lecture 4

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