Brief History of Typography

Friday, 28 February 2014

Today was my first day of Typographic Skills class. This class content many students. It's the biggest class I've ever take. It's consist like 15-ish students. So, for today, we only have a presentation about brief history of typography. So, this was what I got from the presentation:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TYPE

-       Type has existed for about 550 years.

-       The stories of type begin with the beginning of mankind and civilization and are rooted in the life of the cavemen.

-       It was the developing needs and habits of the cavemen, which led civilization on a path toward the evolution of the alphabet, and subsequently the invention of type, and printing.

SOUNDS TO SYMBOLS

-       Early man communicated purely with sound.

-       Stones, history and other information couldn’t be passed on from generation to generation in a permanent way only by direct word of mouth.

-       The earliest attempts to record stories and ideas were through cave drawings, the first know dated around 25,000 B.C.

-       The caveman drawings, or pictographs, were very simple representations of people, places and things and more permanent than sounds.

-       Around 3,000 B.C, the Sumerians developed cuneiforms; a system of writing that consisted of wedge-shaped forms carved into clay tablets and other hand surfaces.

-       Cuneiforms were one of the first systems of writing to read left to right.

-       There was a need for more symbols to represent ideas and other concept in addition to just “things”. This led to the new development of ideograms or symbols representing ideas and actions.

-       Ideograms were more difficult for the masses to understand, as it was not purely representational but more symbolic in nature.

-       Spoken and written language had become very different from each other, requiring the learning of two unrelated system of communication.

-       As society became more complex, the existing system did not meet its increasing needs and was no longer satisfactory.

-       This need subsequently le to the development of letter symbols which when put together represented words.

-       The Phoenicians, a society of traders and skilled craftsmen on the Mediterranean Eastern Coast, took written language a giant step ahead from the pictograms and ideograms.

-       Around 1,000 B.C. they developed twenty-two symbols representing written sound to imitate the unspoken words, eliminating the memorization of hundreds of unrelated symbols

-       This unique concept was the first attempt to connect the written language with the spoken word; we now call this phonetics.

-       Around 800 B.C. the Greeks embraced the Phoenician invention and took it one step further by adding vowels and naming the symbols.

-       They also employed boustrophedon (meaning “as the ax plows”) a system where one reach from left to right at one line, and right to left on the next.

-       The Roman began joining and slanting the letters in harmony with the natural motion of the hand in their attempt to write more quickly and efficiently.

-       The Roman also added ascenders and descenders as well as condensed forms of the alphabet to conserve valuable space.

Typography anatomy

Roman letter

-       One of the most important contributions to early writing by the Roman was Trajan’s column dated 114 A.D. it showcases one of the most beautiful and best known examples of Roman letterforms.

Trajan's column

GUTTENBERG AND MOVABLE TYPE

-       Until the fifteenth century all books were hand-copied by scribes, as exemplified by the many breathtakingly beautiful and exquisitely written and illustrated manuscripts that were created for religious purposes in monasteries.

-       In 1448, that all changed with the birth of printing.

-       Johannes Guttenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany is credited with the invention of movable type. There is some controversies as some credits Lautens Coster of Haarlem in the Netherlands with its invention.

-       Guttenberg accomplished this by carving the characters of alphabet it relief onto metal punches which were then driven into other pieces of metal called matrices.

-       Molten metal was then poured into these matrices, making the actual type that was identical to the original relief punches.

-       The type was then fit into printing presses that were capable of printing multiple pages in a very short time. This was called letterpress printing and had their distinctive characteristic of each character making a slight impression on the paper giving it a rich tactile quality.

-       Gutenberg’s first typeface was in the style of the heavy blackletter popular in Germany at that time, and contained three hundred characters including ligatures and abbreviations.

-       As the popularity of printing became more widespread, different typestyles emerged based on popular handwriting styles of that time including those favored by Italian humanist scholars.

-       Nicholas Jenson and Aldus Manutius were two printers of the time who designed typestyles that were influential and inspirational even to this day.

-       Gutenberg then went on to print the Bible, the first book printed from movable type.

-       It was no longer necessary for scribes to spend months and years (and lifetimes, actually hand-copying books).

-       This historical milestone brought forth many changes, such as improvements in printing, presses, papers, and inks.

-       It also inspired many others to design typefaces to make use of this transformational invention.

-       The sixteenth century brought us the beautiful proportions of the work of Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon.

-       In the next hundred years, the balanced designs and readable typestyles of William Caslon emerged.

-       Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot were tremendously influential in the eighteenth century with their elegant and graceful design.

-       The nineteenth century gave way to the old style characteristics of William Morris’s work.

-       The twentieth century brought us many designs inspired by the geometric Bauhaus style.

-       Many thousands of typeface styles available to us today are in large part due to the originality, artistry, and craftsmanship of five centuries of talented printers and designers, only a handful of which are highlighted here.

Metal movable type

Guttenberg letters of lead

Guttenberg press

PHOTOTYPE

-       The groundbreaking improvements in typesetting equipment were achieved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

-       In addition to its lack of speed and reliability, one of the primary limitations of metal type composition as it is referred to, was the inability to justify type automatically that is, without the manual insertion of metal spaces between the letters.

-       The Linotype machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in the 1880s as well as other typesetters that followed, including one from Monotype sped up the printing process immensely including justification and finally eliminated the need to set type by hand one letter at a time.

Linotype machine

-       The greatly increased speed had a major effect on newspapers by allowing them to extend their deadlines to print late breaking news.

-       This typesetting changed went hand-in-hand with advancements in the printing industry such as offset lithography, a photographic process that gradually replace letterpress printing.

-       Technology took a huge leap ahead in the mid 1950s with the development of phototypesetting.

-       Several companies the most prominent being Mergenthaler and intertype, developed and improved a photographic process of setting type whereby typefaces were made into negatives through which light was focused onto photosensitive paper, producing an image of the type.

-       The improvements over hot metal typesetting were qualitative as well as quantitative.

-       Typesetting could now be done electronically rather than mechanically, sorting over 500 characters per second compared to perhaps 5 or 6 previously and the equipment took up much less space.

-       Images became a sharp and crisp corrections could be made electronically, and most importantly there was now complete flexibility with regard to intermixing styles weights and sizes letter spacing and kerning; line spacing and word spacing; hyphenation and justification; overlapping and other photographic space effects as well.

-       The sudden elimination of so many restrictions in the typesetting process had a major effect on typography and typographic design.

HERB LUBALIN

-       One of the most prominent figures in typography and typographic design in the sixties and seventies was Herb Lubalin, a New York design.

-       His groundbreaking and adventuresome use of type, particularly in publication U&lc (designed and edited by Lubalin and published by International Typeface Corporation) influenced designers around the globe.

-       His work incorporated tight letter spacing and line spacing, extreme kerning with acute attention of every typographic detail, and the overall use of type and innovative new typefaces in ways never before seen.

-       He also handled type in an illustrative way seldom done before either by employing typographic forms as graphic elements of the design or by creating typographic puns.

-       The right types at the expense of readability were a reaction to the restrictions of hot-metal typesetting that preceded them.

-       This style has its critics and admirers today, but it is important to understand how and why it came about in order to appreciate its tremendous importance and influence of the evolutional type and typographic design.

His works

He could express a "bad thing" (for example Go To Hell is a bad thing right?) with a good way. So, this bad thing is like invisible.

INTO THE DIGITAL AGE

-       Digital typesetting method took hold in the 1980s.

-       Because it was so expensive and nee, only professional typographers in type shops adapted this electronic method.

-       The new digital typesetters were capable of composing type and integrating photos and artwork and layout at one workstation.

-       Digital color separation and retouching stripping and plate-making were to follow shortly.

-       At this point, typesetting was still in the capable hands of professionals who spent many years learning the craft and trade of typography.

-       In 1985, Macintosh introduced its first computer.

-       It was the first affordable “desktop computer” developed by Apple founder under the leadership of Steve Jobs.

-       Other manufactures, led by IBM were developing version of their own which came to be known as personal computer or PCs.

-       PCs had different operating systems than Macs, but the same affordability and focus.

-       Now it was possible for virtually anyone to set type on the computer as desktop publishing blazed the path toward desktop typography.

-       At the same time, page-layout applications such as Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress, as well as the more illustration-oriented program such as Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand, were being developed.

-       Simultaneously, companies and foundries such as International Typeface Corporation (ITC), Adobe, Linotype, Compugraphics, and Berthold shifted their focus to developing digital versions of their existing typeface libraries, as well as releasing new and different designs.

-       Smaller, more specialized foundries such as FontBureau, Émigré, T-26, and FontShop began to emerge an introduced some very innovative and cutting edge type designs.

-       The introduction of type design programs such as Letraset, FontStudio, Macromedia Fontgrapher, and Ikarus-M afforded the ability to created fonts to anyone who wanted to.

-       These developments led to the democratization of type design, and contributed to the many thousands of fonts commercially available today.

-       The quality of these typefaces ranged from very high end to extremely poor, leaving the daunting task of deciphering “which was which” up to the end user.

-       Graphic design production methods were changing in dramatic ways as well.

-       Paste-ups and mechanicals (the manual creation of camera-ready artwork using paper proofs and wax or rubber cement) were being replaced by digital page makeup, which was cheaper, faster and much more flexible.

-       Type no longer needed to be sent out to expensive type shops and instead was being set by graphic designers and productions artists, as well as administrative assistants.

-       Setting good typography is an art and craft that in the past took many years to learn and required highly skilled professionals who devoted their careers to that end.

-       Today, however, most of those working with typography have little education in type, including with few exceptions, most designers (Although some of the better design schools are just beginning to address this important subject).

-       The unfortunate result of this situation has been the proliferation of poor typography.

-       The computer in just a tool it is a means to an end, not an end itself.

-       Many designers and production artists are not versed in the factors that contribute to the creation of fine typography and are not aware of a familiar with the features in their page-layout programs that can achieve this.

-       With practice, however, you will acquire the eye necessary to see type as a professional does, as well as the ability and motivation to create it.