Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles.[1] Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.[2][3]
Type designers have described oblique type as less organic and calligraphic than italics, which in some situations may be preferred. Contemporary type designer Jeremy Tankard stated that he had avoided a true italic 'a' and 'e' in his design Bliss due to finding them "too soft", while Hoefler and Frere-Jones have described obliques as more "keen and insistent".[4][5]
- ^ Tracy, Walter. Letters of Credit. pp. 61–5.
- ^ Simonson, Mark. "Fake vs. True Italics". Retrieved 23 September 2014.
- ^ Simonson, Mark. "Ain't What ITC Used To Be". Typographica. Retrieved 10 November 2017.
- ^ Tankard, Jeremy. "Bliss". Jeremy Tankard Typography. Archived from the original on 17 July 2014. Retrieved 16 December 2016.
- ^ Frere-Jones, Tobias; Hoefler, Jonathan. "Whitney". Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Retrieved 16 December 2016.