Fig. 1:  The 15th century witnessed probably the most drastic revolution in typeface design

Thus came the first "revival wave," the first time when font artisans looked into the past in order to create better typefaces for the present.  The problem at that time was, however, that ancient Romans didn't have but uppercase, capital letters.  While adopting their designs for capitals, Renaissance typographers had to spend more time working on lowercase lettershapes.  As a basis, they took carolingian scripts that were common in early Middle age (before the blackletter had become dominant style across the Western Europe), but changed them significantly to match the Roman uppercase letters and to better adopt to Gutenberg's printing technology (that had just appeared). Due to its origin, this new font type was then named Antiqua, i.e. "Ancient."  (Later, the term Antiqua was used for all typefaces that appeared after the blackletter era, and the original Antiqua fonts came to be named "Old Style" or "Humanist Antiqua.")  Ironically, it is these first Antiqua exemplars (more precisely, their 20th century replicas) that have probably the most up-to-date and fashionable look for modern eye.  Enough to name such fonts as Garamond, Minion, Jenson; their light, spruce, stylish outline conveys the unfalsifiably humanist spirit, and these fonts are now very popular for all sorts of design jobs. Formally, the Old Style typefaces are characterized by fairly constant width of all strokes and serifs (typographers say that they have low contrast), complex non-linear shapes of strokes, and so-called "cove" serifs that form curves where they join the main strokes (the ends of serifs are also sometimes rounded).  The thick parts of strokes do not necessarily go vertically; look at the "O" or "e" in Village (Fig. 1, bottom), where the thickest parts of the outline are at bottom left and top right.  This feature, called diagonal stress, is an attempt to imitate handwriting of the scribes, who held their pens at some less-than-90 angle to the direction of the line. Italic varieties are especially interesting in Old Style fonts.  In those times, italic faces had just appeared and were thought of as independent fonts and not as companions to roman faces.  Therefore, authors of modern Old Style revivals had to artificially match independent designs, often created by different typographers and in different centuries, to compose a complete font family with roman and italic faces.

Fig. 2:  Examples of early (top) and late (bottom) Old Style italic faces

Early italic faces had a more handwritten look and a small slant, while later, 16th century italics feature more outspoken slant (sometimes capitals are less oblique than lowercase letters) and peculiarly narrowed letterforms.  In roman faces, the late Old Style design (of well-known fonts, Garamond belongs to this period) loses its diagonal stress, the contrast of strokes is increased, and strokes become more linear.  Overall, all the most peculiar (or at least, peculiar to a modern look) Antiqua features were ironed out with time---by the end of 17th century, a new type of font design was emerging.