Alex Dyson
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Introduction What is type and why on earth do I want to read about it? Firstly, you must have some sort of interest in type if you even picked this up and opened it so there’s your first reason. The second is the fact you have started to read, either as a security of self-reassurance that you are interested in type, or you have a spare five minutes whilst sat on the toilet and you thought “Might as well.”
much that you forget that you are sat on the bog and in twenty minutes or so, you suddenly remember where you are and the realization hits you that you have an intense passion for the art of typography and you walk out of that bathroom feeling like the next Gutenberg.
What? You don’t Personally I hope it know who is the first one. But Gutenberg is? if it is the second one then I hope Okay, let’s get the you get into it, so ball rolling.
If you look up the word type in the Oxford Dictionary, you will find this: noun • 1a category of people or things having common characteristics: this type of heather grows better in a drier habitat blood types • [with adjective or noun modifier] informal a person of a specified character or nature:two sporty types in tracksuits (one’s type) informal the sort of person one likes or finds attractive: she’s not really my type That’s a different kind of type, we don’t care about that. The one we are looking for is this one: • 3 [mass noun] characters or letters that are printed or shown on a screen:bold type • [count noun] a piece of metal with a raised letter or character on its upper surface, for use in letterpress printing. metal types used in letterpress printing:the first European printing of books began in 1454 with the invention of movable type.
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Where did it come from? Hairy people in caves of course! We are all pretty accustomed to letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc as a primary form of communication. Like anything, they have origins and beginnings. The modern alphabet started as very simple symbols identifying words or meanings. As you probably guessed, the first records for these drawings date back as far as 20,000 BC when the closest you could get to a gentleman was a different specie altogether. A good 17,000 years later written communication was starting to develop thoroughly by the Sumerians. This written communication
was purely based on simple drawings called pictograms, which told stories and kept records. Humanity and civilization got more and more advanced over time, slowly but surely. More complicated concepts needed to be communicated across societies as people got smarter. In Egypt, hieroglyphics were developed, and symbols expressing thoughts or ideas called ideograms were incorporated within them. This allowed a more advanced representation of images and pushed communication a lot further than just the
literal pictograms. A good example of ideograms would be the Roman numerals we use today, where I, II, III represents fingers on one’s hand, V is an open hand and VI one open hand as well as an additional finger. You are probably sat there thinking, “yeah that’s great, Egyptians and other ancient civilizations drew pictures to communicate, everyone knows that. Get on with it” If so, then chill out as this is just the beginning to lead you to the development of the alphabet! FUN FACT - The word “alphabet” comes from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta. It was the Phoenicians who are known to of developed the first full alphabet – a group of
symbols to represent spoken sounds which when combined, represent a spoken language. Luckily for us, they were a bunch of merchants who traded through a variety of different cultures spreading their alphabetic knowledge with the rest of the western civilization. Smarter people in
Greece then developed the alphabet further to adapt the art of handwriting in several styles. A few hundred years down the line we can find the Romans using the Greek alphabet as a foundation for the uppercase alphabet that we use today.
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The beginning of moveable type and printing.
How it made life get a little easier. Now you know the ins and outs of the development of the alphabet and how it all came about, I am going to tell you about the second course of development over the the next one thousand years and then the fifteenth century onwards. Manuscript preparation became a very specialized, highly looked at craft and
became a usual practice in most monasteries. Books became items of huge value in society and contained immaculate ornamentation. Illustrated initials were carefully and beautifully designed and complemented with hand rendered body copy. With such delicacy of a practice, it wasn’t uncommon for a monk to devote
an entire lifetime to completing a single manuscript.
Gutenberg did succeed in was making these technologies practical.
When the fifteenth century came about, written communication developed at a drastic scale and changed the whole way people saw it as well as the culture around it. At this moment in time, only the privileged few had access to the written word as less than a tenth of the European population could read.
Gutenberg perfected an efficient and workable system of moveable type, creating a process involving separate type molds for each glyph where metal pieces of type could be cast in high quantities. These metal pieces could then be arranged into a page of text and printed onto paper with ink and a printing press of his own design and structure. For the
In Mainz, Germany halfway through the 15th century, a man named Johannes Gutenberg changed the whole direction of the written word. He is often renown for the invention of the printing press and metal type however he did neither. Printing had already been practiced in Mainland China for several hundred years and few decades in Europe too. What
first time, an efficient system of mass production of print was developed for publishing. This had such a massive impact on Europe, in the next 50 years an explosion of more than 10 million publications were printed of nearly 3500 different works which were widely distributed throughout the Western world. Social and technical knowledge was shared and education of the masses began.
Johannes Gutenburg
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The anatomy of type. All the bits and pieces you didn’t know about. Like pretty much everything, type has elements that it is built from. To make full use of typography and be a master in progress at the art of type you are going to have to learn the bits and pieces which type is made of. The first things you are going to hear about are the invisible lines and grids that keep everything in place and are used to keep spaces, proportions and sizes accurate.
The baseline is the first invisible line on which a letter is suspended. Above that, you have the mean line; this is running along the top of non-ascending lowercase letters. Next up is the cap line, which marks the height of uppercase letters in a font. A very small space above that is the ascender line, which speaks for itself really and marks the height of ascenders within a font. The highest line is the ascent line; this marks the furthest distance between the baseline and the top of a glyph.
Apart from those ones there are two other invisible lines that are found below the baseline, these are the descender line and the descent line. The descender line is a guide marking the lowest point a descender can be within a font. And finally, the descent line is the lowest line that marks the furthest distance between the baseline and the bottom of the glyph. That was a lot of invisible lines you need to remember, but they are there to make your life as a designer easier. If you didn’t have all of those lines as guides for you then any typeface you made would be all jagged and unbalanced. Apart from all of the invisible lines that keep everything in place for you, typography is similar to an artistic game of operation consisting of a variety of different parts of a letterform which can be played with to create new fonts. The variety of these parts is very extensive but the more you know, the better!
Because of the amount of different pieces there are I will only highlight a couple of the most important ones here, the rest can be found in a poster included in this publication. The bowl is the curved part of the letterform that encloses the circular or curved part of some letters. Some people call any part of a letter that encloses a space a bowl, such as the curved strokes of a C.
The counter is the enclosed or partially enclosed curved or circular negative space of some letters such as o, and d. The shape and size of the counter and bowl can affect readability and is also an identifying factor for some typefaces.
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The big names in type. All those names that you have probably heard but thought each were a modern furniture range in IKEA or a cultural dish.
Johannes Gutenberg. Johannes Gutenberg (1395-1468) was a man of many crafts. He worked as a goldsmith, blacksmith, publisher and printer and above all was the man to introduce Europe to a new best friend, printing. This man’s invention of mechanical movable type printing began in the Printing Revolution and is often thought of as the most important event of the modern world. You wouldn’t of thought printing would have such an effect on the Western world, but think again. This invention played a huge role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution. It also laid the foundations for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to societies everywhere. In 1439, Gutenberg was the first person in the western world to use movable type printing. He contributed an enormous amount to the development of printing including the invention of a process for movable type; the use of oil-based ink; the invention and use of a wooden
printing press, which similarly resembled an agricultural screw press. The combinations of all these developments lead to the first practical and efficient system of mass-production of books and publications alike. Nicolas Jenson. Nicolas Jenson (1420-1480), based in Venice was yet another multi-skilled craftsman taking experience and practice in engraving, printing and type designing. Jenson is accredited with being the creator of the first model roman type, and therefore, an iconic figure in the history of type. Idolized by students during the early printing years, Jenson was praised on the beauty and perfection of his roman font by William Morris, artist of the 19th century.
Nicolas Jenson
Jenson’s highly legible and evenly coloured typeface was based mainly on Humanistic scripts and has been re-designed and reinterpreted by numerous type designers throughout the ages. Giambattista Bodoni. Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) a typographer, compositor, printer and publisher based in Parma, Italy. Bodoni developed and evolved a style of type called ‘New Face’ along with Firmin Didot, another typographer. The classification of ‘New Face’ involved letters which were cut in such a way to produce a contrast between the thick and thin parts of their body. He developed many typefaces with an extensive range of sizes. His compositions were admired due to best subtlety of spacing anyone had seen before. Very similar to Baskerville, he set off his texts with wide margins and used little or no illustrations or decorative forms on his pages.
Giambattista Bodoni
Revivals and remakes of his typefaces are often used as display fonts such as the ones you will see in fashion magazines. These are all named Bodoni. Hermann Berthold. Hermann Berthold (1831-1904) was the son of a
Hermann Berthold
calico-printer. He was a very clever man who founded his “Institute for Galvano Technology” in Berlin in 1858. He discovered many interesting things at his institute including a method of producing circular lines from brass, lead and zinc. They produced outstandingly fine results and built up an admirable reputation. Most of Germany’s letterpress printers as well as ones from abroad placed orders with Berthold. Whilst typesetting was happening all around Berthold, he developed high quality typefaces. The most iconic of all of them being Akzidenz Grotesk (1896) known as the mother of all sans serif typefaces. Max Miedinger (1910-1980) and Eduard Hoffman (1892-1980) were the fathers of the most popular typeface to date, Helvetica.
Max Miedinger
Max Miedinger was urged by his father to complete an apprenticeship in typesetting shortly after finishing school. For six years he worked as a typesetter for a variation of companies whilst taking evening classes at an art school in Zurich. He then worked as a typographer in an advertising department until he found himself at Haas Typefoundry in Münchenstein as a salesman. Moving towards graphic design, Miedinger moved back to Zulrich and was later contacted by the head of the Haas Typefoundry, Eduard Hoffman. He was commissioned to design a new sans serif typeface, the Neue Haas Grotesk. In 1960, this typeface was then renamed Helvetica and marketed as a symbol of cutting edge Swiss technology to the world.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this publication on the history of type and it has either promoted your interest, started it or tied up some loose ends for you. Now test what you have just learned with the quiz book included in this pack. You might be surprised with how much you have just learned.
Eduard Hoffman