 |
| HISTORY OF FONTS TYPOGRAPHY |
A piece of cast metal type, Garamond style long s / I ligature. See also: movable type.
Modern typographers view typography as
a craft with a very long history tracing its origins back to the
first punches and die used to make seals and coinage currency in ancient
times. The basic elements of typography are at least as old as civilization and
the earliest writing systems-a series of key developments that were
eventually drawn together into one systematic craft. While woodblock
printing and movable type had precedents in East Asia,
typography in the Western world developed after the invention of
the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th
century. The initial spread of printing throughout Germany and Italy
led to the enduring legacy and continued use of blackletter, Roman,
and italic types.
Classical revival
In Italy, the heavy gothic styles
were soon displaced by Venetian or "old style" Latin
types, also called antique. The inscriptional capitals on Roman buildings
and monuments were structured on a Euclidean geometric scheme
and the discrete component-based model of classical architecture.
Their structurally perfect design, near-perfect execution in stone, balanced
angled stressing, contrasting thick and thin strokes, and incised serifs became
the typographic ideal for Western civilization. The best-known example of
Roman inscriptional capitals exists on the base of Trajan's Column,
inscribed c. 113.
In their enthusiastic revival of
classical culture, Italian scribes and humanist scholars of the early
15th century searched for ancient lowercase letters to match the Roman
inscriptional capitals. Practically all of the available manuscripts of
classical writers had been rewritten during the Carolingian Renaissance,
and with a lapse of three hundred years since the widespread use of this style,
the humanist scribes mistook Carolingian minuscule as the authentic
writing style of the ancients (as opposed to blackletter, incorrectly seen as
the lettering of the Goths that conquered Rome). Dubbing it lettera
antica, they began by copying the minuscule hand almost exactly, combining
it with Roman capitals in the same manner as the manuscripts they were copying.
Sample of Carolingian writing from the Carolingian Gospel Book produced between 820 and 830 AD
Upon noticing the stylistic mismatch
between these two very different letters, the scribes redesigned the small
Carolingian letter, lengthening ascenders and descenders, and adding incised
serifs and finishing strokes to integrate them with the Roman capitals. By the
time moveable type reached Italy several decades later, humanistic writing had evolved into a consistent model known as humanistic
minuscule, which served as the basis for the type style we know today as Venetian.
The transition from humanistic minuscule to roman type
The classically endowed city of Rome attracted
the first printers known to have set up shop outside Germany, Arnold
Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheim, closely followed by the brothers Johann and
Wendelin of Speyer (de Spira), and the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson. The
sequence of appearance and production dates for types used by these printers
have yet to be established with certainty; all four are known to have printed
with types ranging from texture Gothic to fully developed Romans inspired by the
earlier humanistic writing, and within a few years the center of printing in
Italy shifted from Rome to Venice.
Sometime before 1472 in Venice,
Johann and Wendelin issued material printed with a half-Gothic-half-roman type
known as "Gotico-antique". This design paired simplified Gothic
capitals with a rationalized humanistic minuscule letter set, itself combining
Gothic minuscule forms with elements of Carolingian, in a one-step forward,
half-step back blending of styles.
Around the same time (1468) in Rome,
Pannartz and Sweynheim were using another typeface that closely mimicked
humanistic minuscule, known as "Lactantius". Unlike the rigid
fractured forms of Speyer's half-Gothic, the Lactantius is characterized by
smoothly rendered letters with a restrained organic finish. The
Lactantius departed from both the Carolingian and Gothic
models; a vertical back stem and right-angled top replaced the diagonal
Carolingian structure, and a continuous curved stroke replaced the fractured
Gothic bowl element.
For details on the evolution of lowercase letterforms from Latin capitals, see the Latin alphabet.
Development of roman type
Nicolas Jenson began printing in
Venice with his original Roman font from 1470. Jenson's design and the very
similar Roman types cut by Francesco Griffo c. 1499 and
Erhard Ratdolt c. 1486 are acknowledged as the definitive and archetypal Roman
faces that set the pattern for the majority of Western text faces that
followed.
The Jenson Roman was an explicitly
typographic letter designed on its own terms that declined to imitate the
appearance of hand lettering. Its effect is one of a unified cohesive whole, a
seamless fusion of style with structure, and the successful convergence of the
long progression of preceding letter styles. Jenson adapted the structural
unity and component-based modular integration of Roman capitals to humanistic
minuscule forms by masterful abstract stylization. The carefully
modeled serifs follow an artful logic of asymmetry.
The ratio of extender lengths to letter bodies and the distance
between lines results in a balanced, harmonious body of type. Jenson also mirrors
the ideal expressed in Renaissance painting of carving up space (typographic
"white space") with figures (letters) to articulate the relationship
between the two and make the white space dynamic.
Nicolas Jenson's Roman type was used in Venice c. 1470. Later
"old style" or Venetian book Romans such as Aldines, and much
later Bembo, were closely based on Jenson.
The name "Roman" is customarily
applied uncapitalized to distinguish early Jenson and Aldine-derived types from
classical Roman letters of antiquity. Some parts of Europe call Roman
"antiqua" from its connection with the humanistic "lettera
antica"; "medieval" and "old-style" are also employed
to indicate Roman types dating from the late 15th century, especially those
used by Aldus Manutius (Italian: Manuzio). Roman faces based on those
of Speyer and Jenson are also called Venetian.
16th century France
Typography was introduced to France by
the German printers Martin Crantz, Michael Freyburger, and Ulrich Gering, who
set up a press in Paris in 1470, where they printed with an inferior
copy of the Lactantius type. Gothic types dominated in France until the end of
the 15th century when they were gradually supplanted by Roman designs. Jodocus
Badius Ascensius (Josse Bade) in partnership with Henri Estienne established
a press in Paris in 1503. Printing with undeveloped Roman and half-Gothic
types, the French pair were too occupied with meeting the demand for Humanistic and
classical texts to design any original types of their own. French books
nonetheless began to follow the format established by Italian printers,
and Lyon and Paris became the new centers of activity. Eventually,
the French government fixed a standard height for all types, to ensure that
different batches could be used together.
Garamond
Garamond-type revival by Robert Slimbach.
The svelte French style reached its
fullest refinement in the Roman types attributed to the best-known figure of
French typography-Claude Garamond (also Garamont). In 1541 Robert
Estienne, printer to the king, helped Garamond obtain commissions to cut the
sequence of Greek fonts for King Francis I of France, known as the "grecs
du roi". A number of Roman faces used in Garamond's publishing activities
can be positively attributed to him as a punch-cutter. From the dates of their
appearance, and their similarity to Romans used by Estienne, Christoffel
Plantijn, and the printer André Wechel, the types known as "Canon de
Garamond" and "Petit Canon de Garamond" shown on a specimen sheet
issued by the Egenolff-Berner foundry in 1592 is generally accepted as Claude
Garamond's final roman types.
Transition to modern type: 17th and 18th century
Baroque and rococo aesthetic
trends, the use of the pointed pen for writing, and steel engraving techniques
affected a gradual shift in typographic style. The contrast between thick and thin
strokes increased. Tilted stressing transformed into vertical stressing; full
rounds were compressed. Blunt bracketed serifs grew sharp and delicate until
they were fine straight lines. The detail became clean and precise.
Transitional Roman types combined the
classical features of lettera antiqua with the vertical stressing and higher
contrast between thick and thin strokes characteristic of the true modern
Romans to come.
The Roman types used c. 1618 by the
Dutch printing firm of Elzevir in Leyden reiterated the
16th-century French style with higher contrast, less rigor, and a lighter page
effect. After 1647 most Elzevir faces were cut by the highly regarded
Christoffel van Dyck, whose precise renditions were regarded by some experts at
the time as finer than Garamond's.
Modern Romans
Facsimile of sample published with genuine Bodoni types by the Officina Bodoni in 1925. The font shown is the digital Bodoni Monotype c. 1999.
True modern Romans arrived with the
types of the Italian Giambattista Bodoni and the French Didots.
Completing trends begun by the Fell types, Fleischman, Fournier, and
Baskerville, the so-called "classical" modern Romans eschewed chirographic and
organic influences, their synthetic symmetric geometry answering to a
rationalized and reformed classical model driven by the strict cartesian
grid philosophy of René Descartes and the predictable clockwork
universe of Isaac Newton.
The "classical" appellation
of modern Romans stems from their return to long ascenders and descenders set
on widely spaced lines and a corresponding light page effect reminiscent of
old-style-occurring at a time of classical revival.
Bodoni was foremost in progressing
from rococo to the new classical style. He produced an italic very close to
Baskerville's, and a French cursive script type falling in between italic type
and joined scripts. The Roman types of Francois Ambroise Didot and
son Firmin Didot closely resemble the work of Bodoni, and opinion is
divided over whether the Didots or Bodoni originated the first modern Romans.
At any rate, the Didots' mathematical precision and vanishing of rococo design
reflected the "enlightenment" of post-revolution France under Napoleon.
Francois Ambroise also designed "maigre" and "gras" types
corresponding to later condensed and expanded font formats.
The Spanish designer JoaquÃn
Ibarra's Roman was influenced by Baskerville, Didot, and Bodoni, but hewn nearer
to old-style and used in the same classical manner, including spaced capitals.
In England, modern Romans resembling Bodoni's were cut for the printer William
Bulmer c. 1786 by the punchcutter William Martin, who had been apprenticed
to Baskerville and influenced by him. Martin's italic mirrored the
open-tail g and overall finesse of Baskerville's.
In Britain and the United States,
modern Romans (emerging around 1800 and totally dominant by the 1820s) took a
somewhat more rounded, less geometrical form than the designs of Didot and
Bodoni; an obvious difference is that in Anglo-American faces the upper-case C
has only one serif (at the top) whereas in European designs it has two.
19th and 20th century typography
Industrialization
The 19th century brought fewer
stylistic innovations. The most notable invention was the rise of typefaces
with strengthened serifs. Forerunners were the so-called Egyptian fonts,
which were used already at the beginning of the 19th century. Their name likely
comes from the enthusiasm of the Napoleonic era for the Orient, which in turn
was started by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. In fact, slab-serif fonts (e. g. Clarendon from
1845) were newspaper fonts, whose serifs were strengthened in order to prevent
damage during the printing process. Stylistically the serif fonts of the
mid-19th century appeared very robust and otherwise had more or less
neo-classical design features, which changed during the course of time: By the
application of the slab serif design feature and by appending serifs to more
and more typefaces, an independent intermediate group of heterogeneous fonts
emerged during the 20th century. Meanwhile, the slab serifs are listed as an
independent group in most typeface classifications besides both main
groups serif and sans serif.
Slab-serif and sans-serif types were
rarely used for continuous bodies of text; their realm was that of
advertisements, title pages, and other attention-catching pieces of print. By
about 1820, most Western countries were using modern Romans and italics for
continuous texts. This remained true until the 1860s when the so-called 'old
style' faces-a largely English-speaking phenomenon-came into use. These went to
the opposite extreme from the modern faces; 'thick' strokes were attenuated,
and serifs at the end of thin strokes (as in C, E, L, and T) were narrow and
angled whereas in modern faces they were broad and vertical or nearly so. All
the upper-case characters were somewhat 'condensed' (narrowed). Old-style faces
remained popular until about 1910.
Above all the 19th century was
innovative regarding technical aspects. Automatic manufacturing processes
changed the print as well as the graphical illustrations. The illustration of
printed matters could be considerably standardized due to the lithography technique
invented by Alois Senefelder. Finally, another invention was photography,
whose establishment at the end of the 19th century led to the first halftoning and
reproduction procedures. The step-by-step development of a modern mass society
provided a growing demand for printed matters. Besides the traditional
letterpress beginnings of a newspaper landscape as well as a broad market for
publications, advertisements, and posters of all kinds appeared. The challenges
had changed: since printing and typography had been a straightforward craft for
centuries, it now had to face the challenges of an industry-ruled mass society.
Hot type and phototypesetting in the
20th century
The 90 years between 1890 and 1980
coined typography until now. The craft of printing became an industry, the
sixth-largest in the United States.
The fabrication and application of
typefaces more and more were affected by industrial manufacturing
processes. Significant incidents were the invention of the hot type machine
by Ottmar Mergenthaler (Linotype machine, 1886) and Tolbert
Lanston (Monotype machine, 1887) and a few decades later the emergence
of phototypesetting. The result: Compilation and typographical design of
the text could be more and more controlled by keyboards in contrast to manual
typesetting.
A result of the industrialization
process was the unimagined number and distribution of new typefaces.
Whether digital variants of Garamond and Bodoni or
new contemporary 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. The basis was the appearance of large types of 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.
Chicago contributed much to
typography design at this time as Frederic Goudy, designer of 123
typefaces, founded several presses. Oswald Cooper, designer of Cooper
Black studied under Goudy.
Besides the traditional typography of
books graphic design became a more or less independent branch.
The tensions between those two branches significantly determined the stylistic
development of 20th-century typography.
European avant-garde typography
During the 1920s, typographers in central and eastern Europe experimented with forms of avant-garde typography. The main places of development of avant-garde artists had been: Budapest, Zagreb, Belgrade, and, after 1924, also Prague. However, since 1925 avant-garde typography had been spreading to the cities of Western and Eastern Europe, and, as a result, the previous cities gradually lost their relevance.
In 1924 two exhibitions important for the development of avant-garde typography were organized: one by Ljubomir
Micić (the First International Zenitistic Exhibition of New Art in
Belgrade) and the other by Ion Vinea and Marcel Iancu (the
First International Exhibition Contimporanul).
0 Comments