Typefaces and Visual Details for Teaching Materials

January 5, 2008 2:26 PM

Need suggestions for graphic design elements related to 3 historical periods: early modern England, Neoclassical France, and the US in the cold war '50s.

For some teaching materials I'd like to choose appropriate (not necessarily strictly historically accurate) typefaces (ideally one for headings, one for body text) for each of these periods. I'd prefer free-to-cheap but I'm willing to invest a little if it's worth it.

I'd also like some small visual details to use as low-key accents, like lines across a header or section dividers (if I was doing classical Greece,for example, there's lots of line drawings of Doric columns, etc.).

This is for a drama course, so we're basically talking about the age of Marlowe, the age of Moliere, and the age of Tennessee Williams. IANAGD but I'd like to keep the three bodies of content clean and readable but visually distinct. Happy to hear any other visual thoughts (color palettes, etc).

posted by Mngo to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

We recently set The Merry Wives of Windsor in ~1956. The fonts used are Jungle Juice (free) and Century Gothic (which is on every computer I've ever turned on). We stuck with the idea of candy colors - the green you see there, and pink, as well as robin's egg blue with chrome details. The darker blue there you see was taken from a 1950's telephone (I can't find it again on the web but if you really want the hex I can get it for you).
posted by Medieval Maven at 2:36 PM on January 5, 2008

A classmate of mine would type up cover pages for his Government classes in CarbonType to give it a Cold War feel.
posted by niles at 2:39 PM on January 5, 2008

For historical or retro fonts, I usually turn to Letterhead Fonts, a fantastic website with lots of rich, colorful examples.
posted by bristolcat at 4:13 PM on January 5, 2008

Also, these Cuts and Caps from Briar Press are interesting little visual elements that may be similar to what you are looking for as accents. I think they are rather wonderful, myself.
posted by bristolcat at 4:20 PM on January 5, 2008

Best answer: Fun project! For the 17th century, Chapbook looks promising and includes a set of dingbats of things like animals, crowns, and cosmic elements.
posted by kittydelsol at 4:36 PM on January 5, 2008

1950's popular typefaces: Futura, Craw Modern, Monterey Script, or any kind of hand lettering, especially paired with something contrasting and clean.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:56 PM on January 5, 2008

Response by poster: Belatedly finishing this off--I wound up using Day Roman for 17c, Garamond for neoclassical France, and a typewriter font called Liecester for the 1950s (for those scoring at home, a-temporal text on the syllabus and elsewhere was mostly Georgia with some headings in Trebuchet--chosen because they looked good in the html version of the syllabus).

It was kind of goofy, but I actually hooked the literary history of these periods to the history of printing somewhat, talking about bookmaking in England, Garamond himself, and how distinctively "modern" it still was in the 1950s to write on typewriter.

Anyway, thanks for the tips!
posted by Mngo at 5:51 AM on August 15, 2008