The lowercase f and t had bracketed(!) crossbars and some of the numerals are rather bizarre. You end up either allowing the serifs to overlap, or leaving unsightly gaps between letters.Īetna also had some truly weird-looking characters. This looks great when you see an isolated character, but it makes it difficult to get nice, even spacing when setting words. For some reason, they were unusually large. There were some design elements in the original wood typefaces that caused problems, particularly the serifs. Because the brackets on the serifs are so deep-going all the way to the middle of the stroke-it means that strokes that don’t have serifs look too thin, so I had to compensate by making them a little thicker. The style itself poses some technical challenges. It seemed to be a missed opportunity for some kind of revival, and the idea of doing it myself was in the back of my mind for a long time. Herb Lubalin used a condensed version of it a few times. The Aetna style seemed to have fallen out of fashion after the late nineteenth century, except on U.S. currency, complete with drop shadows, outlines, and shading. There are very few modern typefaces in this style, other than copies of the 1880s wood type, or faces made to look like the engraving on U.S. The wood types in this style had another distinctive characteristic-beautiful foxtail terminals instead of ball terminals on lowercase letters.Īetna letterforms as they existed in wood type, with triangular serifs and foxtail terminals.ĭesign by Herb Lubalin using Aetna-style lettering for the 1973 film adaptation of The Iceman Cometh. I learned that the style was called “Aetna” in the early eighties after I got a copy of Rob Roy Kelly’s book, American Wood Type: 1828-1900. But it has some distinctive characteristics, such as the really deep brackets on the serifs and the triangular serifs on the arms of the E, F, L, and T.
At first glance, it looks like a 19th century “ fat face”. I don’t remember exactly when I first noticed it, but I’ve always liked the the style of engraved lettering used on U.S.
Detail of engraved lettering on a modern U.S.
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