans-serif face modeled on the Renaissance serif typeface, similar to Bembo. The uppercase has a wide proportion, and the terminals not being parallel to the baseline provide a sense of animation. The lowercase a and g follow the old style model of having two storeys. The italics are a combination of humanist italic forms, seen in the lowercase italic q, and realist obliques, seen in the lowercase italic a, which retains two storeys, unlike in other humanist sans-serif typefaces like FF Scala Sans and Gill Sans, where the a has a single storey italic."

[Vladimir Tamari]

And since everything seems to be valid in typography these days, why not add serifs to original sans-serifs ? ;)