Goudy Old Style is a popular text typeface with its own recognizable visual style. Its light texture and closely spaced letters make it work for text in relatively large sizes; its hand-tooled details are most apparent at larger sizes in titles and headlines or in small blocks of large text. The Italic should not be used for more than a few words. The Bold weight is especially effective in titles, whether set in sentence case or all in capital letters.
Goudy Old Style has very traditional letter shapes, yet it’s not based on any historical typeface. Its round curves and thin strokes give it a woven appearance in a page of text. One of its distinctive features is its diamond-shaped dots on the ‘I’ and ‘j’.
Prolific type designer Fred Goudy created Goudy Old Style as a metal typeface in 1915 for American Type Founders (ATF). Morris Fuller Benton then designed Goudy Bold for ATF in 1916.
