letter lecture

Print-friendly notes of classroom lecture, based on the book Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, and Students, by Ellen Lupton (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). Additional research by Alissa Faden.

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The Invention of Printing

Movable type, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the early fifteenth century, revolutionized writing in the West. Whereas scribes had previously manufactured books and documents by hand, printing with type allowed for mass production: large quantities of letters could be cast from a mold and assembled into “forms.” After the pages were proofed, corrected, and printed, the letters were put away in gridded cases for reuse. Movable type had been employed earlier in China, but it had proven less useful there. Whereas the Chinese writing system contains tens of thousands of distinct characters, the Latin alphabet translates the sounds of speech into a small set of marks, making it well-suited to mechanization.

slide: Movable type was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in fifteenth-century Germany. His typography took cues from the dark, dense handwriting of the period, called "blackletter."

slide: The raised surface of a piece of metal type (called the face) creates the mark, supported by the rectangular block below (called the shank).

slide: The traditional storage of fonts in two cases, one for majuscules and one for minuscules, yielded the terms "uppercase" and "lowercase" still used today.

slide: The Mainz Psalter, printed in 1457 by Johann Fust and Peter Shoffer, combines typography with two-color woodcuts. Since metal type and woodcuts are both relief processes, they could be printed together on the same press. The Mainz Psalter also included the first modern colophon (page included at end of book with the publishers name that also include other details about the book's production).

In fifteenth-century Italy, humanist writers and scholars rejected gothic scripts in favor of the lettera antica, a classical mode of handwriting with wider, more open forms. The preference for lettera antica was part of the Renaissance (rebirth) of classical art and literature. Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman who had learned to print in Germany, established an influential printing firm in Venice around 1469. His typefaces merged the gothic traditions he had known in France and Germany with the Italian taste for rounder, lighter forms. They are considered among the first—and finest—roman typefaces.

slide: Nicolas Jenson created letters that combined gothic calligraphic traditions with the new Italian taste for humanist handwriting, which were based on classical models.

slide: Adobe Jenson, designed by Robert Slimbach, is a contemporary revival of Jenson's early humanist typefaces. Many typefaces we use today are named for historic printers and typographers (Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville, Bodoni), but they have been redesigned for modern use.

slide: The Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius distributed inexpensive, small-format books in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to a broad, international public. His books used italic types, a cursive form that economized printing by allowing more words to fit on a page. This page combines italic text with roman capitals.

slide: This page, printed by Jean Jannon for the Imprimerie Royal, Paris, 1642, features roman and italic fonts that work together as a type family.

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Enlightenment and Abstraction

Renaissance artists sought standards of proportion in the idealized human body. The French designer and typographer Geofroy Tory published a series of diagrams in 1529 that linked the anatomy of letters to the anatomy of man. A new approach—distanced from the body—would unfold in the age of scientific and philosophical Enlightenment. A committee appointed by Louis XIV in France in 1693 set out to construct roman letters against a finely meshed grid. Whereas Geofroy Tory’s diagrams were produced as woodcuts, the gridded depictions of the romain du roi (king’s alphabet) were engraved, made by incising a copper plate with a tool called a graver. The lead typefaces derived from these large-scale diagrams reflect the linear character of engraving as well as the scientific attitude of the king’s committee.

slide: The painter and designer Geofroy Tory believed that the proportions of the alphabet should reflect the ideal human form. He wrote, "the cross-stroke covers the man's organ of generation, to signify that Modesty and Chastity are required, before all else, in those who seek acquaintance with well-shaped letters."

slide: Whereas humanist designers such as Geofroy Tory were inspired by the human body, this ideal letterform was created along quasi-scientific lines. This engraving by Louis Simonneau is from an alphabet commissioned by Louis XIV in1693. The engravings were the basis of a royal typeface (romain du roi) designed by Philippe Grandjean.

Engraved letters—whose fluid lines are unconstrained by letterpress’s mechanical grid—offered an apt medium for formal lettering. Eighteenth-century typography was influenced by new styles of handwriting and their engraved reproductions. Printers like William Caslon in the 1720s and John Baskerville in the 1750s abandoned the rigid nib of humanism for the flexible steel pen and the pointed quill, instruments that rendered a fluid, swelling path.

slide: The types of the eighteenth-century English printer William Caslon are characterized by crisp, upright characters that recall the fluid strokes of the flexible steel pen and the pointed quill.

slide: In the late eighteenth century, the English printer John Baskerville created type with such contrast between thick and thin elements that his contemporaries are said to have accused him of "blinding all the Readers of the Nation; for the strokes of [his] letters, being too thin and narrow, hurt the Eye."

slide: Working in the media of engraving and the flexible steel pen, eighteenth-centurywriting masters such as George Bickham created lavishly curved scripts as well finely detailed roman capitals rendered in high contrast. Such alphabets influenced the typeface designs of Baskerville, Didot, and Bodoni.

slide: The French printer Firmin Didot took Baskerville's initiatives to an extreme level by creating type with a wholly vertical axis and razor-thin serifs.

slide: These roman and italic letters were printed by Giambattista Bodoni in 1788. They exhibit extreme contrast between thick and thin elements.

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Monster Fonts

Although Bodoni and Didot fueled their designs with the calligraphic practices of their time, they created forms that collided with typographic tradition. The structural attributes of the letter—serif and stem, thick and thin strokes, vertical and horizontal stress—became subject to bizarre experiments.

slide: The rise of advertising in the nineteenth century stimulated demand for large-scale letters that could command attention in urban space. In this lithographic trading card from 1878, a man is shown posting a bill in flagrant disregard for the law.

The explosion of advertising demanded new kinds of typography. Big, bold faces were designed by distorting the anatomical elements of classical letters. Fonts of astonishing height, width, and depth appeared—expanded, contracted, shadowed, inlined, fattened, faceted, and floriated. Serifs abandoned their role as finishing details to become independent architectural structures, and the vertical stress of traditional letters migrated in new directions.

slide: Fat Face is an inflated, hyper-bold type style developed in the early nineteenth century. It is Bodoni on steroids.

slide: Extra Condensed typefaces, first seen in nineteenth-century advertisements, were designed to fit tall letters in narrow spaces. Such letters were made from wood rather than metal, because lead is too soft to hold up under the pressure of printing large-scale letters.

slide: Egyptian, or slab typefaces, introduced around 1806, transformed the serif from a refined detail to a load-bearing slab.

slide: The type historian Rob Roy Kelly created this chart to illustrate how the square serif was manipulated to create ornamental variations.

slide: This 1875 American advertising poster uses a dozen different fonts to maximize the scale of letters in the space allotted. Although the typefaces are richly varied, the centered layout is static and conventional.

slide: This Dada poster uses a variety of typefaces as well as advertising "cuts" (stock illustrations available in the printer's shop).The layout is innovative and dynamic, fighting against the grid of letterpress. Iliazd, 1923.

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Reform and Revolution

Some designers viewed the distortion of the alphabet as gross and immoral, tied to a destructive and inhumane industrial system. Writing in 1906, Edward Johnston revived the search for an essential, standard alphabet and warned against the “dangers” of exaggeration. Johnston, inspired by the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, looked back to the Renaissance and Middle Ages for pure, uncorrupted letterforms.

slide: Edward Johnston created this chart of the essential characters of Roman inscriptions in 1906 as part of his quest to look back in history and revive the search for an essential standard alphabet. He was reacting against the monstrosities of nineteenth-century commercial advertising.

slide: Golden type was created by the English design reformer William Morris in 1890. He sought to recapture the dark and solemn density of Nicolas Jenson’s pages. Morris was a design reformer who was critical of industrial production and saw ugliness in nineteenth-century commercial printing.

The avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, like the popular printers of the nineteenth century, abandoned the quest for an essential, perfectly shaped alphabet, but they offered austere, theoretical alternatives in place of the solicitous novelty of mainstream advertising. Assembled, like machines, from modular components, these experimental designs emulated factory production. Yet most were produced by hand rather than as mechanical typefaces (although many are now available digitally).

slide: This logo for the Dutch avant-garde journal De Stijl was designed by Vilmos Huszar in 1917. The letters consist of pixel-like blocks. Theo van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, created this alphabet using only perpendicular elements in 1919.

slide: Herbert Bayer designed universal, consisting of only lowercase letters constructed with circles and straight lines, at the Bauhaus in 1925.

slide: Designed by Paul Renner in Germany, 1927, Futura is a practical and subtle font that remains widely used today.

Responding to the rise of digital communication, designers in the late late twentieth century continued to explore geometric alphabets. By the early 1990s, with the introduction of high-resolution laser printers and outline font technologies such as PostScript, type designers were less constrained by low-resolution outputs. The rise of the Internet as well as cell phones, hand-held video games, and PDAs, have insured the continued relevance of pixel-based fonts as more and more information is designed for publication directly on screen

slide: The Dutch designer Wim Crouwel published his designs for a "new alphabet, consisting of no diagonals or curves, in 1967.

slide: Lo-Res family, designed by Zuzana Licko for Émigré, 1985.

slide: Geometric typefaces by the French designer Philippe Apeloig, 1980s and 90s.

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Type as Narrative

In the early 1990s, as digital design tools began supporting the seamless reproduction and integration of media, many designers grew dissatisfied with clean, unsullied surfaces, seeking instead to plunge the letter into the harsh and caustic world of physical processes. Letters, which for centuries had sought perfection in ever more exact technologies, became scratched, bent, bruised, and polluted.

slide: Barry Deck’s typeface Template Gothic, designed in 1990, is based on letters drawn with a plastic stencil. The typeface thus refers to a process that is at once mechanical and manual. After Template Gothic was released commercially by Emigre Fonts, its use spread worldwide, making it an emblem of “digital typography” for the 1990s.

slide: Dead History, designed by P. Scott Makela, 1990, is a pastiche of two existing typefaces: the traditional serif font Centennial and the Pop classic VAG Rounded. By manipulating the vectors of readymade fonts, Makela adopted the sampling strategy employed in contemporary art and music. He also referred to the importance of history and precedent, which play a role in nearly every typographic innovation.

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Back to Work

Although the 1990s are best remembered for images of decay, typeface designers continued to build a repertoire of general purpose fonts designed to comfortably accommodate broad bodies of text. Rather than narrate the story of their own birth, such workhorse fonts provide graphic designers with flexible palettes of letterforms coordinated within larger families.

slide: Mrs. Eaves, designed by Zuzana Licko, 1996, is inspired by the eighteenth-century types of John Baskerville (and named after his mistress and housekeeper Sarah Eaves). It became one of the most popular typefaces of its time.

slide: Quadraat, designed by the Dutch typographer Fred Smeijers beginning in 1992, offers a crisp interpretation of typographic tradition. It looks back at the sixteenth century from a contemporary point of view, as seen in its decisively geometric serifs.

slide: Gotham, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000, is derived from letters found at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. Gotham garnered national press when it was chosen as the official typeface for inscribing the Freedom Tower, to be built at the site of the World Trade Center.