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Slide 01
Typography.
- Vol. III · Deck 14 · The Deck Catalog
- From Gutenberg's Bible to the variable font. Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni, the modern grotesques. Akzidenz, Helvetica, Univers. The digital revolution and OpenType. Six centuries of letters arranged for reading.
- Annus mirabilis1455
- Type families~10⁵
- Pages32
Slide 02
Slide 2
- LedeII
- Typography is the craft of arranging type for legibility, readability, and effect. It is invisible when done well — the reader sees the words, not the letters. Six centuries of practice have built up an immense, almost ritualised vocabulary of refinements: x-heights and counters, stress and contrast, optical sizes and hinting.
- The discipline divides into two questions. The first is the design of typefaces — how to draw an alphabet so that thousands of pages set in it cohere. The second is the setting of type — how to choose a face, decide a measure, set a leading, and lay out a page so a reader can move down it without effort.
- Both have been transformed twice in living memory: by phototypesetting in the 1960s and by digital typography from the 1980s onward. We are still working out the consequences.
- Vol. III— ii —
Slide 03
Chapter IGutenberg's Bible.
- GutenbergIII
- Around 1455, in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg printed somewhere between 158 and 180 copies of a Latin Bible — 1,282 pages each, two columns of forty-two lines, set in a heavy black-letter type meant to imitate the manuscript hands of the day. The book is the first substantial European volume printed with movable type.
- Gutenberg's invention was not the press itself (wine and paper presses were old) nor the idea of printed text (Asia had been block-printing for centuries). His invention was the type matrix system: a hand-cut steel punch driven into copper to create a matrix, into which a lead-tin-antimony alloy was cast to make individual reusable sorts. Each casting was identical to a fraction of a millimetre.
- The system was the right answer for European alphabets and propagated quickly. By 1500, presses operated in over two hundred European cities and roughly twenty million books — the incunabula — had been printed.
- Typography · Gutenberg— iii —
Slide 04
Chapter IIJenson and the Roman.
- JensonIV
- The black-letter forms Gutenberg used were dense and Germanic. The Italian humanists wanted something else: types that imitated the clean, rounded hands they used to write classical Latin. Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman working in Venice, cut the first fully resolved Roman type in 1470, used in his edition of Eusebius's De evangelica praeparatione.
- The Jenson Roman is recognisably the ancestor of every serif typeface used today. Open counters, a calligraphic stress angled slightly to the left, generous proportions, tall ascenders. William Morris's Golden Type (1890) and Bruce Rogers's Centaur (1914) both directly descend from it; modern revivals — Jenson Pro by Robert Slimbach (1996), Adobe Jenson — make the link explicit.
- By 1500 the Roman was the dominant book face in Italy and France. Black-letter held on in Germany until the 20th century — astonishingly, until the Nazis banned it in 1941 in favour of "more legible" Roman forms.
- Typography · Jenson— iv —
Slide 05
Chapter IIIAldus and Griffo.
- AldineV
- Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer who founded the Aldine Press in 1494, hired a punchcutter named Francesco Griffo. Together they produced two innovations that shaped European typography forever.
- The first was the italic — cut for the 1501 Aldine edition of Virgil. Griffo modelled it on the cancelleresca cursive used by Italian Renaissance scribes; Aldus used it to set whole books, in part because it took up less horizontal space than Roman, allowing the small octavo "pocket" format Aldus pioneered. The italic later became, by convention, a typographic accent rather than a body face.
- The second was the Bembo Roman, cut for Pietro Bembo's De Aetna in 1495. Bembo's clean, finely-balanced proportions became the foundation for the entire old-style serif tradition — Garamond, Caslon, Times, Sabon, Adobe Garamond, and dozens more all trace their lineage back to Griffo.
- Bembo · Garamond · Caslon · SabonThe old-style line
- Typography · Aldine— v —
Slide 06
Chapter IVGaramond.
- GaramondVI
- Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561) was the leading Parisian punchcutter of the 16th century. His Roman types — cut from the 1530s on, used by the Estienne family of printers — were a refinement of Griffo's, with subtler curves, more elegant proportions, and a profound horizontal flow.
- Garamond's actual surviving punches are mostly preserved at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, which acquired them through the 17th-century Plantin printing dynasty. Most "Garamonds" sold under that name today are descendants of Jean Jannon's 17th-century cut at Sedan, which was misattributed to Garamond in the 1840s. The mistake propagated: ATF Garamond (1917), Monotype Garamond, Linotype Garamond all derive from Jannon.
- Robert Slimbach's Adobe Garamond (1989) and Jean François Porchez's Sabon Next (2002) are the cleanest modern revivals based on the actual Garamond punches. The Plantin-Moretus material is the closest thing typography has to relics.
- Typography · Garamond— vi —
Slide 07
Chapter VCaslon.
- CaslonVII
- William Caslon I (1692–1766) was a London engraver who set up a typefoundry in 1720 and cut a Roman so balanced and so workhorse-reliable that the British printing industry used it almost exclusively for the next century. The first printing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (Dunlap, July 1776) was set in Caslon.
- The English maxim "When in doubt, set it in Caslon" was not entirely a joke. The face's slight irregularities — its uneven baseline, its idiosyncratic letterforms — gave printed pages a comfortable, well-worn texture that no smoother face could match. Caslon's son, grandson, and great-grandson all kept the foundry going; the H. W. Caslon & Co. firm survived until 1937.
- The 20th-century revivals — ATF Caslon (1900), Linotype Caslon, Adobe Caslon Pro (1990, Carol Twombly), ITC Founder's Caslon (1998, Justin Howes) — keep the lineage alive. Founder's Caslon, which faithfully reproduces the imperfections of metal type at each size, is the most authentic.
- The 42-line Bible (c. 1455) — Gutenberg's masterpiece. Roughly 49 of the original 158-or-so copies survive; their per-page market value runs into the tens of thousands of dollars.
- Typography · Caslon— vii —
Slide 08
Chapter VIBaskerville and the Transitional.
- BaskervilleVIII
- John Baskerville (1706–1775), an English writing-master and print-shop proprietor in Birmingham, took the old-style Roman and pushed it. He sharpened the contrast between thick and thin strokes, straightened the stress to nearly vertical, and refined the serifs. Combined with his improvements to ink-making (a glossier, blacker ink) and paper-finishing (calendered "wove" paper), his books were strikingly modern when they appeared.
- Baskerville's contemporaries thought his work blinded the reader. Benjamin Franklin, who admired the typeface, wrote a satirical letter to Baskerville reporting a friend's complaint that the contrast "would be the means of injuring all our eyes." Franklin had set the friend up: the type the friend was reading, unbeknownst to him, was Caslon, not Baskerville.
- The transitional category — between old-style and modern — is named for Baskerville. Bulmer, Bell, Fournier, and the present-day Mrs Eaves (Zuzana Licko, 1996) belong to it. Baskerville himself is among the most-used serif faces ever cut.
- Typography · Baskerville— viii —
Slide 09
Chapter VIIBodoni and Didot.
- Bodoni · DidotIX
- The "modern" face — high contrast, vertical stress, hairline serifs — emerged at the end of the 18th century in two parallel courts. Giambattista Bodoni (Parma, 1740–1813), printer to the Duke of Parma, and Firmin Didot (Paris, 1764–1836), of the great French type dynasty, both produced types of extreme contrast and geometric precision.
- Bodoni's monumental five-volume Manuale Tipografico, published posthumously in 1818, displayed 665 alphabets cut by his hand and is one of the most beautiful books in the history of typography. Didot's contemporary types defined the look of French neoclassical printing and survive as the visual signature of Vogue magazine and most luxury-fashion typography to this day.
- Modern faces are not great body text — the hairlines fade and the high contrast tires the eye over long passages. But for display, magazines, and headline typography they remain irreplaceable. Hoefler & Co's Didot and Bodoni 72, and Berthold's Bodoni Old Face, are the standard modern revivals.
- Typography · Bodoni— ix —
Slide 10
Chapter VIIISlab serifs.
- Slab serifX
- The 19th century, on the back of the Industrial Revolution, made type loud. Posters, broadsides, and advertising demanded heavy display faces with maximum visual carrying power. The slab serif — also called Egyptian by 19th-century type founders, for no reason connected to actual Egypt — was the answer.
- Robert Thorne's Fann Street Foundry cut the first slab serifs around 1815. Vincent Figgins's 1815 specimen sheet shows the type fully formed: thick uniform strokes with rectangular slab serifs of equal weight. Twentieth-century interpretations include Rockwell (Monotype, 1934), Memphis (Stempel), Clarendon (an 1845 design with bracketed serifs that softens the form), and the workhorse Egyptienne F.
- Slab serifs feel sturdy, technical, and a little nostalgic. They have come back into fashion several times — Ed Benguiat's ITC Lubalin Graph in the 1970s, FF Unit Slab and Sentinel in the 2000s. Wherever a typeface needs to read as both modern and substantial, a slab serif tends to appear.
- Typography · Slab— x —
Slide 11
Chapter IXThe sans serif's slow rise.
- Sans serifXI
- The first sans serif type was probably William Caslon IV's 1816 specimen showing a single small line of "Two Lines English Egyptian" — a sans-serif capital alphabet, no lowercase. The idea was an oddity for fifty years.
- The 19th-century sans serif (grotesque, in the trade) was a display face: bold, condensed, ungainly, used for advertising. Vincent Figgins's and Caslon's 1830s grots are the prototypes. Through the 19th century, sans serifs grew in popularity for posters, but body text remained Roman and serif.
- The conceptual shift came with Akzidenz-Grotesk (Berthold, 1898), the first sans serif designed to be a complete working family rather than a display oddity. Edward Johnston's 1916 type for the London Underground and Eric Gill's Gill Sans (1928) advanced the case in Britain. The decisive break was still to come.
- Typography · Sans— xi —
Slide 12
Chapter XBauhaus and Futura.
- BauhausXII
- The Bauhaus theorist László Moholy-Nagy argued in the 1920s that typography should be reduced to its functional essence — geometric, sans serif, no historical ornament. Herbert Bayer's 1925 Universal alphabet pursued the idea to a near-Esperanto degree, eliminating capitals altogether.
- Paul Renner's Futura (Bauer, 1927) was the constructive realisation of the Bauhaus typographic program: a sans serif built from circles and straight lines, geometric to the point of abstraction. The lowercase a, the round o, the sharp triangular apex on the M and W — every form carried the look of T-square and compass.
- Futura has been one of the most-used typefaces of the 20th century. Volkswagen's ad agency adopted it in the 1960s; the Apollo 11 commemorative plaque on the Moon is set in it; Wes Anderson's films use it almost exclusively. The "geometric sans" lineage — Avenir, Gotham, Proxima Nova, Circular — descends directly from Renner's drawings.
- Typography · Bauhaus— xii —
Slide 13
Chapter XIHelvetica.
- HelveticaXIII
- In 1957 Switzerland produced two of the most consequential typefaces of the century. Adrian Frutiger's Univers, designed at Deberny & Peignot, was the first sans-serif super-family with a coordinated weight and width matrix — 21 numbered variants. Max Miedinger's Neue Haas Grotesk, designed at the Haas type foundry under direction from Eduard Hoffmann, was a refinement of Berthold's Akzidenz-Grotesk for the 20th-century corporate world.
- Stempel renamed Neue Haas Grotesk Helvetica ("the Swiss") in 1960 to make it more saleable internationally. The face spread with terrifying speed. The Swiss Style (Müller-Brockmann, Hofmann, Lohse) made it the look of post-war modernism. New York City's signage system (Vignelli, 1970), the New York subway, BMW, Lufthansa, American Apparel, and innumerable corporate logotypes followed.
- Gary Hustwit's 2007 documentary Helvetica made the typeface a popular icon. The 2010 Neue Haas Grotesk revival by Christian Schwartz restored Miedinger's original drawings; Helvetica Now (Monotype, 2019) is the comprehensive digital reissue.
- Typography · Helvetica— xiii —
Slide 14
Chapter XIIFrutiger.
- UniversXIV
- Adrian Frutiger (1928–2015) is, with Hermann Zapf and Matthew Carter, one of the giants of post-war type design. Univers (1957) was his first major work; OCR-B (1968) became the international standard for machine-readable typography; Frutiger (1976) — designed for signage at Charles de Gaulle Airport — is one of the most readable sans-serifs ever cut, and remains the gold standard for wayfinding and transit design.
- Frutiger's later work — Avenir (1988), a humanist geometric sans serif; Vectora, Linotype Didot, the Centennial family — extended his range across multiple stylistic categories. He designed alphabets for Devanagari and Tamil; he wrote Type, Sign, Symbol (1980), one of the discipline's most thoughtful theoretical texts.
- If Helvetica is the workhorse, Frutiger's typefaces are the connoisseur's choice — quietly humanist, profoundly legible, less self-consciously modern than Helvetica and aging better. Both Atlantic magazine and The Wall Street Journal have, at various points, used Frutiger for headline display.
- Typography · Univers— xiv —
Slide 15
Chapter XIIIHermann Zapf.
- ZapfXV
- Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) was the great German type designer of the 20th century — a master calligrapher who could cut an Old-Style Roman, a script, a slab serif, and a geometric sans with equal authority. His Palatino (1948) and Optima (1958) are unavoidable; together they have set perhaps a billion pages of book text.
- Optima is a singular achievement. It is a sans-serif face, but its strokes flare at the ends like the entasis of a Greek column — a halfway form between Roman and grotesque that no one before Zapf had pulled off convincingly. Palatino is a calligraphic Roman of enormous flexibility. Zapf Chancery (1979) and Zapfino (1998) are calligraphic scripts of remarkable variety.
- The hz-program Zapf devised at Hallmark Cards in the late 1980s — for justifying text by adjusting glyph widths microscopically — became part of Adobe InDesign's paragraph composer. His influence on digital typesetting is more pervasive than the user-facing typeface count would suggest.
- A specimen book — the type foundry's principal sales tool from the 16th to the 20th century, and the discipline's primary historical record. Plantin-Moretus, Caslon, ATF, and Berthold each produced canonical specimens.
- Typography · Zapf— xv —
Slide 16
Chapter XIVMatthew Carter.
- CarterXVI
- Matthew Carter (b. 1937), son of the typographic historian Harry Carter, is the third great post-war designer. His career spans every typesetting technology of the modern era: hand-cut metal at Enschedé in the 1950s, photocomposition at Mergenthaler Linotype in the 1960s and 1970s, digital from the 1980s on.
- His digital-era work is canonical. Bell Centennial (1976) was designed for the AT&T phone book — extreme legibility at small sizes on cheap paper. Verdana and Georgia (Microsoft, 1996) were drawn for low-resolution screens, with hand-tuned hinting; they are still the cleanest screen-readable faces in mainstream use. Bitstream Charter (1987), Galliard, Mantinia, and dozens of custom commissions round out the list.
- Carter's 2010 MacArthur Fellowship — the first ever to a type designer — was overdue recognition. He continues to work into his eighties, with the genial pragmatism that has been the discipline's mark.
- Typography · Carter— xvi —
Slide 17
Chapter XVPhototypesetting.
- PhototypeXVII
- Between metal type and digital type sat phototypesetting, the dominant technology from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Photographic film masters of each glyph were exposed onto photosensitive paper one character at a time; the result was pasted up by hand and photographed for plate-making.
- The technology was a mixed blessing. Letterforms could be optically scaled — the same master used at any point size — which was efficient but ignored the long-standing typographic rule that small sizes need fatter, more open forms than display sizes. The result was a generation of poorly-scaled type that read worse than its metal predecessors at body sizes.
- The phototypesetting era was also a great producer of new typefaces. ITC (International Typeface Corporation, founded 1970) commissioned and licensed hundreds of designs — ITC Garamond, ITC Souvenir, Lubalin Graph, Avant Garde Gothic — that defined the 1970s look. ITC's revenue model (designer royalties from licensees) became the modern type-industry template.
- Typography · Phototype— xvii —
Slide 18
Chapter XVIPostScript and the Mac.
- PostScriptXVIII
- In 1984 the Apple Macintosh, the Apple LaserWriter (1985), and Adobe's PostScript language together initiated the digital-typography revolution. The LaserWriter rendered PostScript-described pages at 300 dpi — sufficient for legible body text. The Mac's WYSIWYG interface let designers see what they were going to get. PageMaker (Aldus, 1985) gave them the layout software.
- The result was desktop publishing: a world in which anyone with a few thousand dollars could typeset and lay out a book or newsletter without an entire production house. The trade-press eulogies for traditional typesetting were premature; the technology mostly transferred to the desktop intact.
- Adobe's Type 1 font format (1984) defined the digital-font format of the era. Apple's TrueType (1991) was the rival format, designed jointly with Microsoft to break Adobe's PostScript-rendering hegemony. The format wars consumed the early 1990s before the merger of TrueType and Type 1 into OpenType at the end of the decade.
- Typography · PostScript— xviii —
Slide 19
Chapter XVIIOpenType.
- OpenTypeXIX
- OpenType was developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft, announced in 1996 and finalised as ISO/IEC 14496-22 in 2003. It unified Type 1 and TrueType into a single binary container and added much else: support for over 65,000 glyphs (instead of 256), a Unicode-based character map, and — most consequentially — OpenType features.
- OpenType features are tiny lookup tables that swap glyphs based on context. Ligatures (the fi compound), small caps, lining and old-style figures, contextual alternates in script faces, fractions, swash forms, language-specific localisations — all became compositional elements of the font itself rather than separate font files.
- The result transformed working typography. A typeface like Mrs Eaves (Zuzana Licko, 1996) or Hoefler Text (Jonathan Hoefler, 1991) could carry hundreds of optional alternate glyphs, available through the application UI for any user willing to dig. The line between fonts (single weights) and typefaces (whole families) blurred; OpenType is both.
- Typography · OpenType— xix —
Slide 20
Chapter XVIIIVariable fonts.
- VariableXX
- Variable fonts — the OpenType 1.8 specification, finalised in 2016 by Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft jointly — are typefaces in which every weight, width, slant, and optical size is interpolated from a small number of master designs along continuous axes. A single variable font file can replace what used to be a 12-style family.
- The technology generalises a 1990s Apple research project (Apple Advanced Typography) and an earlier line of variable-font experiments. The 2016 unified specification was the first that all the major platforms agreed on. Modern web browsers (Chrome 62, Firefox 62, Safari 11+) all support variable fonts via CSS font-variation-settings.
- The artistic possibilities are still being explored. David Berlow's Decovar (2017) exposes parametric stencil and serif axes; Lab's Recursive (2020) is a five-axis variable that goes from monospace to sans serif to italic; Roboto Flex (Google) has fifteen axes. The next decade of typography is likely to be defined by what designers do with these tools.
- Typography · Variable— xx —
Slide 21
Chapter XIXWeb typography.
- WebXXI
- For the first decade of the web, type was constrained to the few faces installed on every operating system: Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, Arial, Helvetica, Courier. Designers had no other options. A few hacks (sIFR, Cufón, image replacement) provided crude workarounds.
- The CSS @font-face rule, drafted by Verdana's designer (Matthew Carter) at Microsoft's request as far back as 1998, was finally implemented by Safari 3.1 (2008), Firefox 3.5 (2009), and Internet Explorer 4 (way back, 1997, but in proprietary form). WOFF (Web Open Font Format, 2010) and WOFF2 (2018) made font delivery efficient.
- Typekit (2009, acquired by Adobe 2011), Google Fonts (2010), Hoefler & Co's Cloud.typography, and a long tail of foundry self-hosting platforms made high-quality web fonts available cheaply or free. Web typography in 2025 is essentially print typography — the foundry catalogue is the same, the rendering is roughly equivalent, and the design grammar has converged.
- Typography · Web— xxi —
Slide 22
Chapter XXTschichold and the page.
- TschicholdXXII
- Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) wrote two influential books that shaped 20th-century page layout. Die Neue Typographie (1928) was a Bauhaus-influenced manifesto: asymmetric layouts, sans serif type, photographic illustration, no historical ornament. It set the template for the avant-garde typography of the interwar years.
- Tschichold then renounced his own manifesto. From the late 1930s on he became a careful classicist — symmetric pages, traditional Roman types, refined book design. His later work for Penguin Books (1947–1949) — the Penguin Composition Rules and his redesign of the Penguin paperback line — codified British book typography for a generation.
- The reversal is the deepest single statement in modern typography: that typographic style should serve content, not ideology, and that what is correct for an avant-garde poster is wrong for a paperback novel. Tschichold's The Form of the Book (1975, English 1991) is required reading for anyone setting type for reading.
- Typography · Tschichold— xxii —
Slide 23
Chapter XXIAnatomy of a letter.
- AnatomyXXIII
- The vocabulary of letterform design is dense. The baseline on which letters sit; the x-height (the height of a lowercase x); the cap height, ascender, and descender. The counter (the enclosed white space inside an o); the aperture (the opening of a c or e); the spur, the terminal, the ear on a g, the tittle on an i or j.
- The stress of a serif typeface — the angle of its thick-thin axis, visible on letters like O — distinguishes old-style (oblique) from modern (vertical). The contrast measures how much thicker the thicks are than the thins; modern faces (Bodoni, Didot) have extreme contrast, slab serifs almost none.
- The optical size is the size at which a face was drawn to look its best. Caption sizes need wider proportions, fatter strokes, looser spacing, larger x-heights; display sizes can be tighter, finer, more dramatic. Variable fonts have made optical-size axes routinely available for the first time since metal type.
- Typography · Anatomy— xxiii —
Slide 24
Chapter XXIISetting type.
- SettingXXIV
- Choosing a typeface is the start of typesetting. The harder choices come next. The measure — line length, in characters per line — should run roughly 45–75 characters; longer lines tire the eye, shorter ones force ungainly word breaks. The leading — the distance from one baseline to the next — should be about 120% of the type size for body text, more for sans serifs and longer measures.
- Justification versus ragged-right is a layout decision. Justified type with hyphenation looks formal and saves space; ragged-right reads more easily and avoids the rivers of white that plague badly-justified narrow columns. Modern paragraph composers (InDesign's Adobe Paragraph Composer, descended from Knuth's TeX algorithm) optimise across the whole paragraph and produce dramatically better justification than line-by-line "first-fit" algorithms.
- Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (1992) is the single most-quoted modern handbook of these decisions. Read it once before setting type seriously; reread it every few years.
- Typography · Setting— xxiv —
Slide 25
Chapter XXIIIThe workhorses.
- WorkhorsesXXV
- Some typefaces have done so much labour that the rest of the field stands on their shoulders. The list, by century:
- 16th century: Garamond, Bembo, Plantin. 17th century: Caslon, Janson, Fournier. 18th century: Baskerville, Bodoni, Didot, Bell, Walbaum.
- 19th century: Akzidenz-Grotesk, Clarendon, Egyptienne, Modern No. 20. Early 20th: Goudy Old Style (Frederic Goudy), Centaur (Bruce Rogers), Times New Roman (Stanley Morison & Victor Lardent, 1932), Gill Sans, Futura, Univers, Helvetica.
- Late 20th: Sabon (Tschichold, 1967), Frutiger, Stone Sans/Serif, ITC Charter (Carter), Adobe Garamond, Minion (Slimbach 1990), Meta (Spiekermann 1991), Mrs Eaves, Verdana, Georgia.
- 21st century: Whitney (Hoefler, 2004), Gotham (Frere-Jones, 2000), FF Tisa, Tiempos (Carvalho, 2010), Söhne (Schwartz, 2018). The list of typefaces in serious circulation today runs to thousands; the workhorses, perhaps a hundred.
- Typography · Workhorses— xxv —
Slide 26
Chapter XXIVThe modern foundries.
- FoundriesXXVI
- The independent type foundry has had a quiet renaissance. Hoefler & Co (Jonathan Hoefler, founded 1989; Tobias Frere-Jones partnered 1999–2014), Commercial Type (Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes, 2008), Klim Type Foundry (Kris Sowersby, NZ), Grilli Type (Switzerland), Production Type (Paris), Dalton Maag (London) — each runs on a few designers and a steady output.
- The big platform — Adobe Originals, Monotype, Linotype (now under Monotype), Berthold, FontFont — still produce most of the workhorses sold worldwide. Google Fonts has democratised free typefaces; the catalogue includes thousands of free-to-use families, of widely varying quality.
- The discipline today is in good shape. There are more good typefaces in circulation, at lower cost, than at any previous moment. The fight has shifted from access to selection — the difficulty is no longer finding a typeface but choosing the right one.
- Typography · Foundries— xxvi —
Slide 27
Chapter XXVKnuth and TeX.
- KnuthXXVII
- In 1977 the computer scientist Donald Knuth received page proofs of the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming set by his publisher's new phototypesetter. They were so much worse than the metal-set first edition that he stopped writing the book and spent the next decade designing his own typesetting system: TeX, plus the METAFONT language and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.
- TeX's paragraph composition algorithm — published as Breaking Paragraphs into Lines by Knuth and Plass in 1981 — is a global optimisation that minimises a "badness" cost over all possible line-break sequences. It is still the gold standard for justified text. Adobe's Paragraph Composer in InDesign (2000) is a direct descendant.
- TeX's mathematical typesetting is unsurpassed. Almost every paper in mathematics, theoretical computer science, and physics is set in LaTeX, the macro-package built on top of TeX by Leslie Lamport in 1985. Knuth's own typeset output is fanatically beautiful and a quiet reproach to the industry.
- Typography · Knuth— xxvii —
Slide 28
Chapter XXVITwenty essentials.
- Reading listXXVIII
- 1992The Elements of Typographic StyleBringhurst
- 1969Detail in TypographyHochuli
- 1991The Form of the BookTschichold
- 1928Die Neue TypographieTschichold
- 1969Methods of Book DesignWilliamson
- 1980Type, Sign, SymbolFrutiger
- 1996Anatomy of a TypefaceLawson
- 2002Letters of CreditTracy
- 2004Thinking with TypeLupton
- 2007Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type WorksSpiekermann
- 2008The Visual History of Typede Jong
- 1998An Essay on TypographyGill
- 1995The Crystal GobletWarde
- 2009Just My TypeGarfield
- 2014The Anatomy of TypeColes
- 2017Practical Typography (online)Butterick
- 1999The Geometry of TypeCheng
- 2015Shady CharactersHouston
- 2010The Visual Display of Quantitative InformationTufte
- 2011TypographieRuder
- Typography · Reading list— xxviii —
Slide 29
Chapter XXVIIWatch & read.
- Watch & ReadXXIX
- ↑ Helvetica — Gary Hustwit's 2007 documentary, trailer
- More on YouTube
- Watch · The History of Typography (animated short)
- Watch · The Art of Hermann Zapf
- And read
- Bringhurst's Elements is the first and last book to read on the subject. Hochuli's Detail in Typography is the slim companion that focuses on the page. For history and personality, Garfield's Just My Type is the cheerful entry point; Lawson's Anatomy of a Typeface the technical reference.
- Typography · Watch & Read— xxix —
Slide 30
Chapter XXVIIIHoefler & Frere-Jones.
- HoeflerXXX
- The most influential American type studio of the 21st century. Jonathan Hoefler founded the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989; Tobias Frere-Jones joined as a partner in 1999. Their joint catalogue includes Gotham (designed by Frere-Jones in 2000 for GQ, made famous by the 2008 Obama campaign), Whitney (Hoefler, 2004 — Whitney Museum's house face), Mercury, Archer, Sentinel, Hoefler Text, Hoefler Titling, Tungsten, Operator, Topaz.
- The 2014 split — Frere-Jones sued Hoefler for half the company; the suit settled — was the most-discussed typography lawsuit in living memory. Both designers continue to operate (Frere-Jones now under his own studio, Hoefler now under Monotype's umbrella after a 2021 sale).
- The studio's discipline — drawing optical sizes, building large family ranges, taking decades over a single typeface — has been hugely influential. The current generation of independent foundries (Klim, Commercial Type, Grilli, Production Type) all explicitly reference Hoefler & Frere-Jones's work as a benchmark.
- Typography · Hoefler— xxx —
Slide 31
Chapter XXIXNames to know.
- PioneersXXXI
- Gutenberg, Jenson, Griffo, Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville, Bodoni, Didot. Then a long quiet — until William Morris (1834–96) and the Arts and Crafts revival re-grounded the discipline at the end of the 19th century.
- The 20th century: Eric Gill, Edward Johnston, Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, Beatrice Warde, Jan Tschichold, Paul Renner, Adrian Frutiger, Hermann Zapf, Max Miedinger, Ed Benguiat, Hermann Berthold's firm.
- The contemporary period: Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans (Emigre), Robert Slimbach, Carol Twombly, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Christian Schwartz, Kris Sowersby, Veronika Burian, Petra Dočekalová. The discipline is in better hands than it has ever been.
- Typography · Pioneers— xxxi —
Slide 32
The end of the deck.
- ColophonXXXII
- Typography — Volume III, Deck 14 of The Deck Catalog. Set in Hoefler Text and Garamond Premier on a warm cream paper. Crimson accent #8a1c1c; pilcrow ornaments. Old-style figures and small caps where they belong.
- Thirty-two leaves on the craft of arranging letters for reading. The discipline is six centuries old; the pace of innovation is, on any reasonable measure, accelerating. Whatever the next typeface looks like, it will be a descendant of Griffo, Garamond, Caslon, and Frutiger.
- FINIS
- Vol. III · Art · Deck 14
