The type can control the feel of the whole design, with the right type face a user can get a better feel for the design and the message it is trying to give. Type is so important in design, especially in branding and for companies to give the right ‘vibe’ to their customers through their text and logo. For example: a Business woman would use a type such as Baskeville because its sharp and professional where as a kids entertainer would use comic sans with as its fun and more attractive to children.
This is used a lot in marketing and branding especially for fast food. As soon as you see the font used for the likes of Dominos, McDonalds or Burger King, you instantly can make the connection.
The history of printing is thought to of started as early as 3500 BCE when they used cylinder seals to put marks into clay as well as using block seals, hammered coinage, pottery imprints, and cloth printing. However the earliest credited printing was block printing in China in the 3rd century when they carved designs into wooden blocks, leaving the raised part to be covered in ink and pressed against fabrics and paper.
In 1440, German Inventor and Goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, also known as ‘The Father Of Printing’ began experimenting with printing and 10 years later in 1950 had perfected ‘The Gutenberg Press’ for commercial use. This was revolutionary for Europe as they had no printing presses in Europe til 1455 as well as that his press replaced the wooden blocks with metal and each letter being printed onto blocks, creating the European moveable type.
Gutenberg started the revolution by borrowing money to print the ‘Gutenberg bible’ printing 180 copies of the book by using 300 moulds and 50,000 sheets of paper. Although he did not create the printing press, he was a revisionary inventor as he took others work and ideas and built upon them to develop his own. His process worked so well as he created his own ink, specific to his press and flattened the paper using a wine press, traditionally used to squash up grapes. His invention allowed mass production using mechanics which set him aside from the chinese printers and helped his success. Thanks to Gutenberg’s invention, German painter Albercht Durer was able to use it to improve upon his own work and in 1498, was the first ever person to self-brand his work, using a distinct signature on his work.
Industralisation saw the first of the egyptian style, slab fonts and in 1766, Vincent Figgins introduced the serif and sanserif style fonts. Slab serif fonts, such as soho can be misleading as body text and are better for display text, where as sans serif slab fonts are better for body text as it has good legibility. The creation of these slab fonts allowed for more exciting and creative typography.
We then looked at how we can understand typography including its anatomy, letter spacing, line spacing etc. Below you can see an example, each element shown, makes up the typeface.
Cap Height is the height of a type faces uppercase letters, normally slightly lower than the ascender and is different in all typefaces. The baseline is the invisible lines where the letters rest, other elements such as X-height determine where the baseline is.
