Serif

The serifs are the little feet and flags: the horizontals at the bottom of an n, the flick at the top of a t, the brackets where a stem meets them. They are the oldest surviving feature in Latin type, carried over from the way Roman stonecutters finished a chiselled stroke, and they survived because they do something useful — they sit on the baseline and give the eye a rail to run along.

That is why serif faces are the long-standing default for printed text. It is a convention rather than a law: the research that supposedly proves serifs are more readable does not, and a good sans set well beats a bad serif every time. What is true is that the convention exists, so a serif page reads as considered and a sans page reads as modern, and half of choosing type is knowing what a reader already expects.

The category is broad enough to be nearly useless on its own. An old-style face like Garamond, a transitional like Baskerville and a Didone like Bodoni are all serifs and share almost nothing else, which is why this archive tags the style as well as the category.