Didone () is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the nineteenth. It is characterized by: Narrow and unbracketed (hairline) serifs. (The serifs have a nearly constant width along their length.) Vertical orientation of weight axes. (The vertical strokes of letters are thick.) Strong contrast between thick and thin lines. (Horizontal parts of letters are thin in comparison to the vertical parts.) Some stroke endings show ball terminals. (Many lines end in a teardrop or circle shape, rather than a plain wedge-shaped serif.) An unornamented, "modern" appearance. The term "Didone" is a 1954 coinage, part of the Vox-ATypI classification system. It amalgamates the surnames of the famous typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, whose efforts defined the style around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The category was known in the period of its greatest popularity as modern or modern face, in contrast to "old-style" or "old-face" designs, which date to the Renaissance period. History Didone types were developed by printers including Firmin Didot, Giambattista Bodoni and Justus Erich Walbaum, whose eponymous typefaces, Bodoni, Didot, and Walbaum, remain in use today. Their goals were to create more elegant designs of printed text, developing the work of John Baskerville in Birmingham and Fournier in France towards a more extreme, precise design with intense precision and contrast, that could show off the increasingly refined printing and paper-making technologies of the period. (Lettering along these lines was already popular with calligraphers and copperplate engravers, but much printing in western Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century used typefaces designed in the sixteenth century or relatively similar, conservative designs.) These trends were also accompanied by changes to page layout conventions and the abolition of the long s. Typefounder Talbot Baines Reed, speaking in 1890 called the new style of the early nineteenth century "trim, sleek, gentlemanly, somewhat dazzling". Their designs were popular, aided by the striking quality of Bodoni's printing, and were widely imitated. In Britain and America, the lasting influence of Baskerville led to the creation of types such as the Bell, Bulmer and Scotch Roman designs, in the same spirit as Didone fonts from the continent but less geometric; these like Baskerville's type are often called transitional serif designs. Later developments of the latter class have been called Scotch Modern and show increasing Didone influence. Didone