typography lecture

the history of type

• All that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement amongst a group of people that one thing will stand for another
• language is negotiated. The sender and receiver both must understand
• type is what language looks like
• typography is the art and technique of printing movable type, the composition of printed material from movable type, the arrangement and appearance of printed matter, the craft of expressing human language with durable visual form
• the written word endures, the spoken word disappears. Type has charted and documented changes in culture over 1000's of years
• 7000 years BC, hieroglyphics - one of the earliest physical representations of language 
• type was very much driven by trade, it was a form of receipt and of a record of what had been bought, it was a lot later that descriptive language began to arise. There was no glyph for rain, only water because you cant trade rain.
• 3200 BC - Mesopotamia, middle east to the Syrian gulf occidental view point, western hemisphere
• Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, all different alphabets, they needed to develop a common language of trade = cuneiform system which is the basis of occidental language
• the Rosetta stone, discovered 1799 - the point at which we started to recognise distinct root origins of language. It represents three languages Egyptian, demotic and Greek. Our first example of the idea of translation
• Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet into what we recognise today, Greek is our closest neighbour alphabet wise
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• tools also effected how alphabets looked, rush based alphabets and ink are much more smooth and cursive than the Arabic strand of language 
• Lindisfarne bible = the last significant cultural document produced using bone, the production method effected the quality of line and type
• Gutenberg 1450, produced the first movable printing press in the west approximately 1436, they had already been doing it for 600 years in china. Through travel and trade routes the technology was brought to Europe. From then on it became a physical thing and typefaces started to emerge
• 1540 garamond, 1722 caslon, 1757 baskerville
• William Foster 1870 - elementary education act, compulsary to be taught how to read which pretty much gave typography its job. We then had to shift to mass production, invention of type writers, more developed printing presses
• 1919 Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus 1919-1933, the coming together of industrialisation and design, drawing together pre-industrial European craft and the development of industrial technology. Design as a discipline being informed by new mass manufacture, this is when type design and typography was born.