Sans-serif in the context of Minimalism

Block letters (known as printscript, manuscript, print writing, printing or ball and stick in academics) are a sans-serif (or "gothic") style of writing Latin script in which the letters are individual glyphs, with no joining.

Elementary education in English-speaking countries typically introduces children to the literacy of handwriting using a method of block letters (commonly referred to as manuscript by educators), which may later advance to cursive (joined) penmanship. The policy of teaching cursive in American elementary schools has varied over time, from strict endorsement such as the Palmer method in the early 20th century, to removal by Common Core in 2010, to being reinstated.

Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.

Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th-century (1890s) typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk and other German and Swiss designs. Its use became a hallmark of the International Typographic Style that emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the most popular typefaces of the mid-20th century. Over the years, a wide range of variants have been released in different weights, widths, and sizes, as well as matching designs for a range of non-Latin alphabets. Notable features of Helvetica as originally designed include a high x-height, the termination of strokes on horizontal or vertical lines and an unusually tight spacing between letters, which combine to give it a dense, solid appearance.

Fraktur (German: [fʁakˈtuːɐ̯] ) is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly visible, and often emphasized; in this way it is often contrasted with the curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces where the letters are designed to flow and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion. The word "Fraktur" derives from Latin frāctūra ("a break"), built from frāctus, passive participle of frangere ("to break"), which is also the root for the English word "fracture". In non-professional contexts, the term "Fraktur" is sometimes misused to refer to all blackletter typefaces – while Fraktur typefaces do fall under that category, not all blackletter typefaces exhibit the Fraktur characteristics described above.

Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. Designed as a contribution on the New Frankfurt-project, it is based on geometric shapes, especially the circle, similar in spirit to the Bauhaus design style of the period. It was developed as a typeface by Bauersche Gießerei, in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's seminal Erbar typeface.

Although Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus, he shared many of its idioms and believed that a modern typeface should express modern models, rather than be a revival of a previous design. Renner's design rejected the approach of most previous sans-serif designs (now often called grotesques), which were based on the models of sign painting, condensed lettering, and nineteenth-century serif typefaces, in favour of simple geometric forms: near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. It is based on strokes of near-even weight, which are low in contrast. The lowercase has tall ascenders, which rise above the cap line, and uses nearly-circular, single-storey forms for the "a" and "g", the former previously more common in handwriting than in printed text. The uppercase characters present proportions similar to those of classical Roman capitals. The original metal type showed extensive adaptation of the design to individual sizes, and several divergent digitisations have been released by different companies.

In typography, a serif (/ˈsɛrɪf/) is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface (or serifed typeface), and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" (in German, grotesk) or "Gothic" (although this often refers to blackletter type as well). In German usage, the term Antiqua is used more broadly for serif types.

Serif typefaces can be broadly classified into one of four subgroups: Old-style, Transitional, Didone, and Slab serif, in order of first emergence.

Source Sans (known as Source Sans Pro before 2021) is a sans-serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt, released by Adobe in 2012. It is the first open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License.

The typeface is inspired by the forms of the American Type Founders' gothics by Morris Fuller Benton, such as News Gothic, Lightline Gothic and Franklin Gothic, modified with both a larger x-height and character width and more humanist-influenced italic forms. It is available in seven weights (Regular, ExtraLight, Light, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Black) in upright and italic styles, and is also available as a variable font with continuous weight values from 200 to 900. The typeface has wide language support for Latin script, including Western and Eastern European languages, Vietnamese, pinyin romanization of Chinese, and Navajo. Adobe's training material highlights it as having a more consistent colour on the page than the rather condensed News Gothic it is based on.

Myriad is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems. Myriad was intended as a neutral, general-purpose typeface that could fulfill a range of uses and have a form easily expandable by computer-aided design to a large range of weights and widths.

Myriad is known for its usage by Apple Inc., replacing Apple Garamond as Apple's corporate font from April 29, 2002, to January 24, 2017. Myriad is easily distinguished from other sans-serif fonts due to its "y" descender (tail) and slanting "e" cut.

Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin in 1898. "Akzidenz" indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tickets and forms, as opposed to fine printing, and "grotesque" was a standard name for sans-serif typefaces at the time.

Originating during the late nineteenth century, Akzidenz-Grotesk belongs to a tradition of general-purpose, unadorned sans-serif types that had become dominant in German printing during the nineteenth century. Relatively little-known for a half-century after its introduction, it achieved iconic status in the post-war period as the preferred typeface of many Swiss graphic designers in what became called the "International" or "Swiss" design style which became popular across the Western world in the 1950s and 1960s. Its simple, neutral design has also influenced many later typefaces. It has sometimes been sold as Standard in English-speaking countries, and a variety of digital versions have been released by Berthold and other companies.

The International Typographic Style is a systemic approach to graphic design that emerged during the 1930s–1950s but continued to develop internationally. It is considered the basis of the Swiss style. It expanded on and formalized the modernist typographic innovations of the 1920s that emerged in part out of art movements such as Constructivism (Russia), De Stijl (The Netherlands) and at the Bauhaus (Germany). The International Typographic Style has had profound influence on graphic design as a part of the modernist movement, impacting many design-related fields including architecture and art. It emphasizes simplicity, clarity, readability, and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica, and flush left, ragged right text. The style is also associated with a preference for photography in place of illustrations or drawings. Many of the early International Typographic Style works featured typography as a primary design element in addition to its use in text, and it is for this that the style is named. The influences of this graphic movement can still be seen in design strategy and theory to this day.

Ludwig & Mayer was a German type foundry in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Many important designers worked for the Ludwig and Mayer type foundry, including Heinrich Jost, Karlgeorg Hoefer, Helmut Matheis, and most notably Jakob Erbar, whose Erbar Book was one of the first geometric sans-serif typefaces, predating both Paul Renner's Futura and Rudolf Koch's Kabel by some five years. Starting in 1925, Ludwig & Mayer types were distributed in the United States by Continental Type Founders Association. When the foundry ceased operations in 1984, rights to the typefaces was transmitted to the Neufville Typefoundry.

Erbar or Erbar-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface in the geometric style, one of the first designs of this kind released as type. Designer Jakob Erbar's aim was to design a printing type which would be free of all individual characteristics, possess thoroughly legible letter forms, and be a purely typographic creation. He concluded that this could only work if the type form was developed from a fundamental element, the circle. Erbar-Grotesk was developed in stages; Erbar wrote that he had originally sketched out the design in 1914 but had been prevented from working on it due to the war. The original version of Erbar was released in 1926, following Erbar's "Phosphor" titling capitals of 1922 which are very similar in design.

The typeface first explored Bauhaus geometric letterforms with centered text and compact layouts. Under Jakob Erbar's influence, it then evolved to look similar to Bauhaus principles and asymmetrical design of New Typography.

The near-close near-front unrounded vowel, or near-high near-front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɪ⟩ (a Latin small capital I). The International Phonetic Association advises serifs on the symbol's ends. Some sans-serif fonts do meet this typographic specification. Prior to 1989, there was an alternate IPA symbol for this sound, ⟨ɩ⟩ (a Latin iota); use of this symbol is no longer sanctioned by the IPA, though it may still be found in some modern writings.

The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association defines [ɪ] as a mid-centralized (lowered and centralized) close front unrounded vowel (transcribed [i̽] or [ï̞]), and the current official IPA name of the vowel transcribed with the symbol ⟨ɪ⟩ is a near-close near-front unrounded vowel.