Typography

what part of the history of typography/type is your favourite?

why?

Public Comments

1. I have a bit of a thing for serifs. I just like them, no particular reason!
2. The beginning when typography was really pictures drawn on cave walls or in Egypt when the educated would "set" type. They were considered just one level below the Pharoah and many levels above the citizens. Also, the late 1800s when moveable type was first starting to be used in Europe - the biggest break through since th Guttenberg press. There are so many great parts - and I love them all because they reflect what society was all about. The drawings of alphabets themselves are artwork. The worse part and least favorite - Mac and PCs that made people believe they could do it all themselves and put thousands of professionals out of work - while we watch the amateur use inch marks and foot marks for quotation and apostrophe marks. Wonder why you are asking?
3. There is one reasonable answer; the other absurd. Movable type was made in 1451 in the west, but there is data that shows that it is much older than that in Asia. Although computers have about moved Babbit out of the picture, there are still some newspapers that are set using a linotype and a Ludlow. Also, there are those printers who have a myriad of drawers full of type with sizes ranging from Agate to 72, or 144 point. I taught typesetting using the nice draw of type and setting it in a stick, putting into a form, and taking it to a press. The linotype was about the first thing to relieve the load on typesetters as typesetting then went from a fully manual process to a machine process that set bars of type. What is interesting to me about typography is the different styles. If you look carefully, you will see that different Socio-Economic times are reflected in the type faces that are used. As for "serifs" and "sans serif," I was always taught that sans serif was good in advertisements and short copy, but that the eye, in longer things like books and articles are best done with Serif type because they lead the eye and make reading the text easier. Interesting, in taking a marketing course where typography was briefly, the whole marketing book was done in sans serif and 400 pages of that drove me mad. A type face that I don't particularly like, but find interesting is Cheltenham. It is a dreary typeface, came out during the depression, and therefore suggest the tone of the era.
4. the rise of persian culture and civilisation that extended from greece and egypt to china.
5. I have a book about typography which explains the problem of visual "white rivers" in a typeset page, when the word breaks in several successive lines happen to line up with each other. A quality typesetter would scrap the page and start again, varying the letter pitch slightly or the hyphenation to get rid of the "river". When I see a computer program able to detect and repair flaws like that, I'll be impressed, but I'm still waiting.