How to Save Serif

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Republic of Serif

Sans-Serif Emipre

INDEX The Rise of Serif Flourish of Serif

The Empire strikes back

he history of typography starts with the invention of writing.

As soon as writing existed, men tried to make it beautiful. Since movable type was invented in 15th century, the Serif republic had ruled the world until the empire of sans-serif was built in early 19th century.

In 21st century, many design masters uses sans-serif, and the empire of the sans-serif dominates the world.

However, behind the domination, the republic of serif have been waiting for their counter-back…

The Rise of the Serif

ONE INNOVATION CHANGED THE WORLD. he most revolutionary technical innovation was made by German metalsmith. His name is Johannes Gutenberg. He invented the manual caster for movable type by in c.1450.

Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible is the earliest book printed in the western world.

Gutenberg’s Bible was printed a type that simulated the kind of writing. It was the family name that printers in Britain call ‘black letter’ and others call ‘gothic’.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of fine printing in Britain. William Caslon was cut the famous types, which are still in use today. Caslon admired John Baskerville. He designed and cut a new typeface, which is still one of the most popular English book faces. Baskerville became famous, not just for his modern alphabets, but also for innovative simplicity of his typographical designs.

The roman type of Caslon and his predecessors, which we classify as ‘old face’, were based on the forms made by a broad-nibble pen. By the eighteenth century, types were no longer copies of written letters, they were shapes in their own right, subject to intellectual as well as artistic development.

HISTORY TIMELINE

The Flourish of the Serif

THE SUCCESSOR TAKES OVERTHE WILL OF SERIF. fter Caslon and Baskerville created the base of the republic, their successors appeared in Paris in the late 18th century. His name is Firmin Didot. His typeface is known as the ‘modern’ face, which is the most commonly used types. The Didot family, John Bell, Giambattista Bodoni, and Justus Erich Walbaum were the major type designers and typographers of the time.

Until the early 20th century, the realm of the republic expanded to almost all of the media, like newspaper and magazines. The first power-driven cylinder press was installed to print the London Times in 1812.There was urgent commercial need for newspapers to get the news out on to the street quickly.

Moreover, the outstanding letterpress printer in the United States during the nineteenth century was Theodore Lowe De Vinne, who originated a famous type face, ‘Century’, first used for the Century magazine in 1895 and now.

The rule of the serif republic the world, but something the strike back of sans-serif in the early 20th century.

almost reached all around unexpected happened. It is empire, started in Germany

HERO AND VILLAN

The Empire strikes back

DESTROYTHEOLD ANDSTARTAGAIN. r o m a n letter without serif, caps only, first appeared a s a typeface in 1816. It was then know as ‘English Egyptian’ and was intended as a display face for occasional use in widely used during the nineteenth century. The first lower case cut in London without serifs came from the typefounding firm of Thorowgood; it was called ‘Seven Lines Grotesque’, and appeared in 1835.

Sans came into its own at the begging of the twentieth century, when designers, especially in Germany, called for a typeface unsere Zeit- ‘of our own time’. The first suns was the one made in England in 1916 for the London Underground Railway, and still in use.

It was in Germany that the need to ‘start again’, to destroy the old, was felt with the greatest urgency. After the First World War, in 1918, sans-

serif types were hailed in Germany as the typeface for the new age, the typographical expression of the new movements in art, sculpture and design which inspired, and explored at, the Bauhaus, in that remarkable educational experiment founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius.

In the 1920, the modern typographers felt that sans represented letter design in its fundamental form.

The belief, originally preached

by Tschichold and others in the early 1930s, that sans-serif was the only typeface suitable for use in the present century, and that it expressed the essential ‘sprit of the age’, has long since been abandoned; nevertheless, sans-serif did become the most used kind of type for almost every kind of printing, and still holds that position today across Europe and the United States.