What are serifs?

You may have noticed that some typefaces have tiny legs or bars attached to their glyphs. These visual elements, serifs, have a specific purpose, and in this post, we will discuss the history of serifs, when you might want to serifed fonts, and when to avoid them in your designs.

Why were serifs invented?

It has been speculated that the first serifs were invented out of necessity. Suppose you look at statues from the Roman era. In that case, you might notice their usage of serifs as the visual elements were used as terminators to allow easier cutting of characters into stone. You would cut the serif end first so that the remaining cuts would terminate neatly. In other words, serifs likely exist because of practical reasons. Since then, the original characters used by the Romans were modeled as a typeface called Trajan pictured in the image below. Trajan borrowed the characters from a roughly 2000-year-old column in Rome commemorating emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars.

Baskerville is an example of a transitional serif typeface from the 1750s. It modernized older shapes, and the typeface is still prevalent in book design.

Further evolution of serifs occurred in the 19th century as Slab Serif was introduced. The development of Slab Serif was motivated by the prevalence of printing press technologies and typewriters where each character had to be modeled on its own leading to monospaced fonts.

If you want to see a sans serif font vs. a serifed font, consider comparing Publica Sans and Publica Slab. The mood of the fonts is quite different and you can use this to your benefit especially in design work.

Why are serifs still in use?

The simple answer is that serifs are still in use as they may be more legible given they provide hints for readers to allow faster comprehension. A classic example is to pick up a typeface and consider characters, such as “l”, “I”, “1”. Leaving serifs out leads to a design challenge in communicating the difference between the characters. Unfortunately, it is not always this straightforward as other studies imply that sans serif (read: “without serif”) can be the more legible option for children. The same applies to people with low vision, and the same applies even to digital displays.

Serifs have their uses, especially in print and programming. The main benefit is that serifs allow a font designer to effectively address differences between characters when designing a monospaced font. It is even possible to selectively apply ideas from serifs to sans serif fonts to address specific design problems related to specific characters (i, j, r, and l are good examples). In monospaced fonts, serifs allow occupying space to avoid creating too large gaps between characters since the available space is fixed to a certain width.

Bonus serif - flare serifs

Although it is not considered a real serif, the so-called flare serif is an interesting special case as it achieves a similar effect by varying width without introducing a serif. Optima is a good example of a typeface implementing this technique.

Conclusion

Serifs go way back, and they still have their uses even today. Even if you might not use serifs fonts always, they have specific strengths, and they can be instrumental in monospaced typefaces to improve the legibility of characters through additional hints to allow faster character recognition, not to mention the space-filling benefits of serifs. Now that you know what serifs are, it isn’t easy to unsee them.

If you want to discover more serif typefaces, see Wikipedia’s serif-related categories.