Fat face


In typography, a fat face letterform is a serif typeface or piece of lettering in the Didone or modern style with an extremely bold design. Fat face typefaces appeared in London around 1805-10 and became widely popular; John Lewis describes the fat face as "the first real display typeface." While decorated typefaces and lettering styles existed in the past, for instance inline and shadowed forms, the fat faces' extreme design and their issue in very large poster sizes had an immediate impact on display typography in the early nineteenth century. Historian James Mosley describes a fat face as "designed like a naval broadside to sock its commercial message by poster to the unconsenting reader at a distance of ten or twenty yards by sheer aggressive weight of heavy metal."
The same style of letters was also widely used executed as custom lettering rather than as a typeface in the nineteenth century, in architecture, on tombstones and on signage. Versions were executed as roman or upright, italics and with designs inside the main bold strokes of the letter, such as a white line, patterns or decorations such as flowers or harvest scenes. They are different in style to the slab serif typefaces which appeared shortly afterwards, in which the serifs themselves are also made bold in weight.

Definition

describes the then new "fat face, or fat letter" as "a broad-stemmed letter". Thomas Ford writes that "any type with a very bold face is so called. Such type is much used in jobbing offices." Mosley explains that "while the thick lines were very thick, the thin ones remained the same - or in proportion, very thin indeed."

Historical background

Great changes took place in the style of printed letters available from type foundries in the hundred years after 1750. At the beginning of this period, fonts in Latin-alphabet printing were predominantly intended for book printing. The modern concept of text faces having companion bold fonts did not exist, although some titling capitals were quite bold; if a bolder effect was intended blackletter might be used.
From the arrival of roman type around 1475 to the late eighteenth century, relatively little development in letter design took place, as most fonts of the period were intended for body text, and they stayed relatively similar in design, generally ignoring local styles of lettering or new kinds of calligraphy.
Starting in the eighteenth century, typefounders developed what are now called transitional and then Didone types. These typefaces had daringly slender horizontals and serif details, catching up to the steely calligraphy and copperplate engraving styles of the period, that could show off the increasingly high quality of paper and printing technology of the period. In addition, these typefaces had a strictly vertical stress: without exception, the vertical lines were thicker than the horizontals, creating a much more geometric and modular design.
A major development of the early nineteenth century was the arrival of the printed poster and increasing use of printing for publicity and advertising material. This presumably caused a desire to make eye-catching new types of letters available for printing. Typefaces clearly intended for poster use-in particular for advertising stagecoach services-began to appear in the second half of the eighteenth century, introduced by the typefounders William Caslon II and Thomas Cottrell, although casting large metal type in sand for book titles was used for centuries before that. The typeface designs used were generally magnified body text forms, rather than a new departure, although they did establish one precedent later followed by both fat face typefaces and modern face types generally, that numerals were at a fixed height rather than the old text figures of variable height.

First appearances

Contemporary sources concurred that fat face letters were popularised by the typefounder Robert Thorne. He had been an apprentice to Thomas Cottrell, who pioneered large-size poster types, before setting up his own company, often called the Fann Street Foundry, in North London. According to Hansard, "the extremely bold and fat letter, now prevalent in job-printing, owes its introduction principally to Mr. Thorne, a spirited and successful letter-founder" and according to William Savage he "has been principally instrumental in the revolution that has taken place in Posting Bills by the introduction of fat types." Unfortunately few typeface specimen books from the period survive, making it difficult to confirm this. As to the clients for these types, Mosley writes that "it is tempting to see" the lottery agent Thomas Bish as a force behind them: Bish, a famous lottery promoter, was well-known for brash, startling advertising; a fat face in a later specimen book was simply showcased with the specimen word "Bish".
calligraphy.
According to Alfred F. Johnson, bold typefaces begin to appear in the 1800s with the more extreme fat face types appearing on advertisements for the state lottery from around 1810. The Fry Foundry's French Canon No. 2 of around 1806 has been described as a "semi-fat face"; in the opinion of Paul Barnes the letterforms in Thorne's specimen of 1803 are not yet true fat faces, only bold. Such letterforms were certainly used in signpainting and architectural lettering, although dating surviving examples is often difficult or impossible. Nicolete Gray in her book Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces describes the Fry Foundry's as an early paradigm but not quite the "fully developed fat face": "a superb, wide, generous letter, magnificently roman, but with a good deal less of order and more of pomp than Trajan's classic. It is the same style as the best English architectural lettering...it is not a modern face...this noble letter is merely transitional; by 1815 it has entirely disappeared from the specimen books. It is replaced by the fully developed fat face."

Nineteenth century

Fat faces rapidly became popular, and were also used in the USA, where they were used on gravestones.
Mosley has particularly praised those of Vincent Figgins' foundry : "exaggeration puts a huge strain on the designer if the result is to retain any coherence at all. Whoever cut the fat-faces of Vincent Figgins...handled the problems with what can only be described as elegance." Various varieties were made by different foundries, including condensed, wide and contra-italic versions.

Ornamented designs

Besides simple typefaces, variants were designed with patterns and decorations. These extended from simple inline designs to artwork such as flowers and harvest scenes. Decorated fat face typefaces were cut in wood and reproduced by dabbing or stereotype. Digital font designer Andy Clymer reports finding that it was more common for bold lettering on engraved maps to be decorated than it was to be plain: "whenever things would get heavier, they would often just get more ornamented…not filled in solid with some kind of ornamentation or decoration." One foundry particularly known for decorated designs was the London foundry of Louis John Pouchée. Pouchée was a Freemason, and some of his foundry's wood patterns, many of which survive, were inspired by Masonic emblems.

Twentieth century and later

Fat faces returned to some popularity in the twentieth century, in the UK as part of the Victoriana style promoted by John Betjeman and others in the 1930s. Post-nineteenth century fat face fonts include: