Jewell / Chapter 1

Taking a step back in the book, Chapter 1, the Evolution of Typography, provided a relatively quick timeline detailing some key points in typography's life. From the earliest instances found on clay tablets, to the modern day onslaught of Helvetica, the book touches on the world events, architectural development, and art movements which had significant impacts on alphabet, language, message, and, thus, the overall state of typography as a whole.

Over time, as language and the Roman alphabet became consistently more unified and standardized - a uniform writing style - font types were more easily established. Eventually, Gothic font was extremely popular and useful for its time, although somewhat troublesome in print due to its use of so much ink and its density. In any case, the development of fonts for a long while was noted for larger and more dramatic style.

With the onset of more modern type, fonts eventually grew simpler and less extreme. Most importantly, Helvetica became the most widely used and, perhaps, the most widely mindless font in the world. Today’s type becomes its content more often than it describes its content, and an interesting battle still wages between typographic purists on the matter. The 2007 documentary Helvetica joins the discussion, including interviews with experts on both sides.

I think we're in an age where type is ambiguous. In many ways, an art has been lost in the "perfect" forms of sans serif fonts. Contrarily, this happens to drive some true artists to more creative extents in order to create something unique, powerful, and aesthetically pleasing in lieu of a seemingly bland and generic font palette. Does Helvetica and similar fonts work for clarity, legibility, and modernism? Surely it does! Does Helvetica touch the viewer in a way type could without a minimal, modern restriction? Arguably, it may not. In any case, this chapter, through an evolutionary perspective, brought up this question of progression versus a seriously unproductive plateau, or even a regression.

Image source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/travisrandg/this-animated-history-of-typography-has-character-5d61