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.