The old clichés about “neutral” typefaces never seem to apply to serifs, only sans serifs. Untitled Serif started as an intellectual challenge, but slowly became a practical goal. Sometimes (as a typographer) you simply want a serif that sets text well; something that doesn’t feel fashionably new or ironically old, but a typeface that just does the job.

Most new typefaces are imbued with layers of history, aesthetic associations and cultural signifiers. Amplified by heavy doses of spin and marketing, these layers are elucidated with the inevitable “design information” blurbs — an accepted (and expected) part of selling and buying a typeface. To lend a new typeface prestige, these blurbs reveal the old specimens that influenced it, and name-drop typographers and foundries long dead. They detail the “engineering challenges” the typeface has heroically overcome — usually small printing sizes, low pixel resolution or limited horizontal/vertical space. Contemporary typefaces are touted as the complete aesthetic and technical package.

But what if you don’t have any special technical requirements, or you want to avoid specific historical connotations? What if you just need to set text with something… utterly normal?

It’s hard to determine what a “normal” serif is. Venetian, Garalde, modern, slab, sharp, blunt, long, short — each has its own place in history, its own aesthetic associations. For me, the most “normal” serif genre is the old style. In practice, this is quite a vague term. Some foundries used it to describe French Renaissance (Garamond) styles, while others used it to describe typefaces that don’t really fit neatly into other obvious categories. But the ones I’m thinking of are those post-Caslon types that are shorn of any clear Venetian gestures or weird of-the-time reinterpretations of a style. They are plain jobbing typefaces — over time, many hands have drawn and redrawn these letters into comfortable, unobtrusive forms.