Typograph Notes - Core 1
While typography is considered to have roots all the way back to cave paintings, hieroglyphs, and pictograms used by ancient civilizations, we will start our study with Calligraphy
Calligraphy originated in China
Initially characters were carved on animal bones and tortoise shells
Eventually Chinese ink brushes and writing on paper became prevalent during the Han dynasty
All educated men and some court women were expected to be proficient at calligraphy/
In the middle ages: hand-written and well-illustrated manuscripts were created in Europe
This was before printing was invented so the only way to record words was by hand
Calligraphy was the only system for preserving and transmitting knowledge, which complemented learning by heart
Calligraphy masters would travel around the world to share their knowledge with the educated elite/
illuminated bifolium, which means double page/
The introduction of printing: woodblocks
As in Europe centuries later, the introduction of printing in China dramatically lower the price of books which aided in the spread of literacy
This picture here shows the world’s earliest printed text and it’s from the Tang Dynasty China in 868 AD/
instead of having a scribe write out each page of a manuscript, a piece of wood was carved with the entire page and then used to print many copies of that page
Woodcut printing follows a three step process: first you carve the areas you do not want printed out of the block of wood, then you paint ink on it, then you press it onto paper or fabric
It was very time consuming to carve all the characters into the block of wood and these would break after repeated use
Also the process was delicate and if even one mistake was made during the carving process, the whole piece needed to be started again
Woodblock printing appeared in Europe in the late 14th century
Both image and text were cut onto a single block for a whole page
This page shown here shows both word and image of a book representing themes from both the old and new testament/
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/
Movable Type: a method of printing text that involves arranging separate characters or letters on wood or metal pieces
People often attribute the invention of movable type to Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, but really the technology originated in China/
Movable type was first created by Bi Sheng (990-1051), who used baked clay which was very fragile
The Yuan-dynasty is credited with the introduction of wooden movable type, a more durable option, around 1297
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.
Bi Sheng is truly one of the most important people you will hear of in your life because of the invention of movable type/
It’s been said Johannes Gutenberg brought movable type to the western world
Around 1450 in Germany
The technology was called the Gutenberg Press and it was very similar to that of Bi Sheng’s except there were different characters in each block
Movable type was even more useful for the Latin alphabet compared to the chinese writing system which had tens of thousands of distinct characters. The Latin alphabet translates the sounds of speech into a small set of marks, making it well-suite for mechanization.
The press could produce up to 3,600 pages per workday/
Gutenberg’s bible was created using blackletter type which was created to mimic handwritten scribes’ work and look like calligraphic text
Blackletter is characterized by tight spacing and condensed lettering, which helped reduce the materials used in the making of a printed book
This pages shows a modern recreation of the Gutenberg bible/
The Renaissance and Italian Humanism
15th century Italy - they rejected gothic scripts in favor of lettera antica
Nicolas Jenson created some of the first, and best, roman typefaces
Part of the lasting influence of Jenson’s fonts are the extreme legibility, and his ability to create an even tone through his use of spacing between letters and within each form/
Italic letters were introduced in the 15th-century Italy and were modeled on a more casual style of handwriting
Upright humanist scripts appeared in expensive books, the cursive italics thrived in cheaper writing shops
It saved time in creating the typeface as it could be written more rapidly
It also saved space on the page/
Renaissance artists sought standards of proportion in the idealized human body
Here, French designer and typographer Geofroy Tory published a series of diagrams in 1529 that linked the anatomy of letters to the anatomy of man/
During the enlightenment, a new approach came that was distanced from the form of the human body
In 1693, a committee appointed by Louis 16th in France set out to construct roman letters against a finely meshed grid
These letters were produced by engraving copper plates/
This shows the typeface they developed that was created using the gridded structures called Romain Du Roi on a book cover from 1702. It was created by by Louis Simonneau./
18th-century typographers were influenced by new styles of handwriting and engraved reproductions. Printers such as William Caslon and John Baskerville (both from England) abandoned the rigid forms of humanism for typefaces for more fluid forms. The typefaces of this time had sharpness and contrast and people of the time complained that the thin strokes of the letterforms hurt the eye.
Caslon and Baskerville are called Transitional typefaces/
At the turn of the 19th century, Giambattista Bodoni in Italy and Firmin Didot in France created typeface that were completly unconnected from calligraphy altogether
These typefaces have a complete vertical axis, sharp contrast between thick and thin strokes, and crisp, waferlike serifs.
These fonts are referred to as modern
This image shows Bodoni/
In the 19th century, there was the rise of industrialization and mass consumption and typography was largely transformed to support advertising.
Type designers created big, bold typefaces by embellishing the body parts of classical letters
Serifs stopped being finishing details and began to take on an independent architectural feel/
This period of time was when Clarendon was created. Clarendon was used for wanted posters in the Wild West.
Named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford, Clarendon was designed as a metal typeface in England by Robert Besley in 1845
Lead, which was used for casting metal type, was too soft to hold its shape at large sizes for use with printing presses so type during this time was cut from wood when used at larger scales/
Not everyone was a fan of the exaggerated type used in advertising. Some designers considered the distortion of the alphabet as gross and immoral
Inspired by the 19th century Arts and Crafts movement, Edward Johnston looked back to the Renaissance and Middle Ages for what he considered to be pure, uncorrupted letterforms
This image shows Johnston’s 1906 diagram of “essential” characters on ancient roman inscriptions
While he rejected the ornamentation of commercial lettering, he still accepted the embellishment of medieval-inspired forms/
The avant-garde artists of the 20th century rejected historical forms
Members of the De Stijl group in the Netherlands created the alphabet using perpendicular elements
Theo Van Doesburg from the De Stijl movement designed this alphabet with perpendicular elements in 1919
It was made using hand-drawn characters/
At the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers constructed letters from basic geometric forms, the circle, square, and triangle.
They considered these elements the universal language of vision
This image shows Herbert Bayer’s Universal Type which aimed to reduce the alphabet to only lowercase letters and geometric forms that could be drawn with a ruler and a compass/
Futura
A geometric sans serif, designed in 1927 by Paul Renner.
Considered a progressive font that represented the Avant-Garde.
It was representative of the Bauhaus ideology, function over form./
Responding in 1967 to the rise of electronic communication, Dutch designer Wim Crouwel published designs for a “new alphabet” constructed from straight lines
He rejected centuries of typographic convention
He designed his letters for optimal display on video screens/
In the mid-1980’s, personal computers and low-resolution printers influenced the next turn in typography.
In 1985, Zuzana Licko began designing typefaces that exploited the rough grain of early computers.
Zuzana and her husband, Rudy VanderLans, co founded Emigre Fonts, a famous type foundry
Emperor, Oakland, and Emigre were designed as bitmapped fonts for 72-dpi resolution/
Emigre Fonts published Emigre Magazine between 1984-2005
One of the first publications to use Macintosh computers
Emigre influenced the move towards desktop publishing in the graphic design community
Featured experimental layouts and opinionated articles/
1990’s the rise of grunge typography
A time of experimentation, reinvention and destruction
David Carson is considered the Godfather of Grunge
He created Ray Gun magazine/
Designers no longer wanted letters that looked perfect. They sought to make forms that were scratched, bent, bruised, and polluted.
Barry Deck made a font named Template Gothic which embodies the type style of the 90s
It was an experimental sans serif
Fonts during that time favored physical processes and Template Gothic is based on letters drawn with a plastic stencil/
Two other fonts designed in the 1990s were Dead History and Beowulf.
Dead History imitates the traditional sans serif font Centennial and the pop classic VAG Rounded
Beowulf was based on randomized outlines/