D DOT
Firmin Didot
A French printer, engraver, and type founder
F
irmin-Didot, a family of French printers, punch-cutters, and publishers, gained renown for their illustrated editions of the classics, as well as for publishing inexpensive editions of scholarly texts. The former were illustrated by some of the most respected artists of the day, providing a wide audience with access to images that had only ever been available to those privileged few who had access to royal palaces and aristocratic chateaus. Making classic works—be they artistic, philosophical, or literary— available to a broad audience was only part of the family’s influence, however. The family’s most lasting legacy is the Didot family of fonts, designed by Firmin Didot, which
influences typography to this day. Along with Giambattista Bodoni of Italy, Firmin Didot is credited with establishing the use of the Didone or ‘Modern’ style of serif typefaces. The types that Didot used are characterized by extreme contrast in thick strokes and thin strokes, by the use of hairline serifs and by the vertical stress of the letters. Many fonts today are available based on Firmin Didot’s typefaces, and are often called Didot as a result.
T
he first of the Didot types appeared in 1781, at the end of a long typographic continuum which, to modern eyes at least, seems relatively unvaried. Between Nicolas Jenson’s seminal humanist typeface of 1470 and the old styles of the early eighteenth century, there is a 250-year period marked less by innovation than by a steady improvement in the design of letters. As the center of European printing moved north, fifteenth
century Venetian types gave way to sixteenth century French models, which were in turn assimilated into the Dutch and English old styles of the centuries to follow. Taken together, these types describe a slow progression away from the alphabet’s calligraphic origins— stress angles shifting from generally diagonal to horizontal, bracketed serifs beginning to suggest the graver more than the pen—and by the end of the seventeenth century, printing types began to evidence a distinct and autonomous visual vocabulary. Gone are the irrelevancies of calligraphy, replaced instead by the spurs, beaks, serifs and terminals of modern typography, a coherent system of parts which hinted at the critical rationalism of the Age of Reason.
History ofDidot
Contrast Between Thick and Thin
Didot Tall Ascenders and Descenders
Vertical Axis
Abrupt Bilateral Hairline Serifs
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