Typography
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A Specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon. |
Typography (from the
Greek words
typos = "to strike" "That by which something is symbolized or figured..." and
grafia = to write) is the art and technique of
setting written subject matter in type using a combination of
fonts,
font size,
line length,
leading (line spacing) and
individual and pliances,
LCD mobile phone screens,
car vehicle instrument panels, hand-held
video games,
pens and
wristwatches.
Generally, though, most typographical images follow the same format using
repetition,
contrast,
proximity, and
alignment. These four principles are frequently used in Typography.
Origins of the letter punch
The practice of
printing multiple copies of
symbols or
glyphs with a master
type punch made of hard metal developed around
3000 B.C. with the appearance of
currency in
ancient Sumer. Bars or
ingots of
precious metal were
imprinted with a distinctive stamp; the act of imprinting the ingots
certified them as currency by the power of formality embodied by the type image. These metal punches were precursors of
letter punches later adapted to printing with moveable metal type.
By
650 B.C. the Greeks were using larger diameter punches to imprint small "page" images onto
coins and
tokens.
cylinder seals were a related form of ancient typography capable of printing small "page" images in
cameo on wax or clay—a forerunner of
rotogravure printing used by wealthy individuals to seal and certify documents.
The artists who made the first coin punches were in effect the first typographers and type designers. Their
designs—including glyphs and words—were stylized with a degree of skill that could not be mistaken for common handy-work—they were specific
types (forms), designed to be reproduced
ad infinitum. Unlike the first typefaces used to print books in the
15th century, these types were neither combined or printed with
ink on
paper, but were nonetheless "published" in metal—a more durable medium—and survived in substantial numbers. As the face of ruling authority, coins were a compact form of standardized knowledge issued in large editions, making them an early mass medium that helped civilization spread throughout
Mesopotamia.
Combining multiple types in a single punch-like device seems to have first occurred around
1700 B.C. The mysterious
Phaistos Disc found in Crete in
1908 may have been an early writing machine. 241 tokens, comprising 45 unique glyphs, are moulded in relief on the face of the 15 centimeter
ceramic disc. The true purpose of the Phaistos disc is not known, but comparisons can be made with disc-based writing machines such as the
Blickensderfer typewriter, and
Dymo labelling machine.
First moveable type printing
Woodblocks, a counterpart to metal type punches, were used by
scribes in
Ancient Egypt to
print common hierolgyphic symbols onto tiles.
Block printing with text and illustrations on paper was first recorded in
China in the
6th century, and was in use in
East Asia. The oldest surviving book printed with wooden blocks is the
Diamond Sutra Buddhist scripture from
868. Another movable type printer was invented by Pi Sheng in
1040.
Several kinds of printing press utilizing moveable wooden blocks were developed in China, and an unsuccessful effort using ceramic types; the ceramic pieces were fragile and broke easily. The reason Chinese printing did not succeed was not due to technical limitation, but to the up to 50,000
ideograms making up the
Chinese language posing a logistics nightmare.
Letter punches and the moulding techniques for making coins were eventually adapted to the requirements of
matrix-based moveable metal type systems. A
printing press using movable metal type appeared in
Korea during
Koryo Dynasty circa
1234 A.D. By the
12th and
13th century Chinese libraries contained tens of thousands of printed books. Letter moulds for the Korean moveable metal type system were made the same way Europeans later made them—by striking a letter punch into a softer metal to produce a negative mould, which was then hardened to withstand repeated castings. The castings served as inexpensive copies of letter type punches. The basic technique had been in widespread use since the early twelfth century by coiners and casters of brass-ware and bronze.
The Korean moveable type system was limited by a
Confucian prohibition on the commercialization of printing. The technique was restricted to use by the royal foundry for official state material only. In the early 15th century
King Sejong of Korea devised a simplified
alphabet of 24 characters for use by common people (
Hangul) which may have made large-scale typecasting feasible,
"...but did not have the impact it deserved. It may be that the Korean typecasting technique then spread to Europe with the Arab traders. Korean typecasting methods were almost identical to those introduced by Gutenburg, whose father was a member of the Mainz fellowship of coiners."Gutenberg's hand mould
Johann Gutenberg, of the
German city of
Mainz, is acknowledged as the first to perfect a metal
moveable type printing in
Europe. Gutenberg was a
goldsmith who knew the same techniques of
cutting punches for making coins from moulds as the Koreans adapted to their system. Over a ten year period from approximately
1435 to
1450 he developed hardware and techniques for casting letters from
matrices using a device called the hand mould. Gutenburg's key invention, the hand mould, was the first practical means of making cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities needed to print a single book. It was the essential piece of hardware that made the moveable type printing process viable and profitable.
Brief description of the type casting process
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Diagram of a cast metal sort. a face, b body or shank, c point size, 1 shoulder, 2 nick, 3 groove, 4 foot. |
A small soft metal bar was struck with a hardened letter punch to make a matrice (negative letter mould); a matrice was made for every letter or glyph; a matrice was slid into the bottom of the hand mould, the device was clamped shut, and molten type metal poured into a cavity from the top. The hand mould was unlocked and a rectangular block approximately 4 centimeters long, called a
sort, extracted. Sorts were assembled into words and lines of text and tightly bound together to make up a page image called a
forme, with all letter faces exactly the same height to present an even surface of type. The forme was inked and mounted in a press, and an impression made on paper. Gutenberg developed his own oil-based inks and paper, and commissioned local craftsmen to develop a press suited to the requirements of printing.
Medieval roots
Typography
per se began with introduction of moveable type in mid-15th century Europe, at the junction of the
medieval era and the onset of the
Renaissance and ensuing
Classical Revival.
Letter forms in the mid-15th century embodied 3000 years of evolved letter design, and were the natural models for letter forms in systematized typography. The strong
gothic spirit of
blackletter from the hands of German area scribes was the model for the first text types and books printed by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany.
While the classical type of the Renaissance progressed and dominated western typography into the 20th century, blackletters continued on their own unique path, evolving into five distinct, highly disciplined and structurally rich sub-designs.
Classical revival
Printing spread rapidly from Germany to
Italy, where the severe textura gothic style was displaced by
Venetian or "old style" or
antiqua type. 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 & thin strokes, and incised
serifs served as the model and ideal for
western civilization. The best-known example of Roman inscriptional capitals exists on the base of
Trajan's Column circa
113.
In reviving the
classical culture of
antiquity, Italian
humanist scholars of the early 15th century searched for ancient
minuscules to match the Roman capitals. Practically all of the available manuscripts of classical writers had been rewritten in
Carolingian Renaissance, and with a lapse of three hundred years since the widespread use of this style, the humanist scribes mistook
Carolingian as the authentic
writing style of the ancients. 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.
When they realized stylistic mismatch between these two very different letters, the humanist 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, 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."
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 Johanne and Wendelin of
Speyer, 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 textur 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.
Some time before
1475 in Venice, Wendlin of Speyer issued material printed with a half-Gothic-half-roman type known as "Gotico-antiqua." 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 Lactanius
a differed significantly from both the Carolingian and Gothic models; a vertical backstem and right-angled top replaced the diagonal Carolingian structure, and a continuous curved stroke replaced the fractured Gothic bowl element.
For further reading on the evolution of lower case letter forms from Latin capitals, see
Latin alphabet.
Individual letters:
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy ZzJenson's roman type
Nicolas Jenson began printing in Venice with his original roman font from
1470. Jenson's design is universally acknowledged as the definitive and
archetypical roman typeface 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 emulate the appearance of hand-lettering directly. 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.
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A facsimile of Nicholas Jenson's roman type used in Venice circa 1470. The abstracted long "s" (resembling a barless "f") used in the middle of words fell out of use centuries later. |
Jenson adapted the structural unity and component-based modular integration of Roman capitals to humanistic minuscule forms by masterful
abstract stylization. The carefully-modelled
serifs follow an artful
logic of
asymmetry. The
ratio of extender lengths to letter bodies, and the distance between lines, results in 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.
The name "roman" is customarily applied uncapitalized to distinguish these 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 called "Venetian".
Birth of Modernism
Venetian and Antiqua type weathered the decorative influence of
baroque and
rococo that permeated succeeding transitional types such as
Baskerville. Transitional roman types combined the angled stressing of lettera antiqua with the vertical stressing and higher contrast between thick and thin strokes characteristic of the true modern romans to come. At the end of the 17th century,
modernism began to eschew
chirographic and organic cultural influences, giving rise to a rationalized, reformed classical model, based on a strict cartesian grid driven by the exacting philosophy of
René Descartes and the predictable clockwork universe of
Isaac Newton. In true modern romans types vertical stressing replaced angled stressing completely. By the mid-
18th century typographic design had become synthetic, personified by the strict
symmetric roman designs of
Bodoni and
Didot.
19th century
The
19th century saw a full-scale decorative revival in which type began to be used increasingly for large-scale display and advertising. Display fonts and graphic art mirrored the explosion of fancy and elaborate designs elsewhere, drawing from all previous eras: Rococo, Baroque, Gothic, Classical & Neo-classical. Using the
machine tool the first industrial designers were able to accurately copy any design and reproduce it
ad infinitum. For the first time the
middle classes and people of moderate means could afford facsimilies of objects previously attainable only by the very wealthy. Visual arts throughout the
"century of progress" were characterized by an exuberant
romantic sentiment and the general expectation that life would be better tomorrow than it was today, in contrast to the harsh realities of the
industrial human condition.
20th century modernism
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Text typeset using digital page layout software. |
Calamitous events at the beginning of the 20th century and the pervasive influence of the
Bauhaus school of reductive modern design triggered a wave of conservatism that was partly a backlash against the decorative
Victorianism and organic
Art Nouveau of the late 19th century. The clean, functional,
utilitarian modernism characteristic of the
20th century utilized
sans serif type and
minimal, reductive layouts.
21st century—the digital era
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Text typeset using LaTeX. |
The matter prima of type
In traditional typography text is arranged to be readable and visually satisfying. Interest is created with choice of typeface, text layout, modulation of the tone or
color of set matter, and the interplay of text with the
white space of the page and other graphic elements, all of which combine to give the "feel" or "resonance" appropriate to the subject matter. With
printed media typographers may also be concerned with paper selection, ink choice, and printing methods.
Choice of font(s) is a key aspect of text typography.
Prose fiction,
non-fiction, editorial, educational, religious, scientific, spiritual and commercial writing all have differing characteristics and requirements.
Orthography and
linguistics type is modulated by word structures, word frequencies,
morphology,
phonetic constructs and linguistic
syntax. Typography also is subject to specific cultural conventions. For example, in French it is customary to insert a
non-breaking space before a colon (:) or semicolon (;) in a sentence, while in English it is not.
Cerebral, literary, poetic
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legibility is a character thing, how clearly rendered are the characters?
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readability is how well a text reads. Depends on the quality of
bouma and controlled by leading and tracking.
Mass medium, disposable, high density
Typography is a potent element in graphic design where there is less concern for readability and more potential for using type in an artistic manner. Type is combined with negative space, graphic elements and pictures, forming relationships and dialog between words and images.
Color & size of type elements is much more prevalent than in text typography. Display typography exploits type at larger sizes, where the details of letter design built up from typographic history are magnified, turning typography into a major component of graphic art.
Display typography encompasses
posters;
book covers; typographic
logos and wordmarks; billboards;
packaging; on-product typography; calligraphy;
graffitti; inscriptional & architectural lettering; poster design and other large scale lettering
signage; business communications & promotional collateral; advertising;
wordmarks & typographic logos (logotypes), and kinetic typography in motion pictures and television;
vending machine displays; online &
computer screen displays.
The wanted poster for the assassins of
Abraham Lincoln was printed with lead and woodcut type, and incorporates photography.
The history of inscriptional lettering is intimately tied to the history of writing, the evolution of letterforms, and the craft of the hand. The widespread use of the computer and various etching and
sandblasting techniques today has made the hand carved monument a rarity, and the number of
lettercarvers left in the States continues to dwindle.
Most notable in the United States are John and Nick Benson who continue the work of the
John Stevens Shop in Newport, RI, which was founded in 1705. The Stevens Shop has been responsible for the lettering on many of the highest profile monuments of the past several decades including the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the
John F Kennedy Memorial, the
FDR Memorial, and, most recently, the
World War II Memorial, yet their primary work is the design and carving of
gravestones.
For monumental lettering to be effective it must be considered carefully in its context. Proportions of letters need to be altered as their size and distance from the viewer increases. An expert letterer gains understanding of these nuances through much practice and observation of their craft. Letters drawn by hand and for a specific project have the possibility of being richly specific and profoundly beautiful in the hand of a master. Each can also take up to an hour to carve, so it is no wonder that the automated sandblasting process has become the industry standard.
To create a sandblasted letter, a rubber mat is laser cut from a computer file and glued to the stone. The sand then bites a coarse groove or channel into the exposed surface. Unfortunately, many of the computer applications which create these files and interface with the laser cutter do not have many typefaces available, and often have inferior versions of typefaces that are available. What can now be done in minutes, however, lacks the striking architecture and geometry of the chisel-cut letter which allows light to play across its distinct interior planes.
There are a number of online retailers of gravestones which offer fill-in forms, and a couple dozen clip-art borders and imagery, and some which cater to remembrances of your pet chihuahua, cockatiel, or llama. On the outer edge of gravestone technology there is the Vidstone Serenity Panel, a solar-powered LCD screen inlaid right into the stone which will play "a short personalized video tribute".
Recently, there has been some rumbling in typographic circles over the proposed 9/11 memorial in New Jersey.
Frederic Schwartz, the project architect, has chosen to render the names of the victims, in his words, in "a familiar and easy-to-read typeface": Times New Roman. This democratic choice (the families of victims were closely involved with the design plan) could perhaps be echoing the controversial
Emigre adage "People read best what they read most" in that Times is the default for many applications, but it seems to many that the choice is really a non-choice, or poor choice at best. These letterforms, originally designed for small print in newspaper setting, will be blown up to nearly four inches high.
John Benson, speaking of his work in stone says, "You are making something that will outlast you. And I believe if you invest it with a certain honesty and the focus of your intellect and your sensitivities, those things are in the piece and are capable of being retrieved at a later date. That's what art is all about, isn't it?" (quoted in Kathleen Silver's "Men of Letters") Inscriptional typography can certainly rise to this level of intellectual and physical quality, as can be seen in the recent choice of Gotham for the
World Trade Cornerstone, but too often our culture settles for unconsidered and unthoughtful lettering for even our most important visual memorials.
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Display typography: a book cover |
On this science fiction book cover, the type outlines of the Roslyn font juxtapose with negative space and pictorial elements. Words are treated as compound objects made up of tightly spaced letters; the pictorial composition is as concerned with modulation of negative space—carving the background into satisfying shapes—as much as positive elements—the typeface outlines.
Typography has long been the bread & butter of promotional ephemera and advertising.
For a more comprehensive list of topics, see :Category:Typography*
Bringhurst, Robert (2002).
The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5). Vancouver: Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4. Often referred to simply as
Bringhurst, it is widely respected as the modern authority on typographic style for the English language (
excerpts).
*
, , 2002, ISBN 2743304820, for French typography
*
Type Directors Club*
Comp.fonts FAQ: General Info Section four of six of the newsgroup FAQ*
Typography, Type and Design*
Typography Directory*
Microsoft Typography page *
EServer TC Library: Typography*
FontSite.com Articles on basic typography for desktop publishers*
Diacritics Project - All you need to design a font with correct accents*
Twenty Faces*
Planet typography A magazine on contemporary typography + a directory, a manual and other topics related to typography *
The Printed Book*
Caligraft *
ABC typography. A virtual type museum *
A List Apart: Typography Matters *
Tipometar. Typography in Serbia defined through fonts, design, and photography, with retrospect on the history and ongoings
