Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Fred Catolico - Chapter 7 Reflection

Chapter 7- Typographic Technology

Chapter 7 covers the technology aspect of typography and goes in depth about the history and how far we have progressed in making design easier, more efficient, and more creative. Beginning with the earliest form of hand composition, designers would assemble individual pieces of type into lines and letter spacing was achieved by inserting thin pieces of copper or brass in between each letter until they appeared to be evenly spaced. Although this was very effective and worked at the time, hand composition was tedious and really time consuming. Later there were inventions like the Linotype and Monotype machines. The Linotype was a major development in the world of typography. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1866, the Linotype was named by its ability to create in automated single line with a set length that is specified by a keyboard operator. This was significantly faster and easier than hand composing type. Another significant achievement was the invention of the monotype machine. A bit different than the Linotype, the Monotype would only cast one character at a time instead of an entire line. I learned that the Monotype was important and useful because corrections were be made by changing single letters instead on a whole line at a time. The next invention talked about in this chapter is a Ludlow. A Ludlow is a semiautomatic line caster that combined both hand and machine production. Because it wasn’t fully automatic, the Ludlow was of course time consuming. Its major use was to make display type for headlines and other subjects that required larger type. Keyboard typesetters were introduced in 1950. I learned that later in time, fonts were able to be stored electronically making it easier and faster to produce and create typographic designs. Overall this chapter allowed me to reflect how far typographic inventions have progressed to help designs today.


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