ate with a drop cap
Typographic Calendar 2016
D
ate with a drop cap TYPOGRAPHIC CALENDAR 2016
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Origin of the Drop Cap The practice of using a large letter to mark the start of a text has been around for almost two thousand years. Illustrated caps increased usability by marking important passages and guiding readers through the text. Examples of initial caps have been found dating back to the 4th century CE. Early codex books (books with pages, as opposed to scrolls) did not have word spaces, sentence breaks, or paragraph breaks.
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Goudy Old Style In 1915, Frederic W. Goudy designed Goudy Old Style, his twenty-fifth typeface, and his first for American Type Founders. Flexible enough for both text and display, it’s one of the most popular typefaces ever produced, frequently used for packaging and advertising. Its recognizable features include the diamond-shaped dots on i, j, and on punctuation marks; the upturned ear of the g; and the base of E and L. Several years later, in response to the overwhelming popularity of Cooper Black, Lanston Monotype commissioned Frederic W. Goudy to design heavy versions of Goudy Old Style. Goudy Heavyface and Goudy Heavyface Italic were released in 1925. released in 1925. The huge success of Goudy’s typefaces led to the addition of several weights to many of his typefaces; designers working for American Type Founders produced additions to the family. In 1927, Morris Fuller Benton drew Goudy Extra Bold.
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31 Frederic W. Goudy (1872–1948 USA) designer
Frederic Goudy, one of the best-known and most prolific of type designers, designed, by his own reckoning, 123 faces. Born in Bloomington, Illinois, he worked in various cities before founding the Booklet Press in Chicago in 1895 with equipment bought from Will Bradley. The sale of a set of capitals of his own design to the Bruce Type Foundry, Boston, encouraged him to become a freelance lettering artist. Goudy’s breakthrough with type design came in 1911. He designed Kennerley Old Style for the publishers Mitchell Kennerley on the understanding that he could sell it to the trade. He set up the Village Letter Foundry to cast and sell Kennerley and a titling font, Forum. These established his reputation, and American Type Founders commissioned Goudy Old Style, regarded as one of his finest designs.
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Illuminated Manuscripts Even as late as the 15th century, monks and scribes used initial caps to aid in visually “chunking” texts. Historiated caps not only helped mark the start of a new idea in the text, they acted as place markers for significant places in the text. Images related to the story served as memory aids for priests and monks who “read” the texts by flickering candle light.
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February 2016
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Franklin Gothic Book
Franklin Gothic, one of the most popular sans serif types ever produced, was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902 for American Type Founders. In 1979, under license with ATF, Vic Caruso began work on more weights of the design for ITC. This version adheres closely to the subtle thick and thin pattern of the original design; the slightly enlarged x-height and condensed proportions of the new version result in greater economy of space. This typeface is a standard choice for use in newspapers and advertising. In 1991, David Berlow completed the family for ITC by creating compressed and condensed weights. ITC Franklin Gothic Compressed is designed especially to solve impossibly tight copyfitting problems, while maintaining high legibility standards. ITC Franklin Condensed provides medium weights of narrow proportions. It is frequently seen in newspapers, advertisements, posters, and anyplace with space restrictions.
Morris Fuller Benton (1872–1948 USA) designer
Morris Fuller Benton is accredited with being the most prolific type designer in American history, with an output twice as great as that of Frederic Goudy (although in fairness Goudy did not start his career until a later age). A factor in his relative anonymity was his position as an in-house designer, but in a position that suited his retiring character: when pressed he would put his successes down to ‘Lady Luck’. Benton has been credited with inventing the concept of the type family and although this is not the case he did do his best work expanding faces into families and adapting existing type styles for ATF. Between 1900 and 1928 he designed 18 variations on Century, including the popular Century Schoolbook
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The Book of Kells The Book of Kells contains the four Gospels in Latin. The book is written on vellum (prepared calfskin) in a bold and expert version of the script known as “insular majuscule”. The manuscript’s popularity derives largely from the impact of its lavish decoration, the extent and artistry of which is incomparable. Abstract decoration and images of plant, animal and human ornament punctuate the text with the aim of glorifying Jesus’ life and message, and keeping his attributes and symbols constantly in the eye of the reader.
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March 2016
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Century Gothic
Century Gothic Regular fonts maintains the basic design of 20th Century but has an enlarged ‘x’ height and has been modified to ensure satisfactory output from modern digital systems. A design based on 20th Century, which was drawn by Sol Hess between 1936 and 1947. The Century Gothic Fonts Regular design is influenced by the geometric style sans serif faces which style sans serif faces which were popular during the 1920’s and 30’s. Century Gothic Fonts Regular is useful for headlines and general display work and for small quantities of text, particularly in advertising.
Sol Hess (1886-1953 USA) designer
For 50 Years Sol Hess was art director of Lanston Monotype Machinery Co., where he succeeded his friend and collaborator F W Goudy. He started with the company in 1902 after a three-year scholarship couse at Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, and as a type designer there he redrew and readapted all their typographical materials. His forte was the development of type families, and during his years with Lanston monotype he carried out commissions for many leading American companies, including Curtis Publishing, Crowell-Collier,Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Yale University Press and World Publishing Company.
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What is a Drop Cap? Dropped caps are often created using automated scripts or macros found in many desktop publishing and word processing software programs. Space to create the enlarged letter can be created automatically or manually by indenting lines of type or using the text wrap features of the software. The drop cap can be an actual text font or it may be a graphic image inserted as an inline graphic.
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April 2016
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Bell MT
In 1931 Monotype made this facsimile of the typeface cut originally for John Bell by Richard Austin in 1788, using as a basis the matrices in the possession of Stephenson Blake & Co. Used in Bell’s newspaper, “The Oracle,” it was regarded by Stanley Morison as the first English Modern face. Although inspired by French punchcutters of the time, with a vertical stress and fine hairlines, the face is less severe than the French models and is now classified as Transitional. Essentially a text face, Bell can be used for books, magazines, long articles etc.
Richard Austin (1768-1830 GB) designer
Born in London, Richard Austin trained as a wood-engraver with Thomas Bewick. In 1788 he joined the British Letter Foundry of publisher John Bell as a punch-cutter. Influenced by Bell’s enthusiasm for contemporary French types, Austin, a skillful cutter, produced a very sharply serifed letter which Stanley Morison was to call the first English modern face. the type retains some old-style characteristics and should more properly be called a late transitional. Austin went on to cut true moderns and later, in 1819, after starting a foundry of his own, he outlined the dangers of such designs being taken to extremes.
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Why use a drop cap?
Decoration: In a book with hundreds of pages of gray rectangles of type, it’s considerate to your reader to give them a bit of decoration once in a while, and drop caps are perfect for that. Navigation: A secondary function of the drop cap is to let the reader know a new section of the book is beginning. When you see that large letter, it physically alerts you that something new is coming.
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Adobe Calson Pro William Caslon released his first typefaces in 1722. Caslon’s types were based on seventeenth-century Dutch old style designs, which were then used extensively in England. Because of their remarkable practicality, Caslon’s designs met with instant success. Caslon’s types became popular throughout Europe and the American colonies; printer Benjamin Franklin hardly used any other typeface. The first printings of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were set in Caslon. For her Caslon revival, designer Carol Twombly studied specimen pages printed by William Caslon between 1734 and 1770. The OpenType Pro version merges formerly separate fonts (expert, etc.), and adds both central European language support and several additional ligatures. Ideally suited for text in sizes ranging from 6- to 14-point, Adobe Caslon Pro is the right choice for magazines, journals, book publishing, and corporate communications.
William Calson (1692-1776 GB) Carol Twombly 1959 USA (see June)
designers
William Caslon I was the first British typefounder of any renown and was
responsible for ending the dependence of British printers on imported Dutch types which (with some French types) had dominated the market
throughout the 17th century. Born in Worcestershire, William Caslon began his career in London engraving and chasing gun barrels (occasionally also
cutting brass letters for bookbinders) until a printer called William Bowyer, after seeing some of his letters, encouraged him to try punch-cutting. Bowyer lent him €500 to start his own foundry, which he opened in London’s Vine Street probably in 1722 or 1723. In 1734 the foundry
moved to Chiswell Street, where Caslon published hisfamous specimen sheet showing a full range of the roman types he cut. His work found
particular favour in America, and Caslon type was used by Mary Katherine
Goddard of Baltimore for printing the Declaration of Independence.
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Raised Drop Cap Perhaps the easiest style of initial cap to create, the basic raised cap is simply the first letter of the paragraph set in a larger font than the rest of the text. The raised cap could also be a graphic image instead of actual text. Because the raised cap sits level with the rest of the text, in order to make it stand out sufficiently it should be significantly different from the rest of the text either size (much bigger font size) or by using a distinctly different style of font.
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Myriad Pro
An Adobe Originals design first released in 1992, Myriad has become popular for both text and display composition. As an OpenType release, Myriad Pro expands this sans serif family to include Greek and Cyrillic glyphs, as well as adding oldstyle figures and improving support for Latin-based languages. The full Myriad Pro family includes condensed, normal, and extended widths in a full range of weights. Designed by Robert Slimbach & Carol Twombly with Fred Brady & Christopher Slye, Myriad has a warmth and readability that result from the humanistic treatment of letter proportions and design detail. Myriad Pro’s clean open shapes, precise letter fit, and extensive kerning pairs make this unified family of roman and italic an excellent choice for text typography that is comfortable to read, while the wide variety of weights and widths in the family provide a generous creative palette for even the most demanding display typography.
Carol Twombly (1959 USA ) Robert Slimbach (1956 USA see December) designers
Carol Twombly studied design at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she became interested in type design and typography. She received an MS from Stanford University in the graduate programme of digital typography under Charles Bigelow, and later joined the Bigelow & Holmes Studio. In the Morisawa Typeface Design Competition in 1984 she won first prize for Mirarae, a latin design which has since been licensed and released. A member of the Adobe type studio since 1988, Twombly has designed many successful display and text typefaces for the Adobe Originals library. In 1994 she was the first woman to receive from ATypI the Prix Charles Peignot for outstanding contributions to type design.
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Adjacent Drop Caps
Adjacent Caps are another version of dropped caps. The initial cap doesn’t drop in the body of the paragraph. Instead, the cap appears in a separate column of its own. Where does this column appear? It displays adjacent to the text.
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July 2016
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Helvetica Neue
The history of Helvetica includes a number of twists and turns. There are, in fact, two versions
of Helvetica. The first one is the original design, which was created by Max Miedinger and released by Linotype in 1957. And secondly, in 1983, D. Stempel AG, Linotype’s daughter
company, released the Neue Helvetica® design, which was a re-working of the 1957 original. The outcome was a synthesis of aesthetic and technical refinements and modifications that resulted in improved appearance, legibility and usefulness.
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31 Max Miedinger (1910-1980 CH) Revival : D. Stempel (AG) designers
Max Miedinger, born in Zurich, was an in-house designer with the Haas foundry in Munchenstein, Switzerland. His most famous typeface is Helvetica, currently one of the most widely used sans serifs, which was designed in 1956. Edward Hoffman of Haas had asked Miedinger to adapt the existing Haas Grotesk to bring it in line with current taste. Haas Grotesk had its origins in the 19th-century German grotesques like Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk. The type, which was created from Miedinger’s china-ink drawings, seemed like a new design in its own right, rather than an old one with minor retouching as had been the original plan. Although designed for the home market, the then-called Neue Haas Grotesk proved popluar farther afield. When Stempel AG in Germany released the face in 1961 they called it Helvetica, the traditional Latin name for Switzerland, in order to capitalize on the fashion for Swiss typography. Additional weights were added to the Helvetica family over the years. In 1983 Linotype released a new, more extensive version, Neue Helvetica, in 51 weights.
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Immitation Game When printing first began in the 15th century, early typographers wanted to imitate the manuscripts of the day. They adapted this practice of using a large initial capital letter at the beginning of a chapter as a way of making their books acceptable to a public accustomed to buying illuminated manuscripts.
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August 2016
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Perpetua
Type designer Eric Gill’s most popular Roman typeface is Perpetua, which was released by the Monotype Corporation between 1925 and 1932. It first appeared in a limited edition of the book The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, for which the typeface was named. The italic form was originally called Felicity. Perpetua’s clean chiseled look recalls Gill’s stonecutting work and makes it an excellent text typeface, giving sparkle to long passages of text; the Perpetua capitals have beautiful, classical lines that make this one of the finest display alphabets available.
Eric Gill (1882-1940 GB) designer
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, letter-cutter, sculptor, wood-engraver and type designer, was one of the most prominent and controversial figures of his day. Born in Brighton, Gill studied at Chichester School of Art before being apprenticed to an ecclesiastical architect in London.Whilst there he attended the classes of the calligrapher Edward Johnston at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Thus he became involved in the small world of scribes and illuminators and the Arts and Crafts Movement, embarking on a career as a stone cutter and letterer. Gill designed his first typeface at the invitation of Stanley Morison of the Monotype Corporation. The drawings for the type, Perpetua, were begun in 1925. Gill Sans, designed during the same period, was based on the same sources as the Johnston Sans Serif. Gill had painted san-serif lettering on the Douglas Cleverdon’s Bristol Bookshop in 1927 and it was this that suggested the idea of a Gill sans serif to Morison. Joanna was cut by the Caslon foundry; one of its first uses in 1931 was for Gill’s own Essay on Typography.These three typefaces are from his most creative period.
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Initial Caps Initial Capitals have historic al roots in the early days of book design; their use predates the printing press and the invention of moveable type. Today’s initial caps are not as fancy as those carefully rendered in gold leaf in ancient scriptoriums, but their association with classic book design remains strong.
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September 2016
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Adobe Garamond Pro
An Adobe Originals design, and Adobe’s first historical revival, Adobe Garamond is a digital interpretation of the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon. Since its release in 1989, Adobe Garamond has become a typographic staple throughout the world of desktop typography and design. Adobe type designer Robert Slimbach has captured the beauty and balance of the original Garamond typefaces while creating a typeface family that offers all the advantages of a contemporary digital type family. With the introduction of OpenType font technology, Adobe Garamond has been reissued as a Pro type family that takes advantage of OpenType’s advanced typographic capabilities. Now this elegant type family can be used with even greater efficiency and precision in OpenType-savvy applications such as Adobe InDesign.
Claude Garamond (1480– 1561 FR) Robert Slimbach (1956 see December) designers
A native of Paris, Garamond was an engraver and letter founder of high repute. He was regarded as the best typecutter of his day. He was commissioned by King Francis First of France to make a new cast of type for his own exclusive use, now known as Grecs du Roi. Garamond was the first to produce a reworking of the earlier typefaces of Aldus Manutius, creating a face called Garamond. This small roman type became the standard European type of the day and was still in use in the 18th century. During most of the 20th century, most leading foundries around the world have redrawn their own versions of Garamond’s typeface, and Garamond’s roman is still regarded today as one of the classic typefaces.
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New Age Drop and Intial Caps survived the transition from manuscript to set type. For exceptional printings, a rubicrator was hired to add the finishing touches by hand. But combining illustration and type in the page and in two colors no less, it was still immeasurably cheaper in both time and material than the illuminated manuscripts that preceded it, thus it could be mass-produced.
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October 2016
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Gill Sans MT
Designed by Eric Gill and released by the Monotype Corporation between 1928 and 1930, Gill Sans is based on the typeface Edward Johnston, the innovative British letterer and teacher, designed in 1916 for the signage of the London Underground. Gill’s alphabet is more classical in proportion and contains his signature flared capital R and eyeglass lowercase g. With distinct roots in pen-written letters, Gill Sans is classified as a humanist sans serif, making it very legible and readable in text and display work. The condensed, bold, and display versions are excellent for packaging or posters.
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31 Eric Gill (1882–1940 GB) designer
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Old News The role of written text changed in the mid-1600’s, and drop caps fell out of favor. Newspapers allowed readers to share current ideas and information, scientific inquiry provided a basis of rational thought, and the typographic page simplified. The relationship between type and image continued to shift, primarily influenced by industrialization.
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November 2016
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Century Schoolbook
Another version of the Century family was produced when Ginn & Company, a textbook publisher, commissioned American Type Founders to design a typeface with maximum legibility. Morris Benton researched the subjects of eyesight and legibility, then created Century Schoolbook, which was released between 1918 and 1921. Century Schoolbook is still seen in elementary school texts, and can be used for text work where legibility is a primary consideration.
Morris Fuller Benton (1872 1948 USA) designer
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Modern Caps
Today, initial caps are no longer necessary; they are used primarily as decorative elements. Thus, when we want to design a Web page that feels traditional, elegant, or historic, we find ourselves wanting to use drop caps. While we’re a far cry away from the original gold-leaf illuminations of the renaissance, even the modern reading platform has embraced the idea of the drop cap: the web has a flourishing community of drop-cap enthusiasts and proponents.
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December 2016
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Minion Pro
Minion Pro is an Adobe Original typeface designed by Robert Slimbach. The first version of Minion was released in 1990. Cyrillic additions were released in 1992, and finally the OpenType Pro version was released in 2000. Minion Pro is inspired by classical, old style typefaces of the late Renaissance, a period of elegant, beautiful, and highly readable type designs. Minion Pro combines the aesthetic and functional qualities that make text type highly readable with the versatility of OpenType digital technology, yielding unprecedented flexibility and typographic control, whether for lengthy text or display settings. The full Minion Pro family contains three weights and two widths, each with optical size variants, and each supporting a full range of Western languages, including Greek and Cyrillic. With its many ligatures, small caps, oldstyle figures, swashes, and other added glyphs, Minion Pro is ideal for uses ranging from limited-edition books to newsletters to packaging.
Robert Slimbach (1956 USA) designer
Robert Slimbach, who was born in Evanston, Illinois, received his training and early experience of type design in the drawing office of Autologic in California. In 1987, after two years of self-employment, which saw him contribute ITC Slimbach and ITC Giovanni to the International Typeface Corporation, he joined Adobe Systems. Since then, he has been designing and developing typefaces for the Adobe Originals program. Slimbach’s typefaces offer type users a rich palette of designs, mostly for text use, based on his enthusiasm for classic letter forms. In 1999 he received the Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design.
Designer’s Inspiration
The Book of Kells The Book of Kells was my original source of inspiration. I have alway been fascinated and inspired by the beautiful pages. The art is timeless and has stood the test of time. The illuminated drop caps painted in the book have inspired myself as well as other graphic designers today.
Monastic art Book illustration emerged from a fusion of early Biblical art, traditional Celtic culture, with Anglo-Saxon techniques. This new art form was created by Irish missionaries and monks, and monastic art spread across Ireland, Scotland and England in the seventh and eighth centuries. Ultimately, this Hiberno-Saxon style created some of the most outstanding works in the history of Irish art of the Middle Ages.
Paul Buckley During my research I came across Paul Buckley, the executive creative director for Penguin. Buckley brought Hische’s work to the attention of Penguin Classics, and the two created a line of hardcover editions alphabetized by the authors’ names. Buckley created a rainbow spectrum of 26 books, from “A” to “Z.”These books caught my attention, they are beauitful covers with beautifully designed drop caps.
Jessica Hische In 2009, Jessica Hische (a featured New Visual Artist that year) started her Daily Drop Cap site, where she showcased a different hand-drawn letter each day. The site took off, and Hische’s creative lettering soon became her calling card.
DESIGN Hannah Burns
REFERENCES creativebloq.com thebookdesigner.com tcld.wordpress.com jessicahische.is/awesome.com bookcoverarchive.com/Paul_Buckley graphicdesign.stackexchange.com desktoppub.about.com
TYPOGRAPHIC HISTORY & DESIGNER BIOS TYPEFACE HISTORIES adobe.com itcfonts.com (Helvetica Neue) ascenderfonts.com (Century Gothic)
TYPEFACE DESIGNER BIOS An A-Z of Type Designers By Neil Macmillan
TITLE PAGE IMAGES Illustrator: Hannah Burns
DESIGNER PHOTOS Linotype Ascender Fonts (Bell) Identifont (Slimbach)
INFLUENCES Thinking withType by Ellen Lupton
2016