Lecture Eight - A History of Type.

General

• Type is the intersect or overlap between visual and verbal communication.
• Typography covers: a meta communication - a language that is used to comment on another language, paralinguistics - structures another language or the rhythm of communication and - gestures alongside words to change meaning.
• Type classification: Humanist, old style, transitional, modern, slab serif (egyptian) and sans serif.

Type through time

• Roman Age - most of our alphabet came from this time. Tragans column.
• Dark Ages - 1000 years of no development
• Medieval - lower case was developed.
• Age of Print - Guttenberg printing press invented in 1450, moveable type. First moveable  typefaces were based on human writing, black letter/gothic.

Humanist

• The first typeface was created by Nicolas Jenson and it was called Jenson.
• More readable and modern than black letter.
• Designed to look Italian renaissance.
• Characteristics are little difference in first and second stroke and inclination of the 'e'
• Painter Geofroy Troy believed the alphabet should reflect the proportion of the human form.

Old Style

• The next fifty years of type really developed.
• Shift between imitating human writing to type, as an art on its own.
• Characteristics are no upturned 'e' and spacing.

Transitional 

• Type as a distinct form.
• Now type wasn't based on the human form but created on quasi-scientific lines.
• During the enlightenment period, 1693.
• Characteristics are difference in stroke width. Also as society became more rational the letters became more vertical.
• Late 18th century John Baskerville created a type with a contrast between thick and thin.

Modern

• Start of Modernity.
• Sometimes called Didone.
• 1784 French Modernity, Giambattista Bodini.
• Characteristics are very high stroke contrast, every angle horizontal and vertical, ordered, represented elegance and style.

Slab Serif

• 1880's, industrial revolution.
• The nickname 'Egyptian' is random and does not relate to the style.
• Characteristics not sophisticated, rules of hierarchy broken, condensed to fit lots on a page.
• Typewriter font.

Sans Serif

• Around in the 1800's but popular in the modernist era.
• Progressive, looking to the future.
• Uni cameral, all text lower case.
• Grotesk typefaces are simple and stripped down, all about communication and historicism.