Romain du Roi is literally a style of type that means “King’s Roman”. While this style of type may look like any old stuffy font at first glance the typestyle created upon Louis XIV request in 1692 actually differs from the type before it. The request can be seen as part of the transition from older styles of type, usually known as “Old style”, to a newer more “transitional” style. The difference between oldstyle and transitional type fonts is often unnoticed by many because of the fact that both type styles are serif type-styles(serifs being the little decorative bits attached to letters as seen on the M above). One of the major differences between transitional type styles and the oldstyle fonts is that they have less natural “stress”. Stress being the angle that a font naturally rests at un-italicized( that funky little I you may see in Microsoft word).

One of the most unique features of this type-style as opposed to the ones before it is how it is created. The artists used a very mathematical systematic approach to creating this type-style. Each letter was carefully crafted on a grid piece by piece, as opposed to the older styles not being not nearly as specific. Something to note when considering that this type style wasn’t as inspired by older hand written type and more by science is that King Louis XIV had a scientific committee design the style and the style was developed during the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which had a pretty strong aversion to tradition. So of course instead of creating a new handwritten type it was much edgier to use 48 by 48 grids on each letter of the alphabet.