Chapter 1 of “Typographic Design: Form and Communication”
showed the history and evolution of type and texts in general. What I found to
be most interesting was how events in society, architecture and art affected
the way type looked. In the beginning of type history I would expect most of
all letters to look like they do in their hand written form. What I found to be
fascinating is how computers and technology have taken over the idea of font
and text, almost all fonts today are computer generated and not hand drawn what
so ever. Also because of modern day printers, all different types of fonts can
exist without having to carve out each letter of a font that might be next to
impossible to carve. Fonts have evolved so much over the past thousands of
years they have existed. To think that typographers existed many, years before
graphic design came to be but typography is such a key point to graphic design.
It was really interesting for me to see how exactly history developed the
current fonts everyone knows and uses. On page 8, there are four images of the
letter B; all are different people’s variations of the letter B in 1500’s. What
I noticed was that all the B’s had serifs. All the B’s looked fairly similar
but with some alterations between each artist. Now days if an artist where to
craft a letter for a new font, there could be so many possible variations, from
thin and thick hairlines, the height of the ascenders and the length of the
descenders, the list could go on and on. I thought it was really cool to see
how color began to play a role in typography around the 1970s in the book. I
feel like typography gives a stronger messages/meaning when pair with the
correct colors.
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