Typography is the art form of expressing ideas and words visually. It is known to be created by Johannes Gutenberg who was a German publisher. What brought upon the creation of typography was that beforehand it was done by hand in book, Gutenberg was aware of how time consuming, expensive, but most of all unnecessary it was to society at the time which is what inspired him to create the first ever type face, known as Black Letter.
Black Letter typeface
It consist of thick vertical lines and thin horizontal connectors. The advantage of this typeface was that it was very useful for scribing, despite this the main disadvantage of this typeface is that it was very easy (especially when put close together in print) to look dense and squashed together, resulting in it being quite hard to understand by readers.
One man saw this and felt the need to somehow develop and fix this fault, this man was Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman that worked in Venice (Italy) during the 15th century. Jenson was greatly inspired by the ancient Roman buildings and felt the need to replicate and transform the order of the ancient buildings structure into a typeface known as "The Roman Type"
The Roman typeface
This typeface consisted of straight lines and regular curves which resulted in the typeface being very clear and legible, addressing and successfully correcting the issue of the typeface being too dense. This typeface was an instant success and spread quite quickly across the whole of Europe.
The next development was the invention of "Italics" (by Aldus Maniutius) which were very similar to the typeface Roman, except for the letters being slanted and majorly stylized. The purpose behind the development was a way of addressing cost issues, as Italics was made as a way to fit more letters on the page to save money.
Italics typeface
This typeface was extraordinary and fulfilled its purpose, it lasted until the 18th century.
The next major development of typography was a typeface named "Caslon" which was made in England by a man named William Caslon.
Caslon typeface
This typeface was based off castle lines and is referred to in Typography as "Old Style", this means that the typeface consists of low contrasts between thick and thin strokes.
A few years later, this was developed by John Baskerville to a typeface known as a "Transitional" typeface. This typeface consists of a finer and higher contrast between thick and thin strokes.
Transitional typeface
Then this was later on developed to an Italian typeface known as Didot by a man called Edo and Bidoni which is classified as a "Modern" typeface. This consists of an extreme contrast between strokes.
Modern typeface
William Caslons great grandson (Caslon the 4th) got aggravated with the sight of seraphs and so he decided to remove it and create the typeface known as "Sans Serif".
Sans Serif typeface
This typeface did not succeed immediately but was later on very successful with the coming of the second industrial revolution, as it was a popular choice for all the posters and billboards during that time, of course the letters were manipulated to be wider and taller, to fit the billboards proportionally.
The popular use of "Sans Serif" on billboards brought upon the typeface known as "Egyptian" (slab-serif) which consisted of thick serifs and was mainly used for titles.
Egyptian typeface
This however resulted in the audiences in the 90s being sick of these typefaces as they were all becoming either too similar or too complicated. The solution to this? In the 20th century Paul Renner created the typeface known as "Futura" which consists of simple geometric ships (also known as geometric sans)
Futura typeface
As we have seen before in the history of typography, this typeface was later developed by Eric Gill to a type face known as "Gill Sans" which was very similar to "geometric sans" but had gentler and had more natural and harmonic curves. This is also referred to as "Humanist Sans".
Gill Sans typeface
The next development happened in Switzerland in 1957 , where the typeface "Helvetica" was first introduced. This typeface consists of simple curves and was available in a variety of different weights. This typeface was a major success and some often refer to it as the worlds favourite typeface.
Helvetica typeface
With the production of the computer, everything changed.
Typography is now accessible to all, and can be characterized and manipulated by all with the use of digital programmes.
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