Typograph Notes - Core 1

Typography

The art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and visually appealing.

Calligraphy

A visual art related to writing, originating in China, where characters were initially carved on animal bones and tortoise shells. It was the only system for preserving and transmitting knowledge, which complemented learning by heart. Masters would travel around the world to share their knowledge with the educated elite.

Han Dynasty

A period in Chinese history when ink brushes and writing on paper became prevalent.

Illuminated Bifolium

A double page in a manuscript that is often richly decorated.

Woodblock Printing

A printing technique where an entire page is carved into a block of wood, inked, and pressed onto the paper. It was very time-consuming to carve all the characters into the block and these would break after repeated use. The process was delicate and if even one mistake was made during the carving process, the whole piece needed to be started again

Movable Type

A printing method involving separate characters or letters that can be arranged to form text, first created by Bi Sheng in China.

Johannes Gutenberg

A German inventor credited with bringing movable type to the Western world around 1450.

Blackletter

A typeface style used in Gutenberg's Bible, characterized by tight spacing and condensed lettering.

Renaissance

A cultural movement in 15th century Italy that favored lettera antica over gothic scripts. Artists sought standards of proportion in the idealized human body

Nicolas Jenson

A typographer known for creating some of the first and best Roman typefaces, emphasizing legibility and even tone.

Italic Letters

A type style introduced in 15th-century Italy, modeled on casual handwriting. It saved time in creating the typeface as it could be written more rapidly. It also saved space on the page

Romain Du Roi

A typeface developed in France in 1693, created using a finely meshed grid.

Transitional Typefaces

Typefaces from the 18th century, such as those by William Caslon and John Baskerville, that moved away from rigid humanist forms in favor of typefaces of more fluid forms. The typefaces of this time had sharpness and contrast

Modern Typefaces

Fonts created in the 19th century by  Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot, are characterized by vertical axes and sharp contrasts.

Clarendon

A bold typeface designed by Robert Besley in 1845, used for wanted posters in the Wild West. Designed as a metal typeface in England by Robert Besley in 1845. Wood was used at larger scales.

Arts and Crafts movement

A movement that inspired designers like Edward Johnston to seek pure, uncorrupted letterforms. He rejected the ornamentation of commercial lettering, he still accepted the embellishment of medieval-inspired forms

De Stijl

An avant-garde movement that created an alphabet using perpendicular elements, exemplified by Theo Van Doesburg's designs.

Bauhaus

A design school that emphasized geometric forms in typography, with figures like Herbert Bayer reducing the alphabet to basic shapes.

Futura

A geometric sans serif typeface designed by Paul Renner in 1927, representing the Bauhaus ideology,  function over form.

Emigre Fonts

A type foundry co-founded by Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans, known for designing bitmapped fonts for early computers. Influenced the move towards desktop publishing in the graphic design community. Featured experimental layouts and opinionated articles.

Grunge Typography

A style from the 1990s characterized by experimentation and imperfection, with David Carson as a leading figure. Raygun magazine.

Template Gothic

An experimental sans serif font designed by Barry Deck in the 1990s, reflecting the grunge typography movement.

Cardinal Juan de Torquemada's Meditations on the life of Christ

Thought to be the first Italian book illustrated with a series of woodcut images. First edition was printed in Rome in 1467

 Bi Sheng

The first to create moveable type. Used baked clay which was very fragile,

Wooden Movable Type

Each character was carved into an individual piece and then glued to a board which was then printed in a style similar to woodblock printing. The big difference here was that if you made a mistake, you could pop a letter out and move the type around to fix it. You could also rearrange the characters and use them to create a new page, rather than just creating one page like woodcut prints.

New Alphabet

Responding in 1967 to the rise of electronic communication, Dutch designer Wim Crouwel published designs constructed from straight lines. Letters designed for optimal display on video screens.