Design Nomenclature / Type

Vox-ATypI

Also called Vox classification, Vox system

Maximilien Vox's 1954 nine-class scheme, adopted by ATypI in 1962 and extended to eleven. ATypI withdrew it in 2021: it conflates historical period, formal feature and technology; its later classes are incoherent grab-bags; and it treats non-Latin scripts as an afterthought bolted on at the end.

A ten-cell grid labelled with the French class names from Humane through Fracture, each cell setting a capital A and lowercase a. Each cell prints its substitution: seven of the ten named faces resolve to Georgia, Snell Roundhand to Georgia Italic, Clarendon to Courier New and Univers to Arial. A footnote says cells sharing a face show one design, not the class's — so the grid lists the classes and admits it cannot draw them.

In practice

Its class names — garalde, didone, mécane — survive as useful shorthand and are worth knowing. The system as a taxonomy does not; nothing has replaced it, and that is the honest state of the art.

Origin

The class names are portmanteaus of the designers who defined them: Garalde from Garamond and Aldus, Didone from Didot and Bodoni, Réale from the Romain du Roi.

How this term connects

BlackletterDidoneGaraldeHumanist serifScriptSlab serifTransitionalVox-ATypI
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