Gutenberg and Beyond

Today we were taught about the brief history of the evolution of type and how it changed the world.

Type today is more than just text, it’s an expression as well. Depending on what message you want people to see you use different typefaces, you can make a fun logo or a brand using a playful rounded font, like comic sans, or other quirky fonts. To make a more modern statement, stylish and minimalist you’d use something like Helvetica or some other sort of Sans Serif.

It was only recently, during the 1900’s people began using type to express themselves in various ways.

It all began in ancient China, which was the first nation to experiment with printing. They discovered it in the 3rd century. Using a stone to carve out the glyphs and printing with them using ink. The oldest surviving print is a manuscript dating back from 86AD. The first movable type system was created by Bi Sheng around 1040AD, and the transition from work type to metal occurred around 1234AD.

Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press, but he did design and build the first printing press to incorporate movable type and mechanized inking. This was used first of all to mass-produce bibles for the public.

This resulted in people realizing that what the church said wasn’t always true, because of the church trying to control the public with the help of the bible. But now when the public had their own bibles, it lead to the reformation, where different branches of Christianity would appear, like Protestantism.

The invention of the printing press spread all over Europe in a matter of years. In 1455 there were none, but in the 1500s there were operating printing presses in 245 cities all across Europe. Making it, at the time, the most widespread invention in human history.

Because the printing press was vastly popular at the time, printing twenty million books in the span of 55 years, the publishers began using a printer’s mark. This was a symbol in the printed books to let the readers know where it came from, much like branding we have today, which is a result of the printer’s mark.

The printing technique would also be used in art, like Albrecht Drüer for example. He would use a printing technique for his art, using a cut-out woodblock with graphics. He also had his own printer’s mark, to brand his own works.

During the 19th century, when industrialization started to appear, more typefaces came to be, as early as the 1700’s Sans Serifs, Slab fonts, and Square Serifs were used in printing.

Square Serfis is the typeface you’d see on wanted posters, it’s a font with a blocky more square-like serif. Slab fonts were very similar, just less blocky, but still quite bold.

Understanding typography.

There is a lot that makes a type, not just writing it. When designing a typeface there are certain rules to go by, such as the x-height, which determines how tall the lowercase type is, it is called the x-height since it measures how tall the lowercase x is. Cap height is the total height of an uppercase letter, but there is a measure above that, which is the Ascender. The Ascender is any glyph that exceeds the height of the x-heigh, there are both uppercase letters and lowercase letters that are ascenders, the ascenders that go above the Cap height are only lowercase letters. There is also a baseline, which is the line for when the type ends if it doesn’t have a Descender, which is the opposite of an Ascender. The Descender heigh is for lowercase letters that go below the baseline, such as j, p, y, and g.

These are just a few rules that are set for type.

Serifs

Serif is a type of typeface, it has more details to it than Sans Serif.
A serif is a detail added to a letter, a few common serif typefaces are Baskerville and Times New Roman. These typefaces have a small extra stroke at either a horizontal end or a vertical end of a letter.

Sans Serif

A sans serif typeface is a typeface without the extra stroke that Serifs have. Sans meaning without. They’re a clean font, typically used in computers. A few examples of these are Arial and Helvetica.

There are several different types, even though both Serifs and Sans Serifs are the most used ones. Like Monospace type, in which each type has the same width.
Handwriting which is a more elegant typeface, which is used in wedding invitations or more classy environments, handwriting is not suitable for text because it lowers the readability, and then Display typefaces. Display typefaces are a miscellaneous category, it’s usually used for brands and headings on websites.

Readability in type is important unless it’s for artistic purposes.
There are a few things to think about in terms of readability, like how far a sentence stretches, how close the letters are together as well as how close sentences are vertical. All of these three are important to boost the readability

Web typography.

Back before 2010, you could only use typefaces that were on your computer for the web but in 2010 adobe came out with a WebKit, they were able to then store typefaces on a server that people could later on access online and use in their CSS and HTML for websites.

There are now several different foundries like that, where you can get code online that you can use on your websites, such as Adobe fonts and Google fonts.