the vision and spirit of the machine age

“Around 1790 [Giambattista] Bodoni redesigned the roman letterforms to give them a more mathematical, geometric, and mechanical appearance. He reinvented the serifs by making them hairlines that formed sharp right angles with the upright strokes. . . . The thin strokes of his letterforms were trimmed to the same weight as the hairline serifs, creating a brilliant sharpness and a dazzling contrast not seen before. . . . Bodoni’s precise, measurable, and repeatable forms expressed the vision and spirit of the machine age.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

the zenith of the transitional style

“John Baskerville [was] an innovator who broke the prevailing rules of design and printing in fifty-six editions produced at his press in Birmingham, England. . . .
Baskerville’s type designs, which bear his name to this day, represent the zenith of the transitional style bridging the gap between Old Style and modern type design. His letters possessed a new elegance and lightness. In comparison with earlier designs, his types are wider, the weight contrast between thick and thin strokes is increased, and the placement of the thickest part of the letter is different. The treament of the serifs is new: they flow smoothly out of the major strokes and terminate as refined points. His italic fonts most clearly show the influence of master handwriting.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

Caslon Old Style with italic

“After apprenticing to a London engraver of gunlocks and barrels, young [William] Caslon opened his own shop and added silver chasing and the cutting of gilding tools and letter stamps for bookbinders to his repertoire of engraving skills. [He was encouraged] . . . to take up type design and founding, which he did in 1720 with almost immediate success. His first commission was an Arabic font for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This was followed closely by the first size of Caslon Old Style with italic in 1722, and his reputation was made. For the next sixty years, virtually all English printing used Caslon fonts, and these types followed English colonialism around the glove. Printer Benjamin Franklin introduced Caslon into the American colonies, where it was used extensively, including for the offical printing of the Declaration of Independence. . . .
Beginning with the Dutch types of his day, Caslon increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes by making the former slightly heavier. . . . Caslon’s fonts have variety in their design, giving them an uneven, rhythmic texture that adds to their visual interest and appeal. The Caslon foundry continued under his heirs and was in operation until the 1960s.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

Claude Garamond

“Claude Garamond was the first punch cutter to work independently of printing firms. His roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. Garamond is credited, by the sheer quality of his fonts, with a major role in eliminating Gothic styles from compositors’ cases all over Europe, except in Germany. . . .
Around 1530 Garamond established his independent type foundry to sell to printers cast type ready to distribute into the compositor’s case. This was a first step away from the “scholar-publisher-typefounder-printer-bookseller,” all in one, that began in Mainz some eighty years earlier. The fonts Garamond cut during the 1540s achieved a mastery of visual form and a tighter fit that allowed closer word spacing and harmony of design between capitals.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

The art and science of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters, which are otherwise called antique letters, and in common speech roman letters

“[Geoffroy] Tory’s Champ Fleury (subtitled The art and science of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters, which are otherwise called antique letters, and in common speech roman letters), first published in 1529, was his most important and influential work. It consists of three book. In the first, he attempted to establish and order the French tongue by fixed rules of pronunciation and speech. The second discusses the history of roman letters and compares their proprtions with the ideal proportions of the human figure and face. Errors in Albrecht D’rer’s letterform designs in the recently published Underweisung der Messung are carefully analyzed, then D’rer is forgiven his errors because he is a painter. . . . The third and final book offers instructions in the geometric construction of the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet on background grids of one hundred squares. It closes with Tory’s designs for thirteen other alphabets, including Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and his fantasy style made of hand tools.
Champ Fleury is a personal book written in a rambling conversational style with frequent digressions into Roman history and mythology. And yet its message about the Latin alphabet influenced a generation of French printers and punch cutters, and Tory became the most influential graphic designer of his century.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

the cancelleresca script

”An important humanist and scholar of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius, established a printing press in Venice at the age of forty-five to realize his vision of publishing the major works of the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman worlds. . . .
In 1501 Manutius addressed the need for smaller, more economical books by publishing the prototype of the pocket book. . . . [This] was set in the first italic type font. . . . Italic was closely modeled on the cancelleresca script, a slanted handwriting style that found favor among scholars, who liked its writing speed and informality.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

the spaces between the letters

“It was not Florence, where the wealthy Medicis scorned printing as inferior to manuscript books, but Venice . . . that led the way in Italian typographic book design. A Mainz goldsmith, Johannes de Spira, was given a five-year monopoly on printing in Venice, publishing his first book . . . in 1469. . . .
Nicolas Jenson, who had been Master of the Royal Mint of Tours, France, was a highly skilled cutter of dies used for striking coin. He established Venice’s second press shortly after de Spira’s death. . . .
Part of the lasting influence of Jenson’s fonts is their extreme legibility, but it was his ability to design the spaces between the letters and within each form to create an even tone throughout the page that placed the mark of genius on this work. The characters in Jenson’s fonts aligned more perfectly than those of any other printer of his time.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

the evolution of alphabet design

“In 1498 [Albrecht] D’rer published Latin and German editions of The Apocalypse illustrated by his monumental sequence of fifteen woodcuts. . . . D’rer’s Apocalypse has an unprecedented emotional power and graphic expressiveness. . . . At age twenty-seven, D’rer earned reknown throughout Europe. . . .
His first book [as an author], Underweisung der Messung mit dem Zirckel unt Richtscheyt (A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler), [was published] in 1525. . . . The third chapter explains the application of geometry to architecture, decoration, engineering, and letterforms. D’rer’s beautifully proportioned Roman capitals, with clear instructions for their composition, contributed significantly to the evolution of alphabet design. Relating each letter to the square, D’rer worked out a construction method using a one-to ten ratio of the heavy stroke width to height. This is the approximate proportion of the Trajan alphabet, but D’rer did not base his designs on any single source. Recognizing the value of art and perception as well as geometry, he advised his readers that certain construction faults could only be corrected by a sensitive eye and trained hand.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

Why is Pink a Girl Color and Blue a Boy Color?

Gothic lettering

“The Book of Revelation had a surge of unexplained popularity in England and France during the 1200s. A scriptorium at Saint Albans with high artistic standards seems to have figured prominently in this development. At least ninety-three copies of the Apocalypse survive from this period. . . .
The Douce Apocalypse, written and illustrated around A.D. 1265 is one of the many masterpieces of Gothic illumination. . . . The scribe used a lettering style whose repetition of verticals capped with pointed serifs has been compared to a picket fence. Textura (from the Latin texturum, meaning woven fabric or texture) is the favored name for this dominant mode of Gothic lettering. Other terms, such as . . . the English blackletter . . . are vague and misleading. During its time, textura was called littera moderna (Latin for “modern lettering”).”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.