Recently I started examining Nina Stössingers typeface Nordvest italic and I couldn't help but to fall in love. I notice things like in the n how she combines what looks like two styles into one so collaboratively, it made me question, why are there no combinations of italic and "normal" faces. I mean the way an italic slants and cursifies, am I just out for lunch ? I don't know — I just think it would look cool to take such unique features of italics and make them a little less fluid. I drew up an experiment and I'm sorry to Nina for this but I just wanted to see how it would look for reference. Get what I'm saying ? I also used Museo to show the effect but I don't think it works perhaps because it's not organic enough. I know that breaks the rules — just a thought.
Comments
Perhaps the earliest explicit example is the one in Seria.
http://www.martinmajoor.com/3.2_seria_article_crewdson.html
There's a lot of stuff on this on Typophile.
Oh, and Nordvest is totally amazing.
Maybe that’s because many blackletter subgenres including fraktur, schwabacher or civilité are cursive by nature. Here’s the ‘n’ from Burte-Fraktur, for comparison:
And yes, the Dutch tend to love it.
Anyway, more firmly on-topic:
Especially in small running text readers need a much stronger visual clue to reliably discern emphasis than a construction principle that often results in minimal actual difference. Slant is bullet-proof there. Upright Italic sacrifices slant essentially to push dogma about personal expression. This is anti-Design.
I spoke on the theoretical side of the story. Like you, I would always look for best typographical solution.