Many designers rely on san serif fonts to give there designs a contemporary look.  They have become so widely used that serif fonts are often not even considered as an option.

This article will focus on the different types of serif typefaces and will hopefully provide some insight on how to enhance the uniqueness of your designs by using them.

Let's start with the slab serif typefaces since they most closely resemble sans serif typefaces and because they are the most easily identifiable due to their unique appearance.

Slab serif typefaces share many similarities in style with sans serif typefaces.  They are decorated with blocky serifs that have very little to no contrast between thick and thin.

The vertical and horizontal strokes as well as the serifs are often identical in thickness which give the characters a very stable and professional yet somewhat charming feel.

My current favorites are Serifa, Caecilia, and the most commonly used Rockwell.

Old style serif typefaces have a couple features that make them so interesting. They are characterized by their diagonal stress and subtle contrast between thick and thin.  This means the thinnest parts of the letters are at an angle rather than on the horizontal.

Serif typefaces classified as old style excel in readibility and have a classic, old school look.

Some popular old style serif typefaces are Adobe Jenson, Garamond, Goudy Old Style, Palatino, and my favorite of the bunch, Bembo.

There is not much to be said about transitional serif typefaces without comparing them to the old style and modern serifs.

Transitional serif typefaces have a difference in strokes that lies somewhere in between the low contrast of old style and the high contrast of modern serif typefaces.

Three of the most widely used transitional serif typefaces are Times New Roman, Caslon, and Baskerville.

I'll let you guess which of the three I find not suited to a unique design solution.

The final type of serif I am going to talk about is the modern serif.  These typefaces have a very pronounced contrast between strokes as well as larger, more elaborate serifs.

The extreme difference between vertical and horizontal line thickness renders modern serif typefaces harder to read than transitional or old style serifs.

Kepler and Bodoni are good examples of modern serif typefaces.

How does this apply?

The best advice I can give you is to try out as many typefaces as you can to familiarize yourself with the feel of each one.

If you try a typeface like Garamond, which has an old style serif, and it gives your design a look that you feel is too stale, try a more recent one that lies within the transitional or modern serif typefaces.

Also, slab serifs are a very good and simple way to give a design life without using a sans serif font and without having to worry about the plethora of other serif typefaces out there.I hope you learned a little something about the differences in types of serifs.  They can even be subcategorized further but I'll save that for another time.