i'm on a roll: i've got to the Rs

I'm supposed to be posting two fonts every two weeks, but I'm afraid I've lost track of where I am on the schedule. I know there were some weeks that I skipped when I had some difficult letters further back in the alphabet and I was struggling to find fonts that I'm prepared to post up here. And now I've hit a bit of a winning streak where I'm spoilt for choice. So, first up is a perfectly appropriate follow-on from last week's Quadra:

Unusually for this series I can't give you the name of the designer, for it's attributed only to the Monotype Design Studio, and first appeared in 1933. However, it can trace its roots back to the London type founder, Vincent Figgins, who released the first successful slab, or 'square', serif typeface in 1815. Unlike classical serif faces, this design had blunt, straight-edged serifs and almost no thick-thin contrast in the stroke weights. The face was a cap-only design called Antique and was offered in three sizes.

About the same time, William Caslon IV brought out a mono-weight sans serif typeface called Egyptian. This term was soon used to label all slab serif typefaces, and is still in use today.

By 1825, more slab serif typefaces appeared, now with lowercase characters. The popularity of these designs waxed and then waned again during the first three decades of the twentieth century, until geometric sans serif typefaces became popular. Soon, new slab serif typefaces patterned after geometric shapes began to be released. The Rockwell family, first issued in 1933, is Monotype’s answer to this typographic style.

Rockwell's precursor was a design called Litho Antique, produced by the Inland Type Foundry in 1910. American Type Founders revived the face in the 1920s, with Morris Fuller Benton cutting several new weights. The Monotype Corporation produced its version of Rockwell in 1933; unfortunately, some of the literature erroneously referred to it as Stymie Bold, thereby creating confusion that still exists today.

And next is Rotis, designed by the great Otl Aicher in 1989. It's a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles, for a total of 17 weights including italics. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Rotis has become something of a European zeitgeist. This highly rationalised yet intriguing type is seen everywhere, from book text to billboards. The blending of sans with serif was almost revolutionary when Aicher first started working on the idea. Traditionalists felt that discarding serifs from some forms and giving unusual curves and edges to others might be something new, but not something better. But Rotis was based on those principles, and has proven itself not only highly legible, but also remarkably successful on a wide scale.

Rotis is easily identifiable in all its styles by the cap C and lowercase c and e: note the hooked tops, serifless bottoms, and underslung body curves. Aicher was a long-time teacher of design and had many years of practical experience as a graphic designer. He named Rotis after the small village in southern Germany where he lived.