The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
New York vs Baskerville
Two transitional serifs separated by more than 260 years. Baskerville is John Baskerville's 1757 Birmingham book face, kept alive today through Monotype's 1923 revival and its digital descendants, while New York is Apple's 2019 serif companion to San Francisco, drawn for screens and shipped with four optical sizes.
New York is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Source Serif 4, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to New York → Baskerville is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Libre Baskerville, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Baskerville →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- New York was built for screens first: Apple cut it in four optical sizes (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) with six weights each, so it reads as a quiet text face at small sizes and a sharp display face at large ones.
- Baskerville carries the high stroke contrast, vertical axis, and sharply tapered serifs of eighteenth-century book printing, which can look spindly at small screen sizes unless you pick a text-tuned revival.
- New York is free to download but its license limits it to designing and developing software for Apple platforms, so it cannot be used on a general website or in print work.
- Baskerville's Monotype digitisation ships with macOS and is otherwise sold by Monotype per style or as a family, so using it on the web or in an app means buying desktop, web, or app licenses.
- Both are transitional serifs, but Baskerville's distinctive open-bottomed g, centre-serif-less W, and flourished italic capitals give it a historical texture New York deliberately smooths away.
New York
Reach for New York when you are building an iOS or macOS app that needs a serif in reading views or editorial layouts and you want optical sizes that stay legible from captions to headlines.
Baskerville
Reach for Baskerville for book interiors, print identities, and classic brand voices where its eighteenth-century elegance is the point and the licensing cost is worth paying.