027: Thou shall not slope a roman font to create an italic font

Commentary I’m always amazed when a designer takes a word and, having set it in a roman cut of a typeface, then forces it to be italic by sloping it at an angle using the DTP software. This, of course, is not a true italic, but merely a word leaning over. A giveaway for spotting that this has been done is the fact that no lowercase italics possess a double-story “a.” Although true italics retain many of the core typeface’s design principles, they also include changes to each letter’s strokes. When a character is forced over, however, it displays none of these alterations in the letterform. With italic, a more hand-drawn, cursive approach is evident, with some of the characters linking together and more ligatures being incorporated into the cut. Ther....PD