Pilcrow Pabulum

Helvetica Rotalic by Filip Tydén

I brought up the word ‘rotalic’ in a conversation with my old boss, Richard Kegler, when we got together for his birthday and I was surprised to find that this term is not yet common parlance, so here’s a new (and really useful) typographic term for all of you to incorporate into your everyday vocabulary. I myself first learned of this useful term from the seminal typography blog i love typography.
Apparently, the following article was originally found on Wikipedia, but it has since been scrapped, and I had to rescue it from Wikibin. I an effort to preserve and promote such knowledge, I’m reposting the thing here:

Rotalic

Rotalic is a rotation applied to a typeface. It is a variation similar to the oblique type and the italic type as the vertical lines of a glyph are inclined, but it differs from these other variations in keeping the original shape of the characters. Therefore, any typeface can have a rotalic version.

The name rotalic is a combination of roman (generally used to refer to normal typefaces) and italic (generally used to refer to slanted ones).

Examples

Garamond Rotalic via 'It's Nice That'

Usage

The rotalic typeface is mainly used to highlight a text or as a display font. It can fit the same semantic purposes of the italic and oblique typefaces (emphasis, titles, foreign words), though examples of its usage are still rare.

Alternative Representations

Counter-clockwise Rotalic

The rotation is applied in the opposite direction.

Extra Rotalic

A rotalic typeface is usually rotated between 7 and 10 degrees. The Extra Rotalic have rotations from 15 to 20 degrees.

History

The rotalic was introduced as a typeface variation by Filip Tydén in 2007. The first typeface to have a rotalic version was the Helvetica Textbook, which was used in a series of posters at the Royal College of Art in London.

Top: One of the first posters set in rotalic by Filip Tydén.