SLAB SERIFS: How do I get your attention?

We are locat­ed in the sec­ond half of the 19th cen­tu­ry. Peo­ple from rur­al areas are mov­ing mas­sive­ly to cities where they are more like­ly to make mon­ey, as the sec­ond indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion was at its peak; after the inven­tion of the inter­nal com­bus­tion engine, the expan­sion of the rail­ways and the increas­ing num­ber of fac­to­ries that pro­duced con­sumer goods. We are in the midst of a vibrant city life that offers new types of enter­tain­ment: cir­cus, wrestling, rac­ing, now also acces­si­ble to ordi­nary peo­ple. To spread the infor­ma­tion faster, posters were cre­at­ed to inform peo­ple. New fonts have emerged that have instant­ly caught the atten­tion of the view­er. Most of them were bold, some­times they had square ser­ifs (those are the tails that pro­trude left and right from the let­ters) and they just screamed from the posters. Since this was the time when they dis­cov­ered the ancient cul­ture of Egypt, they were referred to as Egypt­ian scripts, although they have noth­ing in com­mon with the hieroglyphics.

We will cre­ate a plate with a typ­i­cal let­ter / inscrip­tion, from a 19th cen­tu­ry poster.