Studying typography will ruin your life, I would tell my students. You will never look at words the same way again. When your friends eyes are tearing up at the end of a sad movie, you’ll be critiquing the typeface of the rolling credits. When you pick up a book, you’ll examine the text type and “ledding,” the space between the lines. When you look at a billboard, you’ll want to nudge the capital W closer to the lowercase e.
I’m afraid it’s a disease without a cure. On the other hand, you’ll have the opportunity to shape important messages, to enhance a young reader’s encounter with Harry Potter. Or to make a brochure on gardening readable. Or, as with the early designers of type so long ago, to carry the words of God.
In the 15th century, when Gutenberg invented the movable-type press, the letters resembled those handwritten by scribes. First carved from wood, then molten metal cast in molds, these letters had bold, angular shapes with few curves. We call them German blackletter or gothic.
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The pages of Gutenberg’s famous Bible were designed in blackletter, two columns to a page, 42 lines. The Bible had 1,286 pages. Of the 180 copies, printed on paper and vellum, just a few survive in museums.
England’s famous printer, William Caxton, learned printing in Cologne, Germany, and brought it home to London, where in 1477, he published Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
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As groundbreaking as the printing revolution was in Northern Europe, it would be the letter forms from southern Europe that would dominate. In Florence, Venice, Paris and Lyon, letter forms were created to express Renaissance sensibilities.
The forms, while linking to the Roman capitals of antiquity, reflected humanist values. Letters were simple, yet organic. For example, in capitals and lowercase, the Os were not perfectly round, more like a peach, and the axis was tilted. The lines had variable thickness, much like a flower stem or tree branch. And though simple, without ornamentation, the letters had little feet, which we call serifs.
These roman letter forms (old style, transitional and modern) are still used today. For example, consider a widely used typeface created in 1929 for The Times of London, Times New Roman. Or the classic typeface of The New Yorker text, Adobe Caslon. Designed in 1722, Caslon was used to print the Declaration of Independence.
One of my favorite roman fonts is Goudy Old Style. A typeface I frequently use for both headlines and text is Adobe Minion. The typeface you are reading in the Independent is ATNews2. The heading is Berkeley Bold
The benefit of roman type forms, besides their inherent beauty, is their clarity. They can be read easily in small sizes. Enlarged as headlines or graphic initials, they are art forms in themselves.
In the late 19th century, then in the early 20th, we were introduced to a new branch of letter forms, the sans serif. While based on roman forms, the sans serifs reflected a desire for modernity. Designers got rid of the little hands and feet on the ends of verticals, straightened the strokes and gave them uniform width. The letters became more geometrical, some say, mechanical.
Made popular by the Bauhaus movement in Europe, sans serifs dominate today in signage and advertising. Of the hundreds of individual sans serifs, Helvetica is the most widely used. It’s the logotype of American Airlines and BMW. A common look-alike on most Windows systems is Ariel. When I want a more relaxed sans serif, I use Calibri or Gill Sans.
Today page designers have an almost infinite variety of typefaces to choose from--blackletter, roman, sans serif, and thousands of decorative fonts that would never work in text, but might in headlines. But remember, when designing pages for your reader, the last thing you want him or her to think about is the type. Your type design should not be self-conscious. It should be so subtle that only the meaning and beauty of the words come through. It should match the spirit of the message. Only you will know the hard work and the wise choices you put into making language come alive on the page or screen.
Only you will know the agony of the typographer.
© Ben Jacques
