For the Royal Navy Frigate, see HMS Egyptienne (1799)

HMS Egyptienne (1799)

Égyptienne was a French frigate launched at Toulon in 1799. Her first service was in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1801, in which the British captured her at Alexandria. She famously carried the Rosetta Stone to Woolwich, and then the Admiralty commissioned her into the Royal Navy as the 40-gun...

Egyptienne is a serif

Serif

In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface . A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”...

 typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

 belonging to the classification slab serif

Slab serif

In typography, a slab serif typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular , or rounded . Slab serif typefaces generally have no bracket...

, or Egyptian, where the serifs are unbracketed and similar in weight to the horizontal strokes of the letters. Egyptienne was designed in 1956 by Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger is one of the prominent typeface designers of the 20th century, who continues to influence the direction of digital typography in the 21st century; he is best known for creating the typefaces Univers and Frutiger.-Early life:Adrian Frutiger was born in Unterseen, Canton of Bern, as...

 for the Deberny & Peignot

Deberny & Peignot

Deberny & Peignot was a French type foundry, created by the 1923 merger of Peignot foundry and the Laurent & Deberny foundry. It was bought by the Haas Type Foundry of Switzerland in 1972, which in turn was merged into D...

Foundry and was the first new text face created for the process of photocomposition.

The x-height is high, and some lowercase characters, especially a and e bear comparison with other Frutiger typefaces, especially Meridien and Serifa. Egyptienne shows historical influence of the Clarendon faces.