TYPOGRAPHY A Brief History of Type

Historic Milestones in Typography Blackletter The Middle Ages: very little white space and difficult to read Humanist or Venetian 15th century, lighter than blackletter with more open forms Old Style or Garalde 16th and 17th century with larger variations of stroke width; Aldus Manutius creates italic type Transitional or Neoclassical 18th century, the first that did not reproducehandwritten script; greater thick and thin stroke width Modern or Diodone Late 18th century, extreme contrast in stroke width, known for elegance and still used in high-end publications as headings – not for running copy Slab Serif, Square Serif or Mechanical Late 18th century, used with advertisements and headings on posters and billboards Modern Art Periods and Typography

Early 20th Century Futurists: Often used text that had no meaning, influenced by cubists

Russian Constructivists: Used a variety of sans serif type in posters

De Stijl Movement: Stripped away the decoration, used geometric shapes and blocky sans serif fonts

The Bauhaus School and Their motto: Form follows function. Type is stripped of decorative elements; lowercase lettering is favored and asymmetrical balance becomes a cen- tral feature in design composition.

Bauhaus typography was typically unadorned and clean. They believed: “Typography is an instrument of communication. It must present precise information in a suggestive form… For legibility, the message must never suffer from a priori aesthetics.”

Contemporary: Styles borrowed from the past, reinvented using electronic manipulation; free fonts are available for download or creation with simple computer graphic tools, new ap- proaches include grunge, cannibalism and distortion using filters.

Staatliches Bauhaus - The Bauhaus Bauhaus: The Founders of Modern Design Staatliches Bauhaus, more commonly known as Bauhaus, was the influential art and architecture school founded and Page in Germany in 1919. Layout Bauhaus became most influential on schools of thought in regard to typography, modern design, art, architec- ture and interior design. With the belief that artistic Bauhaus Master Instructors forms should be united, practise crafts should be pro- 1926 moted, and all should contribute to a utopian whole. From left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Typography played a large role in the Bauhaus move- Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost ment, with many important and famous typefaces Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel finding their roots there: Kombinationsschrift (Joseph Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Albers), Futura (Paul Renner), Super Grotesk (Arno Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Drescher) and Universal (Herbert Bayer). Oskar Schlemmer. page 1 of 3 Type Categories Type Relationships Type Contrasts and

Oldstyle Concordant Terms A serif group based on hand lettering, works When you only use one type family without Size well with large areas of printed text much variation – a safe mix—but can be a bit Obvious differences in the font size or the use dull Modern of large areas of white space Influenced by the Industrial Revolution and Conflicting Weight or Style Mechanical Age; advances in advertising. Serifs When you use different typefaces that are too Thickness of stroke. Some examples include are horizontal and very thin. Best in large sizes similar in size, style, etc. Usually not a good regular, bold, semibold, extra bold, light, etc. for headings and titles. Very low legibility. direction in typography Using contrasting weights makes a page more Slab Serif Contrasting attractive and helps organize content. Thick throughout the letter form, easy to see Using completely different typefaces, which Structure from afar, on posters, readable for smaller ar- can be exciting and is a good direction in ty- The design of the typeface, such as stroke eas of text with wide leading and often used pography. NEVER USE MORE THAN THREE width, serif thickness, distance between let- for children’s books PER PAGE! ters Sans Serif Form No serifs, come in a variety of different Refers to how a letter is shaped, such as the weights (bold, regular, thin, etc), Easier to read difference between upper case and lower case on screens for large areas of text. Type Spacing of the same typeface Script Leading Direction Resembles hand writing where letters con- The horizontal space between one line of text Refers to the diagonal slant or vertical direc- nect; like cursive writing. Not good for large and the next tion of the counters. areas of text, best for small areas of text, logos or large accents. Kerning Type The space between two letters A printed character or printed characters; an Decorative element in design. Fun, distinctive, are best in small quantities and Tracking work great for headlines and small accents. The spacing across a whole string of letters, Typeface Some look really awful no matter what! used for decorative purposes The style or design of a font.

page 2 of 3 Sans Serif History Digital Types For Your Egyptian of Fonts Viewers The term was first used by Joseph Farington Legibility after seeing the sans serif inscription on John Postscript Type 1 How easy it is to distinguish one letter Flaxman’s memorial to Isaac Hawkins Brown Developed by Adobe, these consist of a print- from another in a particular typeface. in 1805, although today the term is commonly er or outline font, a screen or bitmap font, and used to refer to slab serif, not sans serif. usually a font metrics file (.afm). Type 1 fonts • Doesn’t call too much attention to are considered the high-quality standard for itself Antique years, although OpenType is changing that. In about 1817, the Figgins foundry in London • Has good contrast made a type with square or slab-serifs which TrueType • Has a larger x-height and little it called ‘Antique’, and that name was adopted Developed by Apple and MicroSoft, TrueType variation in stroke width by most of the British and US typefounders. was to replace Type1 font standards. • Has easy to recognize characteristics An exception was the typefounder Thorne, TrueType consists of a single file and more who confused things by marketing his Antique commonly used on Windows computers. • Isn’t too bold or light under the name ‘Egyptian’. In France it became Multiple Master • Does not use all caps or caps on each Egyptienne, and to worsen the confusion, the word in a headline French called sans-serif type ‘Antique’. Some Developed by Adobe, Multiple Master fonts fonts, such as Antique Olive, still carry the were intended to give the designer creative Readability name. freedom to scale fonts to custom widths and The ease with which a reader can scan weights. They are similar to Type 1 fonts. over paragraphs of type. Grotesque Adobe no longer supports these fonts. • Line lengths It was originally coined by William Thorow- good of Fann Street Foundry, the first person OpenType • Point size to produce a sans-serif type with lower case, Developed by Adobe and MicroSoft, Open- • Leading in 1832. The name came from the Italian word Type is a universal font format that includes • Typeface selection ‘grottesco’, meaning ‘belonging to the cave’. the benefits of Type 1 fonts and TrueType font In Germany, the name became Grotesk. Ger- technologies. It is Unicode compliant, is cross- • Type alignment man typefounders adopted the term from the platform, and consists of a single font file. • Background content nomenclature of Fann Street Foundry, which took on the meaning of cave (or grotto) art. Nevertheless, some explained the term was Neo-grotesque or Transitional derived from the surprising response from or Realist British Standards the typographers. Modern designs such as Standard, Bell Cen- classification Doric tennial, MS Sans Serif, Helvetica, Univers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox-ATypI_classification It was the term first used by H. W. Caslon Highway Gothic, and Arial. These are the most (scroll down for examples) Foundry in Chiswell Street in 1870 to de- common sans-serif fonts. They are relatively straight in appearance and have less line width Grotesque scribe various sans-serif fonts at a time the Lineale typefaces with 19th century origins. generic name ‘sans-serif’ was commonly ac- variation than Humanist sans-serif typefaces. Transitional sans-serif is sometimes called There is some contrast in thickness of strokes. cepted. Eventually the foundry used Sans-serif They have squareness of curve, and curling in 1906. At that time, Doric referred to a cer- “anonymous sans-serif” due to its relatively plain appearance. close-set jaws. The R usually has a curled leg tain kind of stressed sans-serif types. and the G is spurred. The ends of the curved Gothic Humanist strokes are usually horizontal. Examples in- Not to be confused with blackletter typeface, Calibri, Johnston, Lucida Grande, Segoe UI, Gill clude Stephenson Blake Grotesque No. 6, the term was used mainly by American type Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma, Condensed Sans No. 7, Monotype Headline founders.The term probably derived from Verdana and Optima. These are the most cal- Bold. the architectural definition, which is neither ligraphic of the sans-serif typefaces, with some Neo-grotesque Greek or Roman;and from the extended ad- variation in line width and more legibility than Lineale typefaces derived from the grotesque. jective term of ‘Germany’, which was the place other sans-serif fonts. They have less stroke contrast and are more where sans-serif typefaces became popular in Geometric regular in design. The jaws are more open 19th to 20th century.[13] Early adopters for Futura, ITC Avant Garde, Century Gothic, than in the true grotesque and the g is often the term includes Miller & Richard (1863), J. Gotham, or Spartan. As their name suggests, open-tailed. The ends of the curved strokes & R. M. Wood (1865), Lothian, Conner, Bruce Geometric sans-serif typefaces are based on are usually oblique. Examples include Edel/ McKellar. Although the usage is now rare in geometric shapes. Note the optically circu- Wotan, Univers, Helvetica. the English-speaking world, the term is com- lar letter “O” and the simple construction of monly used in Japan and South Korea. Geometric the lowercase letter “a”. Geometric sans-serif Lineale typefaces constructed on simple geo- fonts have a very modern look and feel. Of metric shapes, circle or rectangle. Usually these four categories, geometric fonts tend to monoline, and often with single-storey a. Ex- Classification be the least useful for body text. amples include Futura, Erbar, Eurostile. Note that in some sans-serif fonts, such as For the purposes of type classification, sans- Humanist Arial, the capital-i and lowercase-L appear serif designs can be divided into four major Lineale typefaces based on the proportions of identical. Verdana, however, keeps them dis- groups: inscriptional Roman capitals and Humanist or tinct because Verdana’s capital-i, as an excep- Garalde lower-case, rather than on early gro- Grotesque tion, has serifs. Other fonts may have two tesques. They have some stroke contrast, with Early sans-serif designs, such as Grotesque, horizontal bars on the capital-i, a curved tail two-storey a and g. Examples include Optima, Akzidenz Grotesk, and Franklin Gothic. on the lowercase-L, or both. Gill Sans, Pascal. page 3 of 3