Guternberg and Beyond
In lesson 2 we looked at Guternberg and Moveable Type and focused a lot on the history of the printing press and type, including industrialisation in the 19th century and how this impacted the rise in typefaces.
One quote which stuck with me this lecture was one by Erik Spiekermann, “Type is the clothing for words” as I had never thought of type as something other than what it actually is but when written in this context, you can kind of see it in a bigger picture and understand its importance a lot more.
We looked at the discovery of printing before typing was used and how before type, people carved letters into wood and printed them to form full words and sentences. These were then changed to metal in the 12thcentury.
Johannes Gutenerg
Gutenberg was known for having designed and created the first printing press and later gone on to create his first ever book which was the Bible. He was known as a ‘revisionary inventor’ as he took things that were already there and put them together to create the printing press, making it better. The invention of the printing press revolutionises the spreading of information and starts a typographic revolution in the process.
Understanding Typography
We then looked at how we can understand typography such as the anatomy and how its constructed, the difference in serif and san serif, letter spacing, line heights etc.
A tail means it is a serif font, those without a tail are known as sans serif
I thought that this was interesting as I didn’t realise so much technicality was involved with creating a typeface. It never really occurred to me that all elements of the anatomy of typefaces all have to work together in order to create one usable and visually pleasing typeface which can also be altered to suit different sizing, weights and what this looks like in bold or italics etc.
In this lecture we also covered readability, letter spacing, line length and web typography. In each of these areas we covered what looks good visually for a viewer vs what does not. For example, ensuring text starts at the left rather than being centre aligned as it is much easier for our eyes to gravitate towards the left and instantly recognise the next line.