lecture 4
TRANSCRIPT
incunabula
Manutius
Printer who developed:
Italic Type
Bembo Type Face
Scholar who translated:
Aristotle, Theocritis, Artistophanes, Sophocles,
Heroduts, Euripidies, Thucydides, Homer and Plato
Literacy Rates in 1500½ the Male population was illiterate and about 89% of the women were illiterate
Literate PopulationAll clergy
98% of the Gentry
65% of the Yeoman
56% of the craftsman
21% of the peasants
15% of the laborers
Available Education
Popular Education
Apprenticeship
Colleges and University
Blackletter
• Earliest Printed Type
• Based on hand-copied texts
• Traditionally associated with Germany
• Today is extensively used by Latino gangs as implying
officialness or deep seriousness
Garamond
Claude Garamond• Credited with eliminating Blackletter
type from France
• First typographer to use italic type as a
compliment to roman type
• Established a type foundry making
copies of his type faces and selling them
to other printers
Results of Printing Revolution
• Printing became a powerful vehicle to spread political
and religious ideas
• It stabilized and unified languages
• Literacy improved dramatically
Renaissance (1300 – 1550)
• Literacy began to improve
• Beginning of a merchant class
• Painting represented illustrations of the natural world
• Painting became three dimensional
• A single light source, a fixed point of view, linear
perspective and atmospheric perspective all became
common again
• Upper case letterforms based on Roman inscriptions
and lowercase based on Italian humanist book copying.
• Typified by a gradual thick-to-thin stroke, gracefully
bracketed serifs, and slanted stress
• One of the most readable classes for text
• First Oldstyle Letterforms were created around 1475
• Not really a type classification
• Italic type was developed as its own type face but
quickly became a component of the roman family of a
font.
• Italics are generally used for emphasis, captions, not
body text
• Italic style of letters for non-roman type is generally
referred to as obliques.
• First italic type face created around 1500
Baroque Age/ Age of Exploration (1550 – 1600)
• Holy Roman Empire no longer reigned over Europe
• Protestantism was growing everywhere
• Rise of Nationalism and Nation Building was now the
way of the world
• Art and decoration were taken to new levels of
spender and drama
• Science and mathematics are again growing
200 years later (1650)
Oldstyle type faces have become established across
much of Europe
Population has become more educated
Trade has expanded
The merchant class has begun to emerge
Louis XIV reigns in Frace
Beginning of modern science and philosophy
Age of Enlightenment (1600 - 1800s)
• Math and Science ruled
• Consumed with the idea of compiling and analyzing
human knowledge
• Type designers applied math and science to the
design of type
Transitional
• Bridges gap between oldstyle and modern
• Developed largely due to technological advances in
casting type and printing.
• Greater thick to thin strokes, smaller backets on serifs,
stress is more vertical.
• First type in this classification began appearing around
1750
Modern
• Furthering trends stared with transitional
• Pushes to extreme thick to thin strokes and square
serifs
• Loses readability if set too tight, or too small a size
• Strong vertical stress
• First type in this classification appeared around 1775
Script
• Seemingly based on handwiting
• Is supposed to be a replication of calligraphy
• May also be based on engraved type forms
• Script type is unsuitable for blocks of text type
• First script typefaces appeared around 1550