Chapter seven was all about the evolution of the technology used to make printed typography. I have not done enough research about the subject prior to this reading so it was really interesting for me. I didn’t realize how slow of an evolution the technology has had since the first printing press. It really blows me away how easy it is to create and manipulate type with computers these days. Imagining creating molten lead molds for every line of type for something I want to print sounds ridiculous. Today we have essentially limitless control over the manipulation of typography that we would like to print, while earlier you couldn’t even adjust the size of characters. It makes me really appreciate how far this art form has come, and also how much creative control we now have today.
With that said, I still would like to someday learn how to properly set metal type by hand a single character at a time. I feel like it would be an amazing experience and a skill that not many people have these days. There would be no practical use for it, but keeping the old ways alive is important in my opinion. However, you won’t see me trading in my macbook for a linotype anytime soon. I also didn’t even know about phototype before this chapter. It seems like a great advancement, but the idea of having everything you print on photo-paper seems awful. I’m really thankful that our digital methods print onto plain paper these days. I can’t even imagine how excited typographers must have been when the first digital typefaces were introduced. They must have been pretty ugly and poorly rendered at first, but quickly took off into the endless beautiful digital typefaces we have today. Not to mention the crazy software, such as all the Adobe applications, that we now have to manipulate all this typography.
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