Thursday, February 7, 2008

on our visit to the letterpress

typography history

I started by reading the whole type history

Type Technology — The Four Revolutions

Gutenberg (ca. 1450-1480) & The Impact of Printing

Before the printing press, books were produced by scribes (at first, primarily based in monasteries, although by the 12th century there were many lay copiers serving the university market). The process of writing out an entire book by hand was as labor-intensive as it sounds (try it some time): so much so that a dozen volumes constituted a library, and a hundred books was an awe- inspiring collection.

This remained true until the invention of movable type, the perfection of which is attributed to Johannes Gutenberg (although the Chinese had it several centuries earlier, and a Dutch fellow named Coster may have had some crude form a decade earlier). Gutenberg, although a man of vision, did not personally profit from his invention. He worked for over a decade with borrowed capital, and his business was repossessed by his investors before the first mass-produced book was successfully printed — the Gutenberg Bible of 1454, printed in Mainz by Fust Schoeffer. and

Gutenberg's basic process remained unchanged for centuries. A punch made of steel, with a mirror image of the letter is struck into a piece of softer metal. Molten metal is poured into this, and you get type. The type is put into a matrix to form the page of text, inked, then pressed into paper.

Within several decades typesetting technology spread across Europe. The speed with which it did so is impressive: within the first fifty years, there were over a thousand printers who set up shops in over two hundred European cities. Typical print runs for early books were in the neighborhood of two hundred to a thousand books.

Some of these first printers were artisans, while others were just people who saw an opportunity for a quick lira/franc/pound. The modern view of a classical era in which craftsmanship predominated appears unjustified to scholars: there has always been fine craft, crass commercialism, and work that combines both.

To those who have grown up with television, radio, magazines, books, movies, faxes and networked computer communications it is difficult to describe just how much of a revolution printing was. It was the first mass medium, and allowed for the free spread of ideas in a completely unprecedented fashion. The Protestant Reformation might not have occurred, or might have been crushed, without the ability to quickly create thousands of copies of Luther's Theses for distribution.

Many groups sought to control this new technology. Scribes fought against the introduction of printing, because it could cost them their livelihoods, and religious (and sometimes secular) authorities sought to control what was printed. Sometimes this was successful: for centuries in some European countries, books could only be printed by government authorized printers, and nothing could be printed without the approval of the Church. Printers would be held responsible rather than authors for the spread of unwanted ideas, and some were even executed. But this was a largely futile struggle, and most such restraints eventually crumbled in the western world.

Industrial Revolution: Steam, Line-casting & Automated Punch-cutting (start 1870-95; end 1950-65)

Amazingly, the printing press and the science of typecutting had only minor refinements from the late 1600s to the late 1800s. Towards the end of this period, the industrial revolution brought major innovations in printing technology. Rotary steam presses (steam 1814, rotary 1868) replaced hand-operated ones, doing the same job in 16 per cent of the time; photo-engraving took over from handmade printing plates.

Typesetting itself was transformed by the introduction of line-casting machines, first Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype (1889), and then the Monotype machine. Essentially, line-casting allowed type be chosen, used, then recirculate back into the machine automatically. This not only introduced a huge labor savings in typesetting, (again, on the order of the 85% reduction in printing time), but also rendered obsolete the huge masses of metal type created by the previously existing type foundries.

While typesetting and printing speeds increased phenomenally, so did the speed of punchcutting. In 1885, Linn Boyd Benton (then of Benton, Waldo & Company, Milwaukee) invented a pantographic device that automated the previously painstaking process of creating punches. His machine could scale a drawing to the required size, as well as compressing or expanding the characters, and varying the weight slightly to compensate for the larger or smaller size — this last being a crude form of the optical scaling done by skilled typographers making versions of the same font for different sizes. In optical scaling, the thickest strokes retain the same relative thickness at any size, but the thinnest strokes are not simply scaled up or down with the rest of the type, but made thicker at small sizes and thinner at large display sizes, so as to provide the best compromise between art and readability.

The economic impact of all these advances on the type industry cannot be overstated. For example, in the United States, the majority of type foundries escaped a bankruptcy bloodbath in 1892 by merging into a single company, called American Type Founders (ATF). Ultimately twenty-three companies merged into ATF, making it far and away the dominant American type foundry.

Also around this time, the "point" measurement system finally reached ascendancy. In the earlier days of printing, different sizes of type had simply been called by different names. Thus, "Brevier" was simply the British name for 8-point type of any style. Unfortunately, these names were not standardized internationally; 8-point type was called "Petit Texte" by the French and "Testino" by the Italians. Such a naming system also allowed wonderful confusion, such as "English" referring both to blackletter type, and a 14-point size; "English English" was thus a 14-point blackletter!

Pierre Simon Fournier had first proposed a comprehensive point system in 1737, with later refinements, but what was ultimately adopted was the later version developed by Francois Ambroise Didot. This put approximately 72 points to the inch (and now exactly 72 points to the inch on most computer-based typesetting systems).

Photocomposition (Intertype et. al., start 1950-60, end 1975-85)

The first photocomposition devices (the French "Photon" and Intertype's Fotosetter) made their debuts as early as 1944, but didn't really catch on until the early 1950s. Typeface masters for photocomposition are on film; the characters are projected onto photo-sensitive paper. Lenses are used to adjust the size of the image, scaling the type to the desired size. In some senses this technology was an "improvement," allowing new freedoms, such as overlapping characters. However, it also pretty much eliminated optical scaling (see 2.2, above), because in the rush to convert fonts to the newformat, usually only one design was used, which was directly scaled to the desired size.

Digital (start 1973-83)

The earliest computer-based typesetters were a hybrid between the above-mentioned photocomposition machines and later pure digital output. They each had their own command language for communicating with output devices. Although these machines had advantages, they also had problems. None of these early command languages handled graphics well, and they all had their own formats for fonts. However, some of these devices are still in service as of 1995, for use in production environments which require more speed and less flexibility (phone books, newspapers, flight schedules, etc.).

In the late 1980s PostScript gradually emerged as the de facto standard for digital typesetting. This was due to a variety of reasons, including its inclusion in the Apple Laserwriter printer and its powerful graphics handling. When combined with the Macintosh (the first widely used computer with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get display) and PageMaker (the first desktop publishing program), the seeds were all sown for the current dominance of computer-based typesetting.

Most high-end typesetting still involves printing to film, and then making printing plates from the film. However, the increasing use of high-resolution printers (600-1200 dots per inch) makes the use of actual printing presses unnecessary for some jobs. And the next step for press printing is the elimination of film altogether, as is done by a few special systems today, in which the computer can directly create printing plates.

Today, although PostScript predominates, there are a variety of competing page description languages (PostScript, HP PCL, etc.), font formats (Postscript Type One and Multiple Master, Truetype and Truetype GX) computer hardware platforms (Mac, Windows, etc.) and desktop publishing and graphics programs. Digital typesetting is commonplace, and photocomposition is at least dying, if not all but dead. Digital typefaces on computer, whether Postscript or some other format, are generally outline typefaces, which may be scaled to any desired size (although optical scaling is still an issue).

There has been considerable economic fallout from all this in typography. Although some digital type design tools are beyond the price range of the "average" user, many are in the same price range as the mid- to high-end graphics and desktop publishing programs. This, combined with the introduction of CD-ROM typeface collections, has moved digital type away from being an expensive, specialized tool, towards becoming a commodity. As a result of both this and the brief photocomposition interregnum, the previously established companies have undergone major shakeups, and even some major vendors, such as American Type Founders, have failed to successfully make the digital transition, and gone bankrupt instead (although at this time ATF appears to be undergoing a resurrection). More recently, even major digital type foundries have--dare one say foundered?--on the shoals of ubiquitous cheap typefaces (even a licensing deal with Corel Corp seems to have been insufficient to save URW++).

Although there is a new accessibility of type design tools for hobbyists and professional graphic artists, the decreasing value of individual typefaces has resulted in a decrease in the number of working type designers per se (both independents and company-employed).

Type Forms Through the Centuries

One must keep in mind that although typefaces may have come into use at a particular point in time, they often continued in general use far beyond that time. Even after the rise of old style typefaces in the late 1600s, the blackletter type was commonly used for setting text for several centuries (well into the 1900s in Germany). With later interpretations of earlier forms being relatively common, the style of a given typeface may belong to a quite different period from that of the typeface itself! Further, many typefaces have very complex histories: a type could have been originally designed in metal at one time, reworked by someone else later, made into a phototypesetting face by another person, and then later created in digital form by yet another designer — who might have been working off of any of the above as the basis of their work.

The classification system used here (old style, transitional, modern, sans serif, slab serif, etc.) has the virtues of being both simple and widely used. However, the precision and artistic accuracy of this system is perhaps dubious: see Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style or his article in the first issue of Serif magazine for a more thorough system.

Definitions

Contrast: The degree of difference between the thick and thin strokes ina font (if any).

Stress (axis): The angle at which contrast occurs, usually ranging from vertical to a somewhat back-slanted diagonal. This can best be noted by looking at, for example, the letter "O" and noting if the bottom left is thicker than the top left, and the top right is thicker than the bottom right. If this difference exists, the letter has diagonal stress. If the two halves of the "O" are a mirror image of each other, with the sides thicker than the top/bottom, then the letter has vertical stress. If the top and bottom of the "O" are the same thickness as the sides, there is neither contrast nor stress.

Serifs: Those "finishing strokes" or "fillips" going off the ending lines of a letter. For example, when the number "1" or the letter "i" are drawn with a bar across the bottom, the two halves of the bar are serifs. If the serif is joined to the letter by a slight flaring out, it is said to be "bracketed."

Early Letterforms

Although writing itself can be traced back to several millennia B.C., to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions, modern letter forms have their most immediate heritage in Roman inscriptions from around 50-120 AD, such as the one on the base of Trajan's Column in the Roman Forum (114 AD, digital version called Trajan by Carol Twombly for Adobe, 1989).

Although early Latin writing was heavily influenced by these chiseled-in-stone letterforms, over the centuries it evolved into a variety of other shapes, including uncials and the related Carolingian script. It is through this period of the sixth to tenth centuries that we see the development of the lower case (minuscule) letter as a different shape from the upper case (capital).

Type forms similar to what we now think of as "normal" letter shapes evolved from the Carolingian (or Caroline) minuscule. The Carolingian letters are so-called because of their adoption by the Emperor Charlemagne (late 10th century) as a standard for education. Digital revivals of these exist, such as Carol Twombly's Charlemagne (1989).

By the fifteenth century, italics also existed, in the form of a cursive script which had developed in Rome and Florence. However, italics at this time were a completely separate entity from the upright letterforms, as they remained in the early days of printing.

Blackletter

· View example Blackletter fonts.

The first printed types exemplify what most people think of as medieval or "old English" lettering, with ornate capitals, roughly diamond-shaped serifs, and thick lines. As a group, these typefaces are called "blackletter." They evolved from the Carolingian by a gradual movement towards narrowing and thickening of lines.

The general sort of blackletter used by Gutenberg in his first Bible is called textura (example). The other sorts of blackletter are fraktur, bastarda and rotunda. Probably the most common blackletter revival typefaces in use today are Cloister Black (Morris Fuller Benton, 1904, from Joseph W. Phinney) and Fette Fraktur.

It is worth noting that although these typefaces seem very hard to read to us today, this is due as much to familiarity as to any objective lesser clarity. Fraktur was in use in Germany well into the 1900s, though it was gradually being superseded by Roman typefaces. The Nazisat first fostered a return to Fraktur, then outlawed it as a "Jewish typeface" in 1940.

Studies from mid-century found that people can read blackletter with a speed loss of no more than 15%. However, there is subjectively more effort involved. Blackletter is today most appropriate for display or headline purposes, when one wants to invoke the feeling of a particular era.

Old Style Typefaces: Centaur, Bembo, Jenson, Garamond, Caslon

· View example fonts and more example fonts.

E.P. Goldschmidt, as explained by Stanley Morison, claimed that "the supersession of black-letter was not due to any 'technical advance,' it was the visible expression of a changed attitude of mind." The Renaissance was typified by an obsession with things "classical," in the Greco-Roman sense, which had major implications for typography. The neo-classical letterforms were somewhat more condensed than the Carolingian shapes, but much rounder and more expanded than the blackletter.

Old style type is generally considered "warm" or friendly, thanks to its origins in Renaissance humanism. The main characteristics of old style typefaces are low contrast with diagonal stress, and cove or "bracketed" serifs (serifs with a rounded join to the stem of the letter). The earliest (Venetian or Renaissance) old style typefaces (originally 15th-16th Century) have very minimal contrast, and a sloped cross-bar on the lower-case "e." One such is Bruce Rogers' Centaur Jenson. Similarly, Monotype's Bembo (1929) is based on the work of Francesco Griffo, circa 1499. (1916), based on

Italics at this point were still independent designs, and were generally used completely separately; a whole book could be set in italics. Probably the most famous italic of the period is Arrighi's (1524), which may be seen today as the italic form of Centaur. Likewise, the italic form of Bembo is based on the italic of Tagliente (also 1524).

Later or baroque old style type (17th Century) generally has more contrast, with a somewhat variable axis, and more slope of italic. The most common examples are the types of Garamond and Caslon, many variant revivals of which exist in digital form.

Transitional Type: Baskerville, Fournier

· View example fonts.

"Transitional" type is so-called because of its intermediate position between old style and modern. The distinguishing features of transitional typefaces include vertical stress and slightly higher contrast than old style typefaces, combined with horizontal serifs. The most influential examples are Philippe Grandjean's "Romain du Roi" for the French Crown around 1702, Pierre Simon Fournier's work circa 1750, and John Baskerville's work from 1757 onwards. Although today we remember Baskerville primarily for his typeface designs, in his own time people were much more impressed by his printing, which used an innovative glossy paper and wide margins.

Later transitional types begin to move towards "modern" designs. Contrast is accentuated, and serifs are more flattened. Current examples of such are based on originals from approximately 1788-1810, and are dominated by British isles designers, such as Richard Austin (Bell, 1788), William Martin (Bulmer) and Miller & Richard (Scotch Roman).

For currently available examples of transitional type, there are many types which bear Baskerville's name, descending from one or another of his designs. Less common today is P.S. Fournier's work, although several versions of it are available in digital or metal form. Although Scotch Roman has been a very common face in metal type usage since Monotype's 1920 revival, it is not a common digital face. Bell, on the other hand, is included in a Microsoft Font Pack, and Bulmer has received more attention since its revival by Monotype in late 1994.

Modern Type: Didot, Bodoni, Walbaum

· View example fonts.

"Modern" typefaces are distinguishable by their sudden-onset vertical stress and strong contrast. Modern serifs and horizontals are very thin, almost hairlines. Although they are very striking, these typefaces are sometimes criticized as cold or harsh, and may not be quite as readable for very extensive text work, such as books.

A number of designers, perhaps semi-independently, created the first modern typefaces in the late 1700s and early 1800s. One of the first, and ultimately the most influential, was Giambattista Bodoni, of Parma, Italy. Ironically, historians of type often relate the development of the "modern" letterforms to a then-current obsession with things Roman — in this case the strong contrast and sharp serifs of classical Roman inscriptions.

Today, the most common "modern" typefaces are the dozens of reinterpretations of Bodoni's work (which itself evolved over time). One of the most successful reinterpretations is the 1994 ITC Bodoni by Stone et. al., featuring three different optical sizes. Although little is seen of Didot, a reinterpretation by Justus Erich Walbaum (ca. 1800) sees occasional use.

Sans Serif & Slab Serif: Helvetica

· View example fonts and more example fonts.

These type forms made their first appearances around 1815-1817. Both are marked by simpler letterforms with (usually) relatively uniform stroke weight, lacking significant contrast, often geometric in underlying design.

The earliest forms of sans and slab typefaces tended to be heavy, often monolithic, display faces, but there quickly evolved a wide range of styles. Although the earliest designs are not much used today, their descendants are common enough.

Sans Serif (a.k.a. Gothic or Grotesque)

Sans serif letters have no serifs, as the name suggests. The low contrast and absence of serifs makes most sans typefaces harder to follow for general reading. They are fine for a sentence, passable for a paragraph, but are difficult to use well in, say, the text of a book. The terminology of sans serif types can be confusing: essentially, gothic or grotesque are both generic names for sans serif (although Letter Gothic, confusingly, is more of a slab serif type).

In sans serif faces, the italics are often, although not always, simply a sloped (mechanically obliqued) version of the roman letters, making them totally subordinate to the roman.

By far the most common sans is Helvetica (1951, Miedinger), despite being abhorred by many typographers. Helvetica does have the advantage of coming in a huge range of weights and widths, which makes it versatile, and its ubiquitous character makes it easy to match. Other general-purpose sans serifs include Univers (Frutiger, 1952+), Arial (Monotype), Franklin Gothic (M.F. Benton, 1903) and Frutiger (Frutiger, 1975).

Sprouting from the Art Deco movement in the 1920s and 30s (see Art Deco), radical geometrical shapes began to be used as the basis for sans serif designs.

There are a few other common sans faces which do not fall cleanly into the above categories. Eric Gill's 1928 Gill Sans has an almost architectural quality, and its greater contrast and humanistic design makes it better-suited than most sans serif typefaces to setting bodies of text. The same can perhaps be said of a number of late 20th Century humanistic sans faces (see below)

Slab Serif (Egyptian)

These faces have block-like rectangular serifs, sticking out horizontally or vertically, often the same thickness as the body strokes. There is some debate about the origin of slab serif typefaces: did they originate by somebody adding serifs to a sans face, or were they conceived independently?

But even if they had a separate genesis as a family, it is certainly the case that many of the most common and popular slab serif forms have been created by adding slab serifs to sans faces by the same designer (e.g. Adrian Frutiger's 1977 Glypha from his Univers, Herb Lubalin's 1974 Lubalin Graph from his Avant Garde). Other slab serif faces include Berthold City (Trump, 1930), Memphis Serifa (Adrian Frutiger, 1968) and Silica (Stone, 1990). (Weiss, 1930),

The Clarendons or Ionics are an offspring of the slab serif typefaces in which the serifs are bracketed. These are often used in newspaper work, because their sturdy serifs hold up well under adverse printing conditions. The most famous member of this sub-family is Century Schoolbook (Morris Fuller Benton, 1924-35).

Decorative & Display Type

Fat Faces

The "Fat Face" types were an offshoot of the moderns, intended for display purposes (that is, to be attention-getting for use in large sizes, particularly advertising). The first such types appeared from 1810-1820. They further exaggerated the contrast of modern typefaces, with slab-like vertical lines and extra emphasis of any vertical serifs, which often acquired a wedge shape. Bodoni Ultra, Normande and Elephant are all examples of fat face types which are closely based on early to mid-19th Century originals, and are available in digital form.

Wood Type

Wood type answered some of the needs of display advertising during the industrial revolution. It derives its name from the fact that instead of being made of metal, the type is carved from wood, cut perpendicular to the grain. It is distinguished by strong contrasts, an overall dark color, and a lack of fine lines. It may be unusually compressed or extended. Many wood types have an "Old West" feel, because they are most strongly associated with America in the 1870-1900 period. Some of the wood types most widely available today are those in an Adobe pantheon released in 1990, which includes Cottonwood, Ironwood and Juniper (Buker, Lind & Redick).

Script, Brush, Italic & Freehand

Script typefaces are based on handwriting; but often this is handwriting with either a flexible steel nib pen, or a broad-edged pen, and is thus unlike modern handwriting.

Some common scripts based on steel nib styles include Shelley (Carter, 1972), Coronet (Middleton, 1937-38), and Snell Roundhand (Carter, 1965, based on Snell ca. 1694).

Script faces based more on the broad-edged tradition include the contemporary Park Avenue (Smith, 1933).

There are also monoline scripts, which lack significant contrast in the letter strokes. One such is Freestyle Script.

Brush typefaces look as if they were drawn with that instrument, which most of them were, at least in the original design from which the metal/film/digital face was created. Some of them resemble sign-painting lettering, such as Balloon (Kaufmann, 1939), Brush Script (Smith, 1942), and Dom Casual (Dom, 1952).

Brushwork can also be the basis for script, as with Present Script (Sallaway, 1974) and Mistral (Excoffon, 1953)

Although modern typography typically relegates the italic to a second-class citizenship subordinate to the roman, there are still some italic typefaces designed as such in their own right. The best known is doubtless Zapf Chancery (Zapf, 1979). Others include Medici Script (Zapf, 1974) and Poetica (Slimbach, 1992).

Art Nouveau

The late Victorian era, from 1880 to World War I, was characterized by this ornamental style of art, with its organic, asymmetrical, intricate and flowing lines. This "Art Nouveau" (French, meaning "new art") produced similarly distinctive typography, which saw a revival during the 1960s.

There are a fair number of digital revivals of art nouveau faces, although few are widely used. Some of the more common digital art nouveau typefaces are Arnold Boecklin (Weisert, 1904), Artistik, Desdemona, Galadriel and Victorian.

Art Deco

If Art Nouveau was about finding beauty in organic intricacy, Art Deco was perhaps about finding beauty in geometric simplicity. First appearing in the 1920s and 30s, Art Deco made a comeback in the 1970s and 80s as well.

Almost by definition, Art Deco meant sans serif type. The most common such face is Avant Garde (1974, Lubalin), which is striking but hard to read at length. A more graceful geometric sans is Futura (Renner, 1927-39). There are also more quirky faces in this category, such as Kabel (Koch, 1927-30). A recent popular Art Deco display face is ITC Anna (1991?).

Synthesis

Many of the most interesting typefaces of the twentieth century does not fit any of the above categories, or at least not easily. The reason is that they reflect not merely a single style, but cumulative experience, and the merger of different styles. This is perhaps true even of that most mundane of typefaces, Times New Roman (Lardent/Morison, 1931), which has old style, transitional and modern elements.

Synthesis and Serif Type

Although there are many practitioners of this synthesis, the most famous is Hermann Zapf. His Palatino (1948) and Zapf Renaissance (1987) are modern typefaces with the spirit of Renaissance letterforms. Melior (1952), Zapf Book (1976), and Zapf International (1977) all reflect an obsession with the super-ellipse, a rectangulated circle, as the basis for letter shapes.

There have also been many modern revivals of old style which, while close to old style in spirit, are not direct revivals of a specific original, and show modern influences in the proportions or lettershapes. These include the Granjon-inspired Galliard (Carter, 1978) and Minion (Slimbach, 1989).

Synthesis and Sans Serif Type

After 1950, many designers began to explore a wide range of starting points as the basis for sans serif designs. Aldo Novarese's Eurostile (1964-5) takes sans serif forms and distorts them towards square and rectangular shapes. Zapf's 1958 Optima is a masterful blend of sans serif shapes with Roman and calligraphic influences. Shannon (Holmes & Prescott Fishman, 1981) is a sans serif based on celtic manuscript proportions. Several designers have reinterpreted ancient Greek lettering for a modern sans serif alphabet: most popularly Carol Twombly's Lithos (1989), and most recently Matthew Carter's Skia GX (1994). Koch's Neuland (1930?) has a rough-hewn strength. Hans Eduard Meier's Syntax (1969) is one of the earliest sans typefaces which clearly echo renaissance roman letterforms. More recent sans faces often draw on a humanistic background, from Spiekerman's Meta to Vereschagin's Clear Prairie Dawn.

Grunge Typography

The most recent typographic wave is one which has sometimes been called grunge typography, after the musical movement originating in Seattle. Although it is far too early to judge the ultimate impact of grunge, I see the form as the merger of the industrial functionalist movement called Bauhaus (contemporary with Art Deco, named after the architectural school) with the wild, nihilistic absurdism of Dadaism. Grunge, like many typographic/artistic movements before it, is a rebellion; but this rebellion denies not only the relevance of anything previous, but sometimes even the relevance of legibility itself, in the belief that the medium *is* the message.

As grunge type designer Carlos Segura of T-26 says, "Typography is beyond letters. Some fonts are so decorative, they almost become 'visuals' and when put in text form, they tell a story beyond the words — a canvas is created by the personality of the collection of words on the page."

Grunge typefaces and typography are seen in magazines such as RayGun. Some examples of grunge typography are the work of Barry Deck (Template Gothic, Cyberotica, Truth), Nguyen's Droplet, Goren's Morire and Lin's Tema Cantante.

I then read on the influence of technology on type and came across this article

Fluid Typography

“Fluid Mechanics: Typographic Design Now,” essay by Ellen Lupton, published in Donald Albrecht, Steven Holt, and Ellen Lupton, Design Culture Now: National Design Triennial. New York: Princeton Architectural Press and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2000.

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Liquidity, saturation, and overflow are words that describe the information surplus that besets us at the start of the twenty-first century. Images proliferate in this media-rich environment, and so too does the written word. Far from diminishing in influence, text has continued to expand its power and pervasiveness. The visual expression of language has grown increasingly diverse, as new fonts and formats evolve to accommodate the relentless display of the word.

Typography is the art of designing letterforms and arranging them in space and time. Since its invention during the Renaissance, typography has been animated by the conflict between fixed architectural elements-such as the page and its margins-and the fluid substance of written words. Evolutions in the life of the letter arise from dialogs between wet and dry, soft and hard, slack and taut, amorphous and geometric, ragged and flush, planned and unpredicted. With unprecedented force, these conflicts are driving typographic innovation today. Typography is going under water as designers submerge themselves in the textures and transitions that bond letter, word, and surface. As rigid formats become open and pliant, the architectural hardware of typographic systems is melting down.

The flush, full page of the classical book is dominated by a single block of justified text, its characters mechanically spaced to completely occupy the designated volume. The page is like a glass into which text is poured, spilling over from one leaf to the next. By the early twentieth century, the classical page had given way to the multicolumned, mixed-media structures of the modern newspaper, magazine, and illustrated book.

Gill Sans: Pride of England?
Gill Sans is the Helvetica of England; ubiquitous, utilitarian and yet also quite specific in its ability to point to our notions of time and place. As a graphic designer’s in-joke once put it ‘Q. How do you do British post-war design? A. Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’. As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin.

Icons of the British mid-20th century.

So to pick an argument with something that is akin to a typographic national monument might appear unwise; it is so very much ‘ours’. But it is a flawed masterpiece. How flawed? Well, monumentally flawed, in fact. In 2006, now that Gill Sans is distributed freely with Apple’s OS X and Adobe’s Creative Suite products, it is time to re-examine those flaws. Ever since Gill Sans was incorporated into the Adobe/Linotype library in the early 1990s what used to be Monotype Gill Sans became GillSans. The new compound name and the missing foundry attribution serves to distance today’s users of this type from any awareness that Monotype used to issue Gill Sans in a range of different series with alternate cuts. Readers with experience of metal and phototypesetting may recall this system, but for now, the majority of us only have this ‘bundled’ version of GillSans to go by.

Since the inspirations of Optima (1958, by Hermann Zapf) and Syntax (1969, by Hans Eduard Meier), there has been a steady rise in the number of sans serif faces that have a humanistic structure and are good for a variety of tasks. FB Agenda (1993 by Greg Thompson), Bliss (1996 by Jeremy Tankard) and Fedra Sans (2001 by Peter Bilak), are some of the recently-produced typographical riches that all owe some part of their provenance to Edward Johnston’s sans serif lettering for the London Underground in 1916 – a project that the younger Eric Gill briefly assisted on and freely acknowledged as being the original model for Gill Sans.

However, writing his Essay on Typography in 1931, Gill claimed that Johnston’s letters were not entirely satisfactory or ‘fool-proof’, and that his new Monotype Sans Serif, the prototype of Gill Sans, was superior. Although other writers have celebrated the individual qualities of Gill Sans Q, R, a, g and t, as designs in their own right, I contend that the majority of character shapes in Gill Sans are actually worse than in Johnston’s design of fifteen years previous. Gill Sans achieved its pre-eminence because of the mighty marketing clout of the Monotype Corporation and the self-serving iconoclasm of its author. Thus, rather than Johnston’s lettering, it was Gill Sans that became the English national style of the mid-century. There were other, arguably better, typefaces derived from the ideal of making a monoline sans serif based on humanist structures. That this project has returned to inform some of the really great type design of the last fifteen years is a testament to how the problem was not solved in 1928.

Origins of Gill Sans in Johnston.
Like Johnston’s Underground lettering, Gill Sans began life as a piece of signage, a fascia board for the shop of Douglas Cleverdon. To complement the exterior signage, Gill produced a smaller alphabet in a blank book intended as a guide for Cleverdon to make future notices and announcements. To be fair to Gill, the initial intention was perhaps quite casual – but the result was seized upon in such a way that it forced Gill to step into Johnston’s shadow, on a commission that was to have far wider implications. Gill’s patron, Stanley Morison, as advisor to the Monotype Corporation, was probably the single most powerful individual in British typefounding in the 1920s. Gill knew that despite an existing commission for the serif face Perpetua, his working relationship with Morison, and his wider reputation with Monotype, the trade, and ultimately the reading public, would come to rest on this design. In the face of this, Gill may have deemed his relationship with both Edward Johnston and his style of lettering expendable, but the evidence suggests that Eric Gill was ‘learning on the job’ with this assignment.

There are three developmental forms of the Gill Sans lowercase ‘a’ on record; revisions were made at the Monotype drawing office and passed back to Gill for approval. The original design for ‘a’ is strikingly similar to Johnston’s (as might be expected), followed by a second attempt which was put into production and can be seen on early specimen sheets. The third and least satisfactory character is seen in all versions of Gill Sans since the early 1930s. Stylistically it calls into question Gill’s deletion of the foot serif for the lowercase ‘l’ in Johnston’s model – a feature which had an essential function within that alphabet, as it allowed distinction between the numeral 1, uppercase ‘I’ and lowercase ‘l’. In Gill Sans (appointed typeface to a nation of shopkeepers), this feature is absent and Monotype were obliged to produce a complete alternate cut for Gill Sans, designated ‘F’ that included a ‘proper’ numeral 1 that could be used for numerical setting, such as shop window prices and timetables. This tradition, upheld by Monotype until the early 1990s, was not carried forward to Adobe GillSans.

Gill obliterated the terminus endings of the vertical stroke in ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’; the Monotype drawing office again came to his assistance and revised the forms so that they were preserved in the medium weight (this can be seen on early samples of the series 262). Today however, this feature only persists in the lightest weight of the digital GillSans.

Gill Sans Light (above) and Gill Sans Regular (below); flattening of the bowls and subsequent loss of terminal stroke details in lowercase ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’.

The Gill Sans ‘g’ is another instance of ‘do as I say not as I do’; elsewhere in Gill’s Essay on Typography is a diagram of the forms of lowercase ‘g’ accompanied by the sneer “…comic modern varieties – as though the designer had said: A pair of spectacles is rather like a g; I will make a g rather like a pair of spectacles.” Sebastian Carter, writing in ‘Twentieth Century Type Designers’, called this the ‘eyeglass g’, claiming that it had been kept and improved from the Johnston alphabet. Looking at the original trial drawings for this ‘g’ in which the link is weaker, longer and the bowl correspondingly lower, it is easy to rebut this argument. The directional stress of the lower bowl is not consistent from weight to weight in Gill Sans, and it changes form entirely (to a continental or italic g) in the Ultra Bold weight; the fatness of the letter does not allow four strokes and two counters to fit within the allotted vertical space.

Variation of the directional stress from weight to weight of Gill Sans in the lower bowl of the ‘eyeglass g’ – no longer ‘eyeglass’ or double storey by the time it becomes Ultra Bold.

The lowercase ‘y’ was designed with a straight descending tail which makes the character appear rigid and unbalanced. This feature, like the overdrawn arms of ‘a’ and ‘r’ with their conflicting terminations, puts paid to any notion of rhyme or reason in the ‘improvement’ of the ‘unsatisfactory’ Johnston letterforms. The question to ask is this; if Gill found it necessary to introduce his (strictly unnecessary but aesthetically defensible) curves into the tail of ‘Q’ and the leg of ‘R’ in the uppercase, where none had been drawn in the existing model, why did he find it expedient to remove the existing curve (which was both necessary and defensible) in the tail of the lowercase ‘y’?

Examples of conflicts in stroke terminations; lowercase r, t and y compared.

Gill Sans is the ‘New Black’: Revival or Reaction?
One of the abiding eccentricities of Gill Sans is that its range of weights appears darker and less evenly distributed than any comparable face (even Futura is better moderated in this respect). Gill Sans Light (series 362) may equate to the book, normal or even the regular weight in other typefaces, just as Gill Sans Medium (series 262) looks like boldface in comparison, and Gill Sans Bold (series 275) is already well on the way to what Gill himself called Gill Sans Double Elefans. A likely reason for this is that Gill, as a stonecarver and sculptor, had his ideas about the apparent desirability of darker types formed by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris nearly 50 years earlier. However it is perfectly clear from reading Gill’s own Essay on Typography what he thought about the advisability of making extra bold weights of display typefaces: “…as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans-serif letters – each one thicker and fatter than the last because every advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbours.”

Diagrams of how not to make letters – 7, 8 and 11 are ‘overbold’, 12 is ‘hardly recognisable’; page 51 of Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography.

This is why series 442, the Ultra Bold weight, is otherwise called Kayo for ‘knockout’ – it was envisaged as an (English) heavyweight champion capable of slugging it out with (German) Futura Extra Bold. Elsewhere Gill labels his diagrams with terms ‘sans overbold’, ‘hardly recognisable’ and ‘fatuous’, to drive home his point about the distortion of letterforms in the heaviest weights. Yet this is exactly what happened to Gill Sans – rather than refuse commissions for Extra Bold and Ultra Bold (well beyond the weight of what was considered normal), he continued to draw up and deliver designs that he knew to be aesthetically unjustifiable.

Aside from inconsistencies of the weights in Gill Sans, Gill changed proportions between capital height, stroke width and character width. This leads me to disagree with the many descriptions of the design of Gill Sans that still contend that the typeface is “based on Roman character shapes and proportions” or “does not reject traditional forms and proportions”.

Comparison of uppercase E and F in Gill Sans and Johnston. Shorter middle arms help balance and legibility in Johnston’s case.

This is debatable – only with ‘J’ and ‘Q’ is there a potential argument about their improvement. While most of the uppercase appear compromised against their Johnston counterparts, the significant demonstrations concern the simplest shapes. With uppercase E and F, Gill standardised the length of the lower and middle arms to match the width of the topmost arm, narrowing the overall widths of both letters to compensate. This alters the letterforms’ balance in direct contradiction to the idea that he was somehow preserving classical proportions. While Gill narrowed the proportions of the M, his version of L, N and T are all much wider than in Johnston’s alphabet. Crucially this also makes extra white space around the letterforms – therefore N and T dominate the appearance of Gill Sans with their broad diagonal and open white space, requiring extra care with kerning and letterspacing.

Comparison of uppercase ‘K’ and ‘T’ in Gill Sans and Johnston.

Was Gill Sans ever designed as a jobbing typeface – suitable for a variety of purposes? While Monotype’s older publicity material never claimed Gill as being suitable for extended text setting, tastes and applications have changed; a recent assignment at my University showed nearly a third of second year degree students choosing Gill Sans as a headline and text face for a publication assignment. That the face is now as convenient to use as a Palatino or Helvetica may have something to do with this continued popularity. Identifont.com currently lists Gill Sans at six out of ten most requested fonts. In 2006, with Apple/Adobe GillSans about to amass the ubiquity of a lesser-known Arial, it would be all too easy to forget what came before GillSans. Now that the new OpenType format allows for extensive support including alternate sorts and contextual spacing, the typographic community should look forward to a better version of Gill Sans OpenType Pro; perhaps a complete overhaul in the style of Frutiger, Sabon, Optima and Syntax?

From the Monotype .pdf catalog at myfonts.com; apparently the only alternative glyph in the entire Gill Sans Opentype Pro font is the proportional numeral one.

Meanwhile, students should be urged to approach Gill Sans with caution; it is a hard typeface to use well without making considerable effort. When one’s view of a historic facade includes a very large and well-known monument, it can be hard to see which background details are obscured by the foreground presence, and this is where English sans serif type design has been for the last sixty years.

Light at the end of the tunnel for Johnston?
In addition to sanctioned and licensed revivals such as P22’s London Underground (1997 by Richard Kegler) and ITC Johnston (1999 by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson), a number of recent type designs now remind us of the original beauty of Edward Johnston’s vision rather than Eric Gill’s.

Fedra Sans by Peter Biľak, 2001; diamond-shaped dots show historic character at larger sizes.

Contemporary sans serifs Bliss and FB Agenda join forces with revivals from ITC and P22.

As reported in issue 58 (winter 2005) of Eye magazine, Jeremy Tankard was commissioned by Sheffield City Council to create Sheffield Sans. Now publicly released as Wayfarer, this type was partially inspired by the spirit of Granby, which had originally been released by the SheffieldGranby was formulated to be the local competition. It’s easy to see from today’s perspective, that to beat the competition, Gill employed a certain amount of bombast and hyperbole to secure critical success, while the Monotype sales force were able to supply volume discounts to institutional customers. In terms of design, however, Stephenson, Blake’s secret advantage may have lain in the fact that they had cut the wooden masters for Johnston’s original London Underground lettering. foundry Stephenson, Blake in 1930. Created at a time when Gill Sans was the new sensation,

42pt Granby in metal from the Stephenson Blake Foundry.

The old metal version of Granby has a faithfulness to Johnston’s proportions and characteristics that Eric Gill missed in such a way as to suggest he did it deliberately. Nearly a century later, Edward Johnston’s pioneering work is still the big noise in contemporary sans serif typeface design. So much for ‘fool-proof’!

Review on elements

Gill begins his books with a chapter entitled "Time and Place". This chapter is more about culture in general than typography. The chapter compares Industrialism to traditional crafts, noting the two are completely different and that one is largely bereft of humanity whilst the other embodies it. The chapter largely deals with the idea that design must now work for machines to mass reproduce rather than just one artisan producing unique works. Gill's concern is that humanity is lost in this exercise. This chapter can be applied to the web in many ways - making a website human and usable by humans is still a major challenge that faces designers today. Technology does not solve everything - humanity is just as important. ill goes on to talk about how Typography has progressed through time, moving from hand driven typography to mass printing presses. Each is examined for the impact on the craft with very interesting insight. Underlying the text he seems to lament the passing of the age of the craftsman.

For anyone working in a creative industry this is a fascinating read. More and more tools are available for designers and developers. It is easier than ever to produce creative work, quickly and easily. But as Gill suggests if you leave creation solely to technology you lose the humanity that is so crucial to creation.

That then would Gill think of the internet? I am sure he would be excited by the possibilities it would offer him. At the same time I think he would be concerned by the immediacy of creation and the lack of craftsmanship. I think he would be heartened by the small community who relish the opportunity to to work their craft on the web and the ability for them to share their knowledge with everyone across the globe. He would be frustrated by the constraints that machines place on his typographic skill. And Gill would have a blog - it would be great.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

elements of typography - eric gill

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=44Yq6UplAbAC&dq=
an+essay+on+typography+eric+gill&printsec=frontcover&source=
web&ots=ScMpVV1RU2&sig=WpiS2IUjeCpNURHBlpXjSXTc3go#PRA1-PA67,M1

Please click on the link ( you cannot download it)

i picked up my quote from this book and it was written by eric gill. After i read the book my deepening of the conflict between industrialisation and the ancient methods of handicrafts my research got even more stronger and i picked up the quote " There are two types of typographies as there are two worlds and apart from god or profits the test of one is mechanical and the other sanctity".

These are the rough sketches for letterpress...