History of Typography

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Johannes Gutenberg and Movable Type • There is still some contoversy surrounding the origin of the invention of printing from Moveable Type in Europe. However, it’s generally accepted that Johannes Gutenberg produced the first-known book to be printed this way. Gutenberg’ achievement was to invent a system of mass produced in greater numbers and more economically. His invention played a fundamental role in the development of the modern wolrd, and was the single most important factor in the spread of knowledge and the move toward universal literacy in the West. Gutenberg applied his knowledge gained from working with metal, as a jeweler, to find an alloy which allowed him to form individual letters. He cast the letters in mirror image, and then grouped individual letters into a matrix to form a page. He inked this and pressed a piece of paper onto it.

Gutenberg‘s key innovation was the adjustable mold. Typographically, Gutenbreg’s greatest achievement was the 42-line Bible, which intimate the style of the handwritten book to a remarkable degree. His typeface was based on Textura, the formal script of northen Germany.

Within 15 years of the Forty-twoLine Bible, the printing press had been established in all of Western Europe except for Scandinavia.

Although he failed to make the most of it commercially, he set standards of craftsmanship that ensured its exploitation by others and established the value of the use of interchangeable characters in the composition of text. As with most significant inventions, there was a generally perceived need for improvements on current methods, no doubt recognized by many others as well as Gutenberg.

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A LOOK AT TECHNOLOGY CHANGES

The 90 years between 1890 and 1980 coined typography until now • The craft of printing

Gutenberg’s method of manufacturing type allowed him to imitate with remarkable success the shapes and proportions of letters and the ways in which they were combined by scribes.

became an industry, and the typography became a part of it as well. Both stylistically and technologically this epoch was really tumultuous. The result of the industrialisation process was the unimagined number and distribution of new typefaces. Whether digital variants of Garamond and Bodoni or new type designs like Futura, Times, and Helvetica: nearly all currently used typefaces have their origin either in the following and ongoing digital typesetting era or are based on designs of this epoch.

Now, font designers are no longer limited with the specifications of the metal types, a new font or typeface can be designed in a relatively easy way with the help of specialised computer applications or font editors.

The basis was the appearance of large type foundries and type manufacturers. The result: Successful typefaces could quickly gain the status of a trademark–and therefore were able to assign a unique “branding” to products or publications.

Originally, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype machines designed to be printed on letterpress printers. Today’s digital type foundries accumulate and distribute typefaces (typically as digitized fonts) created by type designers, who may either be freelancers operating their own independent foundry, or employed by another foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services.

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TYPE AS NATIONALITY

LONDON ITALY

FRANCE GERMANY Cultural tradition ensured that and type design remained true to the gothic/blackletter spirit. It was the dominant letter shape of medieval t ypography. It is distinguished by a uniform treatment of vertical strokes that end on the baseline (e.g., in b or l), the use of angular lines instead of smooth curves and circles (e.g., for b, d, o, or p), and the fusion of convex forms when they occur together (e.g., as bo, pa, and the like). Blackletter type was used in the only extant work known to have been printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the 42-line Bible.

Typography, type-founding and typeface design began as closely related crafts in mid-15th century Europe with the introduction of movable type printing at the junction of the medieval era and the Renaissance. Handwritten letterforms of the mid-15th century embodied 3000 years of evolved letter design, and were the natural models for letterforms in systematized typography.

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Fraktur is a form of black letter that became the most common German blackletter typeface by the mid 16th century. Its use was so common that often any black-letter form is called Fraktur in Germany.

Characteristics of Fraktur are: The left side of the small letter o is formed by an angular stroke, the right side by a rounded stroke. At the top and at the bottom, both strokes join in an angle. Other small letters have analogous forms.

The capital letters are compound of rounded c-shaped or s-shaped strokes.

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Italy Blackletter served well in Germany, but Italy, they found the pointed

stateliness of the Gothic letter out of keeping with the spirit of Humanism. When an edition of Cicero was brought to Italy in 1465, they used a typeface

that was explicitly intended to be, but was not, a printed copy of the text

of Cicero’s own time. To distinguish this type from the Gothic that was more “modern” in the 15th century, the Italians called it Antiqua. Known today as roman, it spread rapidly throughout western Europe except in Germany, where the Humanist movement was blocked by the counterDubbing it lettera antica, they impulses of the Reformation. In Italy the heavy gothic styles were soon began by copying the minuscule displaced by Venetian or “old style” Latin types, also called antiqua. All hand almost exactly, combinof the available manuscripts of classical writers had been rewritten during ing it with Roman capitals in the the Carolingian Renaissance, and with a lapse of three hundred years same manner as the manuscripts since the widespread use of this style, the humanist scribes mistook they were copying. By the time Carolingian minuscule as the authentic writing style of the ancients. moveable type reached Italy several dec ades later, the humanistic writing had evolved into a consistent model known as humanistic minuscule, which served as the basis for type style we know today as Venetian.

In Germany and in Italy, the many centres of printing grew up for the most part in the centres of commerce. But in France, where printing was from a sponsored activity.

The first book printed in France, a manual of instruction in Latin composition, was printed in an Antiqua type; and though there is some history of the use of a mixed Gothic until about 1520, printers in France from the start led the way to establishing the predominance of roman and italic. Important influences in effecting the almost exclusive use of roman type were the printers Simon de Colines, Henri and Robert Estienne, Geoffroy Tory, and the man who was the world’s first commercial typefounder, Claude Garamond.

FRANCE

Garamond quickly became a major force in making well-designed and superbly cut types available to printers, including those who generally couldnot have afforded the services of capable cutters. Though Garamond’s efforts with a Greek font were not notably successful, his French versions of the roman type of Manutius and an italic type of Ludovico degli Arrighi were of commanding importance in European typography until the end of the 16th century.

In 1540, after years of experimentation, Garamond perfected a roman type that, though it had affinities with the lettering of scribes, was designed unmistakably for mechanical reproduction.

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“He was one of the leading type designers of his time, and is credited with the introduction of the apostrophe, the accent and the cedilla to the French language. Several contemporary typefaces, including those currently known as Garamond, Granjon, and Sabon, reflect his influence.�

As a consequence it has become increasingly hard to distinguish individual or national styles.

With the appearance of personal computers at the end of the 20th century, a new round of western typography has begun. Increasingly, as technology became more complex and shops more highly specialized and automated, design became more a profession; the typo-grapher, trained in industrial design or graphic arts, succeeded the printer or the publisher in deciding how a book should look. Now, font designers are no longer limited with the specifications of the metal types, a new font or typeface can be designed in a relatively easy way with the help of specialised computer applications or font editors. Computer fonts are now widely used by every user of personal computer. During the this time, styles in book design, as in all the arts, fine or applied, have become increasingly international. Styles born in one country spread throughout the world and die through overuse at a dizzying rate.

Books, magazines, clothes, paintings, music, regardless of country of origin, all resemble one another far more than they differ.

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TYPE BECOMES

INTERNATIONAL

The ready availability of serviceable letter models freed typography from the necessity of creating its own prototypes and left it able to spend its creative impulses in other ways.

So well did it succeed that, within the first few decades after Gutenberg, it had brought forth almost every major development that it was to contribute and, in fact, had established itself so well that it may be fair to say that, until the 20th century, the art was a static one for all but the first 50 years of its existence.

Further, the fact that the art form could take its basic ingredients from existing sources gave it a stability that it would not otherwise have had. Since it was unnecessary to wait while various producers in various countries came to agreement on which letter shapes to adopt or what reading conventions to employ, the typographer was enabled to get on with the work of overseeing the printing of books for distribution on a scale never before envisioned. The influence on the Renaissance was of incalculable importance if, indeed, it was not one of cause and effect.

Futura Univers Gill Sans Franklin Gothic Meta

FATHERS OF THE FACES

1954

• Different from Paul Renner, Adrian Frutiger who is the father Univers expressed a modern thought on his work, “I first experienced the power of type to make the whole intellectual world readable with the same letters in the days of metal. This awakened in me the urge to develop the best possible legibility. The time soon came when texts were no longer set in metal types but by means of a beam of light. The task of adapting the typefaces • The original design appeared in 1926 when Douglas of the old masters from relief type to flat film was my best Cleverdon opened a bookshop in his home town of Bristol, school. When we came to the “Grotesk” style of sanserif, where Gill painted the fascia over the window in sans-serif however, I had my own ideas which led to the Univers family.” capitals that would later be known as Gill Sans. In addition, Gill had sketched a design for Cleverdon, intended • Morris Fuller Benton was America’s most prolific type designer, having as a guide for him to make future notices .Gill further developed it into a complete font family after Stanley completed 221 typefaces, ranging Morison commissioned the development of Gill Sans to from revivals of historical models combat the families of Erbar, Futura and Kabel which were like ATF Bodoni, to adding new being launched in Germany during the latter 1920s. Gill Sans weights to existing faces such as was later released in 1928 by Monotype Corporation. Gill Sans Goudy Old Style and Cheltenham, became popular when in 1929 Cecil Dandridge commisand to designing original designs sioned Eric Gill to produce Gill Sans to be used on the such as Hobo, Bank Gothic, and London and North Eastern Railway for a unique typeface Broadway. Benton’s large family for all the LNER’s posters and publicity material. of related neogrotesque sans-serif typefaces, known as “gothics” as was the norm at the time, includes Alternate Gothic, Franklin Gothic, and News Gothic. These typefaces better anticipated and were more similar to later realist sans-serif typefaces such as Helvetica than the other early grotesque types of his contemporaries.

1948

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1926

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• Paul Renner of 1900s saw roman as forming the trunk of the family tree of type, with roman capitals as the basis for all future developments in Western letterforms.

And on the grounds that minuscules influenced by roman forms could be traced back to Charlemagne, whose empire included the first German Reich, Renner concluded that roman was more German than gothic. Renner created Futura both as a new form of Grotesk and as a means of getting shed some of Germany’s old-fashioned “national dress.”

In particular, Renner sought a balance between capitals and lower case more effective than • Meta is a humanist sans-serif typeface family designed by Erik Spiekermann origithat of Herbert Bayer’s “uninally as a commission for the Deutsche Bundespost (West German Post Office), but versal alphabet” – a typeface later released by Spiekermann himself in 1991 through his FontFont library. Accordin which the capitals led the ing to Spiekermann, Meta was intended to be a “complete antithesis of Helvetica,” lowercase rather than being in which he found “boring and bland.” Throughout the nineties, FF Meta was embraced harmony with it. by the international design communitywith Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger writing that it had been dubiously praised as the “Helvetica of the 1990s.” FF Meta has been adopted by numerous corporations and other organizations as a corprate typeface, for signage or in their logo. The font is used in The Weather Channel’s logo. Development began in February 1985 when Deutsche Bundespost approached Sedley Place Design, where Spiekermann was working at the time, and commissioned a comprehensive corporate design program. As the typeface would be used repeatedly in small sizes, for identification (rather than copy), require two different weights, and printed quickly on potentially poor paper stock, the brief called for a very legible, neutral, space-saving, and distinguishable (in regards to weight) typeface with special attention to producing unmistakable characters.Whereas traditionally, typefaces are designed to be viewed beautifully large, the goal with this particular typeface was to produce a typeface which worked well for its primary application.

1991

1927

Designer: Anh Le Project: Typographers Time line French Fold Booklet Course: Typography II Faculty: Francheska Guerrero Typefaces: LinotypeUnivers & Adobe Garamond Pro

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