Type Distribution & Production Lecture

Today our lectured covered the origins of Type, for me it solidified the 'types of Type'. I'd been aware of some of the styles of Type in regards to their historical background, but now with the timeline above I can clearly see which parts of the history of Type are relevant and why. To better understand the issues discussed today I'm going to briefly go through some parts of the history of Type that I believe are relevant to my personal practice.

There's evidence to support than symbology & lettering date back thousands of years, and even to suggest that many modern characters/glyphs we use to do have some form of connection or influence to what was used years ago. A good example is the capital letter 'A', it is said that it may derive from early illustrations of a cows horns. Flip the character upside down and there is a logical connection there.

Hand rendered symbols & glyphs are obviously still used today, but what really kicked mass produceable Type into being mainstream was the release of the Gutenberg press in 1450, which allowed for moveable and reproducible Type.

There's mention of early Typographic designers such as Claude Garamond, John Baskerville, Bodoni etc. But for me it really starts in the very end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, when the grotesque San Serif style really comes into it's own. It's worth mentioning about Akzidenz Grotesk here, probably my favourite Typeface, and one of the very first examples of a classic San Serif grotesque font; Akzidenz was designed by Günter Gerhard Lange in 1896 for the berthold Type foundry.

For me, the Typefaces that came soon after set the benchmark for what a San Serif Type should be today. Look at Gill Sans (Eric Gill 1928) for an example and pair that with the ultra-modern Gotham by Tobias Frere-Jones that was designed in 2000; they are very similar in appearance, notable similarities include the middle stem of the letter 'M', where neither touch the baseline. These Typefaces totally sum up the way I think about Type, it's the age old argument again: "Form follows Function", these Typefaces do exactly what they're meant to do.