History of Type - Lecture Notes

• Chronologies - Understanding where things come from is essential for us to take control of our practice, challenges our work and mind. It effects the process as we are move forward and build an understanding on the basic principles.
• Typography is what language looks like 
• Getting things right in type is a modernist obsession
• 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia (originated) - looking at the occidental view of the history of type
• Type is based on an understanding of language and can only exist when there is a shared understanding that one symbol can stand for a meaning
• Letters are just symbols (the pictures for sounds)
• The symbols can now be manipulated in order to express emotion and create meaning and tone of voice
• Definition of Typography - the art and technique of printing with moveable type
• 1450: Johannes Gutenberg - Changed the face of how we approached type by creating a wood block printing press, which he used to print a bible, this shows how type has an impact from the social and cultural
• Type Classificatio - To classify a whole range of type forms based on what they look like
• 1870: William Forster - Had the biggest influence of the demand and need for type as he introduced the education act and made education compulsory
• 1919: Walter Gropius - Started to consider mass production of literature and looked at the form and function of type
• The Baushaus (1919-1933) - Here they started to form a definition for the function of type and a group of people were brought together from the creative and the industrial, which they had to do because of the new demand for type and everyone could now read. This was the paradyme shift that effects our basis of typography now
• 1957: Max Miedinger - Famous for his typeface creation: Helvetica. With this creation there started to form principles and typefaces were being built for commercial use in this new consumer society
• 1982: Arial came out for Microsoft's computer operating systems which was very, very similar to Helvetica
• 1990: Steve Jobs came out with the Macintosh Classic and this came with the first mouse at a reasonable price where it was an accessible computer, this was the birth of type design on a digital level
• Type can now be seen as an image or an object and this has been driven by a whole range of social, cultural and political reasons.
• We as a generation consume more type now than ever before
• Even though type is very modernised now, it is still based on the simple fact of wanting to communicate to each other
• It is about the other and not the designer
• 1994: Vincent Connare - Created Comic Sans MS, worked for Microsoft
• There is no single approach in a post-modern world that typography follows rules that apply to everything