The differing strokes between the two modern fonts create a visual balance and aesthetic ideal for digital media. Their comparatively wide, balanced weight and lack of serif eliminate any visual noise from the reader’s eye, allowing the reader to focus solely on the words, and, more importantly, the message.įurther, modern serif fonts and sans serif fonts, when used alongside each other in design, particularly in graphic or web design, pair wonderfully together. Oftentimes, sans serif typefaces and fonts are considered more accessible in legibility and readability to readers - think of popular sans serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Avenir, Calibri, and Open Sans. They’re also marked by ball-end terminals at the end of some letters, most notably on lowercase “r” - though it’s not unheard of to see these circular elements on uppercase letters as well. They exhibit vertical stress within their letterforms, meaning that each glyph stands straight up without any sort of horizontal tilting.

Modern serif fonts are marked by different weights between strokes and have thin unbracketed serifs. Once you know what to look for, you’ll be able to spot a modern typeface easily. This family of modern fonts shares common DNA with each other and have distinct traits that set them apart from other categories of typography. Gone are the blotchy serifs of the transitional fonts - more advanced printing technology makes crisp lines and delicate features possible. These typefaces exist thanks to the evolution of printing processes. Typographers formally define a modern typeface by tracing its roots back to the 18th century. Though the term “modern typeface” may bring to mind futuristic fonts or a minimalist font like Helvetica, neither is considered a modern typeface in the ‘traditional sense’ of graphic design. Modern typefaces are sometimes referred to as Didone or Neoclassical. While they may not officially fall into the modern fonts category, they’re closely related, meaning they might be the look your client wants when they say, “Make it modern.” The evolution of modern typefaces Popular serifs like Courier, Bondi Egyptian, and Rockwell may come to mind however, these slab serifs aren’t categorized as modern typefaces, despite being extremely popular across the web. Slab serifs differ in one major way - they do not have a noticeable difference in stroke weights.

To the untrained eye, it’s hard to discern between the slab serifs and modern typefaces because they both have vertical stress and thin serifs.

Modern typeface definition