April 5-11

Hey all!

So we're drawing near to the end of the SRPs with only one short month left!

I've been hard at work in production of the 6 posters I plan to make. To be thorough, I want to make clear why exactly I'm doing this.
So for my initial goal, I want to be the one to make an easily digestible history of typography with some posters that give a bare-bones overview of how typography has evolved. As a secondary goal, I'm gaining an understanding of the processes one uses to make something like a poster; this includes a psychological component as you have to know what methods to use to make your poster readable and enjoyable.

I have a rough draft of the first two posters (Histories of Blackletter and Roman).

I'll publish as soon as I have a good feeling that they're both close to finished!

March 22-28

Well it's come time for me to start cramming the entire history of type into a cohesive sort of timeline.

My final product is going to be a series of large posters: a sort of aesthetic and political history of the different varieties of type. For these posters, I set a few expectations as to what it would deliver somebody reading it:

1. The poster is an independent medium. Any observer can look at it and understand what it means to convey.

2. The poster is interesting to look at and read.

3. The poster has a visual theme matching the historical theme of its subject matter.

With that, I messily brainstormed:

(For the scrupulous note-taker, I used Pilot Varsity fountain pens and a Moleskine unlined notebook.)

In addition to these posters I'll make sure to have some writing accompanying these, which will contain some of the information I found interesting but didn't see working on the poster.

I've also finished The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and highly recommend it to anyone interested in type design.

March 15-21

Hello all!

I was out of town last week, which made it difficult to find time to work on my SRP, but I'm back on track and ready to roll now.

I'm making some really cool discoveries about the history of type. Though the public libraries have a nonexistent typography section, I'm managing to make use of the two books I do have on design and type. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst takes a fine-toothed comb to every detail of type. This is considered the definitive work on basic typesetting and design. American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century by Mac McGrew is a coffee-table volume of hundreds of fonts, and contains both samples and extensive histories on their design. These two big guys have gotten me through a lot of hassle. Would you believe that not everything can be Googled?

That's one of the biggest challenges with this project. I'm trying to assemble something huge here! By the end of this project I expect to assemble the philosophy of feelings behind a ton of different type styles.

Here's one last little thing I noticed. When I look at the history of a typeface, I don't just look up its name. You find so much more hidden in the details when you look at everything happening around the person who made it, or the era it was made in. For Eagle, it was the Depression. Nicolas Jenson? He knew Gutenberg and then fled Germany to continue his work! This is the important part; looking at the history. We do this for art history, why not for type?

The Story of: Jenson

In the year 1458, a French man named Nicolas Jenson smelled change in the air.

There was a new age dawning, something nobody had anticipated. Word had spread of a man in Germany who was making copies of the bible without ever using a pen.

Jenson had spent the better part of his life as a coin engraver in his home country of France, but this was soon to change. He received word from Charles VII (King of France) that he was to become a printer in Mainz where the now-famous Gutenberg had begun his work in movable type. 

Trajan

Jenson

While the technological advance of a movable-type printer shocked Nicolas, he still sought out to make some changes. The monastic Blackletter writing style was hardly readable, and in an age of mass-production he took it upon himself to assemble a more “humanist” face.

For this quest, he took inspiration from older alphabetical systems. 

For the capital letters he took the forms of Rome’s stone-carved letters. Compare Jenson’s capitals to 

those seen in Trajan.

Gutenberg's Blackletter type

Jenson’s idea when drawing up the figures for the type punches was simple: to balance the usage of negative and positive space. Blackletter was cramped, hardly any space between its wide pen strokes and sharp corners. Jenson's type had even, balanced lines and was weighted to occupy space gently but firmly.

Handwritten German, in Blackletter

For the lowercase (minuscule), Jenson’s shapes were straighter, more balanced versions of Carolingian minuscule script, used by the Romans in 800-1200 AD. 

Jenson's Roman type

These forms were radically different from both monastic blackletter and Gutenberg's metal type. This markedly increased legibility and helped lead to an age of skyrocketing literacy.

Jenson worked in Mainz for years until one day the city was sacked by a neighboring archbishop. Germany was a tumultuous and fractured region at the time, and Mainz’s prominence in the Catholic Church (The Free City of Mainz) had conflicted with the interests of a nearby authority. 

Among those who fled were several typographers such as Gutenberg and Jenson. This displacement, while inconvenient, led to a spread of typography and printing press information never before seen. Within a few years, there were printing presses in Venice, France, and Belgium. The unexpected diaspora led to progress of movable type through the land.

Thanks for reading!

Note: I update these articles frequently as I receive suggestions or new information. Let me know if you see anything that might need to be added or changed!

Update: March 1-7

Already almost a month out working and I've made some amazing progress!

My internship at Edible has allowed for many great opportunities in editing, design, and type organization. I've spent a lot of my time working on a solution for organizing a couple thousand fonts, and have made some really significant progress. In taking a volume of files like this and putting it into a reasonable order I've gained exposure to many hundreds of typefaces which really makes me appreciate the work that typographers do nowadays. Also around the office I've had my hand at some typographical editing, looking at drafts for formatting issues, and gaining much-needed perspective on how something like Edible is put together—it takes a lot of very dedicated, hardworking people with an eye for design.

Beyond the internship, I've formed many initial ideas about how I'm going to assemble the nebulous mass that is "typography" into comprehensible containers. There is so much to be learned by just looking at the events surrounding when a typeface was made. So many people analyze how a letter looks, how it reads, but I'm focusing on the other side: the typographer who wanted to make a typeface and what they made satisfied a need, somewhere in the world. What was that need? Did some far-off trade conflict make a sans-serif typeface more popular in France than before? I'm a detective looking for clues and it's really interesting what I've found so far.

Expect another "Story Of:" post soon. The next font I'll be looking at is Jenson.

The Story of: Eagle Bold

   Typography is precise, artistic, and expressive. The political moods of an era can heavily influence how typographers reach their design goals. This article explores the environment surrounding type designer Morris Fuller Benton in his progress towards creating the font Eagle Bold for use by the National Recovery Administration.

Eagle Bold in use on the NRA's famous "Blue Eagle" poster.

 Morris struck a proud, severe figure, his brow perpetually furrowed over deep-set, narrowed eyes. His thin hair was kept neatly parted and combed directly down the center, pasted tightly to his scalp as if it were painted on. His upper lip was clean-shaven, but every now and again he’d think fondly of his younger years as a student at Cornell University, pruning the full and noble mustache of a modern man, one ready to enter the world of the early 20th century and succeed. And succeed, Benton did. From 1900 to 1937, he was the chief type designer at American Type Founders, one of the most well-known type foundries in the country.

Morris Fuller Benton (Date Unknown)

    He followed after his father (L.B. Benton), inventor of the world-changing pantographic punch-cutter, which allowed for mass production and scaling of type matrices to a level never before seen in typesetting. Both he and his son were both mechanical engineers initially, starting their work in type design after they left college, which instilled into Morris a priority for mechanical precision and the development of type foundry methods instead of type itself. His father’s pantograph allowed for type founders to scale type automatically rather than having to hand-carve new sizes—this drove Benton to design his fonts to be attractive at many sizes rather than be designed for one size alone. All throughout his work, Benton’s type was an example of not only precision, but an understanding of the mechanics he used to overcome previous pitfalls in typography. [1]

These designs live on in many popular typefaces. He created the exceedingly popular Century series, along with Franklin Gothic and hundreds more. Eventually, he would be credited for the design of over 200 fonts. [2] 

    When the Depression struck, the United States Government took it upon themselves to construct a plan for getting the economy working again. In 1933, under FDR’s pen, the National Industrial Recovery Act came to pass. Through this bill was born the National Recovery Administration, a government agency built to assist businesses in the creation of a stable economy. The NRA took hold of land during the Dustbowl and converted it into Soil Conservation Districts to help alleviate the crisis, paid farmers not to plant crops that were in surplus, and encouraged planting of trees in fields abandoned by demoralized farmers in order to anchor the soil. This heavy intervention into the free market was championed by some and compared to fascism by others.

    As a government in the 1930s, there wasn’t much by way of direct government-to-populace communication besides occasional radio broadcasts and the mass-distributed poster. The question at hand for the NRA at this point was how to make small businesses both aware of the NRA’s existence and, more challengingly, willing to comply with the codes set forth. Solving this problem was left to the NRA’s advertising art director, Charles T. Coiner. He conceptualized the “Blue Eagle” logo, designing a simple, geometric design of a blue eagle holding a gear and lightning bolts to symbolize the authority and determination of the NRA to defeat economic woes. [3]

"We Do Our Part."

   The Eagle’s design was built on simple geometry and designed to be immediately recognizable. To complement the simple, bold design of the Blue Eagle, they were in need of a font. A seasoned typographer named Morris F. Benton initially proposed using his very own Novel Gothic, an eccentric typeface with thick lines, sharp angles, and an affinity for triangles. This was rejected, and a dejected Morris headed back to the drawing board, presumably cursing himself for shaving the mustache which loaned him so much confidence in his early years.

Novel Gothic in use.
© 1970 Columbia Records. License: All Rights Reserved.

Our fun-loving gal, Novel Gothic.

    
   Morris Fuller Benton knew that his creation, Novel Gothic, wasn’t far from the final product. The NRA needed something proud, authoritative, and patriotic. Novel had a sharp, eccentric feeling about it. The perfectly circular O, its N like a cartoon lightning bolt, and the curious tapering of the T bar were all aspects that undeniably made it visible. These, however, were not aspects that the NRA wanted to include in their image. Consider the V, its twin lines soaring yet ending on a strange angle which contrasted heavily with the flat lines of its surrounding letters. The triangular bar in H and E was a bold move that fell flat in how it broke up the negative space within the glyph. The final product which brewed in Morris’ mind would eliminate these issues and be a confident all-capital typeface which, on the NRA poster, would announce the presence of a strong-handed, nationalist agency with a mission to end the Depression and get everyone back to work, as FDR promised. [4]

Changes from Novel Gothic to Eagle Bold.

     
    First, Morris got rid of the triangular bar motif. It was unprofessional for a government logo and needed to be dealt with. He replaced each of these with a conventional straight, thick rectangle, no fuss, no frills. Our A, H, F, and E were now in working order to represent the voice of the United States. Next, our man Morris stopped to think. He wondered how much eccentricity he could keep in this typeface without making it look silly. After some consideration, he decided to leave M, N, and Z mostly alone. They were noticeably severe in their angularity, but our proud American typographer knew that if those Bauhaus guys up in Germany could do it then so could he. Fight fire with fire, right? Beyond these changes, he eliminated the angled terminals on letters like K, R, W, V, and J. These terminals were now aligned with the baseline, easing Eagle's legibility and flow and tightening the typeface’s use of the space around it. All in all, Novel was out. It looked clumsy and unstable compared to the new typeface’s structural integrity. All that it needed was a name, and he’d submit it to the NRA advertising art board and let Charlie Coiner have a whack at it. When he walked in the door, samples of Eagle tucked under his arm, he knew that he had made something beautiful.

Eagle Bold initially only contained capital letters.

   
   Eagle is still in use, in logos such as Cartoon Network's (1992–2004) and The Onion’s (1988–now). It was expanded, and lowercase letters added, in the late 80s and early 90s by David Berlow and Jonathan Corum. [5]

Welcome!

This blog will chronicle my progress as I work on my BTN Senior Research Project, "Exploring Typography as an Indicator of Social Climate."

My research will attempt to identify unifying features in modern typography and plans to explore the zeitgeist of the 2010s to form an answer to the following questions:

“What overarching aspect of modern type exemplifies early 21st century culture?”

“How have past design innovations and social paradigm shifts influenced modern type design?”

“How do businesses operating in the 21st century influence their identity through type?”

My internship at Edible Baja will allow me to experience an environment focused on typography; allowing opportunities in using Adobe CSS and other software for font organization and digital typesetting. In assisting the Edible offices with their font categorization I will gain a deeper understanding of the philosophy of modern type, in how we view the differences in contexts such as magazines, advertisements, and in different sizes.