Welcome to the early 1800s and the birth of the Slab Serif, otherwise known as Egyptian, Square Serif, Mechanical or Mécanes. What’s with the name Egyptian? Upon Napoleon’s return from a three year Egyptian expedition and publication in 1809 of Description de l’Égypt, Egypt was all the rage, and it appears that type founders simply used a term that was on everyone’s lips, a term that was in vogue. The nomenclature has absolutely nothing to do with Egyptian Hieroglyph Slab Serifs—because there’s no such thing.Like the industrial revolution, the Slab Serif was born in Britain, and was no doubt inspired by a new wave of advertising, and those beefy letter forms that could be found on just about every billboard, pamphlet, and poster of the day. Until this time, type was designed to serve one purpose—it was designed for long stretches of texts, for books. But with mechanisation, and major innovations in printing technology (e.g. the Steam Press, 1814), advertisers in particular were looking for a type that stood out from crowd; a type that shouted, look at me! Thus was born the the display face—type for use at large sizes, for short bursts of copy.Those posters were a riot of big type, often a half-dozen different styles on a single page. If the Didones are a lissom Audrey Hepburn, then the Slab Serifs are those guys one sees all too often on construction sites around the globe—trousers half-way down their posteriors. What I’m getting at is that the early Slab Serifs weren’t discreet. They were designed to be noticed.
The Slab Serif or Egyptian is also home to further subsets of typeface styles, like the Fat Faces which are fundamentally Didones (or Moderns) on steroids. Take a Modern style typeface, give its thicker strokes even more weight, triangulate some of those serifs, and you have a Fat Face. You might be familiar with types like Poster Bodoni. Bodoni is of course a Modern style type but, carrying all that extra weight, it’s a Fat Face. The Fat Face, then, is basically an Obese Didone.