Now I Know My ABCs: The History of Type for a New Generation

No w i ď Ť n ow my a bc s

The History of Type for a New Generation

Rachel Leigh

Hello.

This book is about the alphabet. What? You say you already know your alphabet? You have written it, sung it, and recited it – backwards? Wow! In a way, you’re right. Almost your whole life, you have been familiar with the letters that we use to create written language. But I am here to show you that the alphabet (or alphabets, for as we will soon see, there is more than one) is so interesting that you can study it, play with it, and admire it your whole life, without ever getting bored.

The Very Beginnings Just think about it – what is a letter? It is just a shape, a symbol that we have matched to a sound in our language. When you were very young, writing your letters probably felt no different than drawing. Well, when civilization was young, it was the same way. People drew the things that they wanted to communicate. If we look at letters as drawings, it becomes possible to understand where their meanings come from. Why on earth does an A stand for the sound that it does? All this and more, coming up next.

Picture Language The people who lived in Egypt thousands of years ago created a fantastic way of writing that was made up of small simple drawings called hieroglyphics. Historians and archeologists have kept track of all the different hieroglyphs that they find, and they have found at least seven hundred! Most of them simply mean the word for the object that they represent. But for more complicated words and ideas that could not be drawn out, the Egyptians made rebuses. A rebus uses the sounds of short words as building blocks to create longer words or phrases. Here is an example:

belief

Belief itself would be very hard to draw, but if the Egyptians had this word and wanted to write it, they could draw a simple picture of a bee, and follow it with a quick sketch of a leaf! They could communicate anything they wanted using pictures.

Can you imagine yourself growing up in Ancient Egypt and learning pictures instead of letters? To write a message, you also would have the choice of starting anywhere on the page that you wanted, and moving in a straight line up or down, right or left. How would the reader know which direction to read? Your bird and animal symbols would face in the direction you wanted the message to be read! Maybe you would add a large illustration to your page of hieroglyphics. This was done frequently, because hieroglyphics look so good with other images on a page.

Pictures slowly become letters Other ancient people called the Phoenicians also used symbols to mean the sound of a word instead of the word itself. Here is an example: the Phoenician word for fence was heth. They drew the fence like this, and used it to stand for the first sound in their word, heth.

Does it look a little bit familiar? Here is their symbol for the first sound in the word aleph. Aleph means “ox,” so the Phoenicians drew a symbol of a yoke that oxen wear, like this.

It’s not hard to see the beginnings of the letters in our alphabet today!

The Phoenicians’ alphabet started to become popular in Ancient Greece. The Greeks made some changes so that it would suit their own language better. They also simplified some of the letters and made them more stately. Now take a look at the Greek alphabet. You could almost use it to write in English!

ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝ ΞΟΠΡΣΤ ΥΦΧΨΩ

The Greeks and many other ancient peoples did not include any spaces between words – they had to figure out on their own where one word stopped and the next one started!

As time went on, this alphabet was modified little by little by different people groups until it became the alphabet used today for hundred of languages! Apart from English, how many other languages can you name that use this alphabet? Fun fact: Letters were only introduced as needed. The last letters to join our alphabet were J, V, and W.

A Word about Asian Alphabets Today, writing words no longer feels like drawing pictures to us, does it? What do you think about this?

If you like the idea of drawing your messages rather than writing them, maybe you should go to China or Japan. Their ways of writing are excitingly different from our “Western” alphabet. In these languages, every word has its own symbol. There is no alphabet to learn, only different strokes and a seemingly endless set of symbols called characters.

Expert Chinese calligraphers (people who are skilled at writing beautifully) talk about characters as if they were alive. A character has bone (size and strength), meat (thin parts, thick parts), blood (the appearance of the ink used to write them), and muscle (energetic-looking strokes). Writing, for them, is very exciting.

Have you ever thought of your writing this way?

Rare Talent In the cultures that we have talked about so far, education did not catch up with the invention of writing for a long time, so not very many people knew how to do it. Those who did often worked full-time copying special books like the Bible. Can you imagine writing out such a long book word for word? Now think about doing it in your very, very best handwriting, as well as adding fancy decorations to the first letter of every paragraph! This is what people called scribes did in the times of castles and knights. It took years to make a book, which made them very expensive. Here is what our alphabet looked like when scribes wrote with points of feathers dipped in ink.

The Alphabet Meets Science Around the year 700, people started wondering if there were faster and easier ways that books and written materials could be made. If you have ever used a rubber stamp, then you will understand the solution that they came up with! It’s called printing. At first, people carved stamps that printed whole pages of books at once. Fantastic! But then… can you see the problem? The printer would be left with a pile of hundreds of stamps for a book that he might never care to print again. Wouldn’t it be even better, they thought, if we made a single stamp for each letter? That way, when a printing job was done, the letters could be put back into boxes until they were needed again to make new words and sentences. Just like little tiny alphabet blocks.

It was a German man named Johannes Gutenberg who really got this printing process to work well. He got to work making enough little metal letter stamps to print the whole Bible. If you were not looking too closely, you might have thought that Gutenberg’s Bible was still written by hand, like the ones by the scribes! But since that was what people were used to letters looking like, there was no reason for Gutenberg to make them look any differently. He hoped that people would trust his printing-press machine if his printed books seemed just like the hand-written ones.

It took some time, but people got used to the idea. Some of them decided to become printers like Gutenberg, and opened print shops around Europe. Now that books took less time to make, there were more of them around and they did not cost as much. The result? The ordinary, less educated people started learning how to read, too.

The Alphabet Gets Better Yet Sitting and chiseling out individual letter stamps all day caused many printers to start thinking hard about the alphabet and what it should really look like. No longer did they care how a letter could be best formed with a feather pen and ink. This was the machine age now, and they were thinking more scientifically. The alphabet that we print with should be very precise, they said, and we must carefully design the type to look as good as it can on a page.

That’s right – before “type” was something you did on a keyboard, it was a noun. Type is letters, numbers, and punctuation; in fact, everything that you read is made up of type. Now you can begin using the word “typography.” Typography is the art of letterforms and how they are placed together on a page.

So as I was saying, certain printers, by studying their letters, became typographers. They took it upon themselves to study and make adjustments to the alphabet until it was the best it could be (in their opinion, at least. You will see that someone always comes along later thinking that their alphabet design is better.)

What Does It Take to Be a Good Typographer?

The way that some typographers try to build better and better alphabets might look a little like your big sister’s math homework. Shapes are a kind of math called geometry, and since letters are shapes, they can be geometrically built. This was a helpful idea to the early typographers – but only to a point. Before you start refining type for yourself, take a lesson from a certain king and his alphabet.

Louis the 14th, the king of France, ordered that a special alphabet be designed just for him. It would be illegal to use this “typeface” for anything other than royal decrees and edicts. Obviously wanting it to be the best-looking alphabet in France, King Louis appointed a team of brilliant mathematicians who would design using their knowledge of geometry and scientific principles.

The team decided to start with a grid in which they would design each letter. They divided a square into 64 units. But even that did not let them be as mathematically precise as they wanted to be, so they divided each of the 64 units into 36 smaller units! So on this grid of 2, 304 units per letter, they designed the royal typeface. The results were great – but the mathematicians must have been disappointed in the end, because all that “perfection” could hardly be reproduced at ordinary printing size!

The point of the story is this: geometry is important, but the best test of all is the eye of the reader. If it looks right, then it probably is right. On the next page, take a look at some of the different typefaces that had been designed around this time in history. The designers, whose names are below their designs, wanted the letters to be both readable and elegant. Can you spot the subtle changes that each one made?

More Flexible Than You Thought The printed alphabet did a good job of keeping up with the times, thanks to many more clever typographers. Starting in the late 1700s, one thing it did successfully is get bigger! The tiny letters used for printing books were too small for other things that people started wanting to do, like advertising. So, printers began to develop much bigger letter stamps for their presses. The delicate process of casting metal type was very difficult (and heavy!) at larger sizes. So they learned to make them out of wood instead of metal.

Big, bold letters like these were good for posters about upcoming shows or new products that needed to be able to be read quickly, and from a distance. In many places, there were no laws about where it was all right to put up posters. They started to be plastered everywhere – the buildings looked like some people’s refrigerator doors when they become covered with magnets, drawings and “important” information.

The wooden type was so easy to make, and advertising so exciting, that typographers and printers started making letters in a lot more sizes and shapes. They would use the many different styles they had available and combine them into one attention-grabbing layout. A poster with nothing but words (which you will see when you turn the page) can actually look pretty exciting!

Who Shot the Serif?

Type was also further mutated by the needs of advertising when typographers started chopping off pieces

KK

of letters that had always been there before! Take a look at these two letter Ks: can you see what happened?

The little end pieces that are gone from the second K are called serifs. Today, we are used to seeing letters with or without serifs. The next time you’re reading something, notice whether the typeface is serif or sansserif (sans means “without” when you want to sound elegant).

In addition to sizes and serifs, typographers even thought to make families of type weights. What does that mean? It’s simple – one typeface can have different versions that look lighter and heavier, like this.

Getting Fancy During the 1800s, often called the Victorian years, the alphabet got to play dress-up. The sky was the limit for some of these typefaces. Take a look!

Freddy Goudy’s Story There is so much you can do with the alphabet. You can probably tell by now that there has never been a time in history when someone was not fascinated with it. There was a little boy named Freddy who was born in Illinois right at the end of the Civil War. He was definitely a young typographer. For fun, he would cut out thousands of letters from colored paper. He arranged them into Bible verses and deco-

rated the walls of his church! And that was only the beginning. Check the fonts on your computer, you just might find some typefaces named after and designed by Freddy Goudy.

On a Swing Goudy’s typefaces are not as fancy or inventive-looking as the ones we just saw. This brings us to a very important and interesting historical fact that we will call The Swing Pattern. The Swing Pattern says that whenever something is done a lot and for a while, the people who come next will want to do the opposite. It’s exactly like being on a swing: if you are sailing forward, you know that in the next second, you will be soaring backwards. The harder you pump, the more extreme these differences in direction will be.

This is what happened to the alphabet. The Victorians had so much fun adding frills to their alphabet that the next generation of typographers, like Goudy, was tired of that look. They wanted to do something fresh, so they went for the opposite extreme: plain and simple (but still elegant) type. It wasn’t truly new, because the first printed books were designed with that same simplicity, but it was fresh right after the Victorian years. History of any kind is very nearly predictable, if you look for this pattern!

Back and Forth Let me tell you about another typographer, and another instance of the Swing Pattern. Jan Tschichold (we’ll call him Jan, and pronounce it yann) was born in 1902 in Germany. His dad was sign painter, and Jan grew up seeing his carefully painted letters. Jan himself learned to be a calligrapher, which means he could handwrite beautifully and much fancier than most people can. He made his letters fancy, all right, just like the old medieval styles of writing.

After a few years though, he completely changed his mind about letters. He and many other designers started wanting things to be simple and geometric, to reflect the world that was so full of new technology. Jan decided, for instance, that sans-serif letters were the best, because they were so simple. He said that the best designs were the ones with no extra frills, because they got the message across immediately.

And then, after a few more years, he swung back! Jan admitted again that it was good to be inspired from all the typefaces of history, and that since people were not machines, their type could have little quirks and flourishes too. Would you believe it? Two swings in one career, and both were results of what was happening in the world around him.

Letters are Signs of the Times Art of all kinds (including typography) contains clues about what was going on in the artists’ world when they created it. On the next page are two pages of poetry: the first is from 1903 and the other is from 1914.

Pretty different, don’t you think? These pages show very different moods. And mysteriously, many designs that looked like the first style were replaced with ones like the second in only a few years. What on earth could have caused such a change? Let’s look for clues. A good way to find them is to label what we see with describing words. Ready? Here are some words for the first page of poetry:

natural structured straight delicate ordered flowery ornamental rectangular fancy What do those words remind you of? Elegant tea parties? Walking through a well-kept garden?

Now, let’s give the other one a try:

chaotic cluttered violent loud messy confused noisy sharp wild angry

What does this second list sound like to you? A war? An monster? A dangerous machine? These pages show a Before and an After in history. Around 1914, many things were happening in the world that made people, even artists, frightened and unhappy. There was a huge war. There were rulers that acted like monsters. And so many new machines were being used that people were living differently because of it.

It seemed to many artists that the rules of life were being broken, and so some of them decided to break the rules of art to show how they were feeling. You can see how this affected the alphabet. Letters need to march in straight lines. “Who says?” Words should not overlap each other. “Oh yeah? Watch this…” A page should be readable. “Well, that’s just what you think. We want the letters to express the things they say. So some words need to be big and other need to face different ways, so we will do that. Anything, just so that the words look like what they describe.”

When you feel frustrated with the way something is going in your life, do you ever feel like making a big mess? Well, that is exactly what happened to some designers. They called their style “Dada” and threw tantrums on paper, purposefully refusing to let their design choices make any sense at all. If you asked, “Why is that letter L so far away from all the others?” a Dada designer would fold his arms and say, “Just because.” Here, you can see what a page from a Dada dictionary might have looked like.

The funny thing is that people have taken them and their designs rather seriously, and you can find them in art history books. But then again, that’s what art history is – the story of what people felt and thought and how they turned those emotions and ideas into something people can actually look at.

It’s a Jungle Out There Throughout the alphabet’s history, typographers have been like explorers. They try new things with letters, moving into the unknown, making sure it’s safe. Nowadays, the typographers have gone so far that the jungle of typography (some people mistakenly call it a field) has become like a big backyard for us to play in. We can have fun! And maybe you will become the next typographer to uncover a brand new typographic idea for the rest of us to see.

Now, I want you to think about the way this book started out. Remember that these unique little shapes that we call letters are only distant relatives of drawings and picture symbols? Well believe it or not, this book ends where it began. Letters can be seen as pictures again! It’s true, turn the page and take a look.

gideon wurdz’ foolish dictionary

but

is

much

prized

by

the

rig h t

two.

Now, it’s your turn. The next page is all yours to complete as you like. Go ahead, young typographer.

Make it come alive.

Bibliography (where all this awesome information came from) Meggs, Phillip B, and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.