Typography Word of the Day: Stress

Refers to the thick-thin tendency of the strokes–an indication of typographic legacy

Stress, of course, can be good or bad. This sort is a good sort.

A word drawn in Uncial. This is highly-stressed, at about 45 degress, due to the slant of the pen-tip used to draw it. (courtesy Wikipedia)

When speaking typographically, of course, stress essentially means how the strokes in the individual glyph goes from thick to thin. Conventional wisdom holds that the thick-thin transitions in many well-known typefaces come from thier origins in the brush-stroke writings of calligraphers who operated before type became movable.

A good example can be found in a script called Uncial, a handy example of which can be seen in the illustration. This script was written with a pen with a wide-edge held at about a 45-degree angle. This is a highly-stressed example; if one drew a line through the thinnest parts of the counter of the minuscule “a” (or a notional “o” written with the same nib) one may indeed find that this line is about 45-degrees from the vertical. This is also termed a stress of 45 degrees.

Knowing where stress comes from we can make judgements about the modernity of a given font’s heritage given what the stress of the glyphs are: fonts such as Garamond are thought of as “old style” because they have stress which suggests being drawn with a calligrapher’s pen; fonts such as Paul Renner’s Futura, with thier strokes of universal thickness, can be correctly regarded as quite modern (without respect to the rather obvious name).