Day 3

1. Day Notes

Transitional letterforms were used in Rococo designs.  They tend to be fussy and highly detailed. Typography done by copper plater’s allowed for greater contrast between thick and thin.

Charles would only take 20 printers and the rest to be killed. Printers tend to take over the media, and that’s a threat to Royalty and their clergies.

Bodoni is inspired by the transitional studies (old style + modern)

The French revolution leads to the death of the lush decorative designs.

1790 Bodoni redesigns an alphabet, mechanical appearance, geometric, and redesigned the serif.

The old style serif tended to be more fluid and soft to the eye, Bodoni’s style is more angular and straight.

The Design of the letterforms should be built from a limited number of identical units.

While in America there are interchangeable parts for guns. Compact and efficient.

Bodoni became the historical typeface (“fat-face”)

Display faces are not made to text, purely decorative

Industrialization, going to factories building factories buying stuff selling stuff.

Industrialization leads to consumerism.  Rise of middle class, people with money have no idea what to do with their wealth and so people come around and give you ideas or instructions on how and where to spend it. Mass unemployment and tenements.  People are flooding to the states and desperately need jobs but there’s no one had a place to live, so people built these small tenements where 4-8 people would live.

Video: Gangs of New york

Break

Think of printers as drug dealers. If you have a better quality and quantity you’ll do better.

They need to sell creates larger faces.

Wood type, machinery

Egyptian faces. Bulky serifs. Why the name? It’s just what was cool at the time.

What used to be two line Egyptian is known today as sans serif.

Think of Tuscan font with obnoxious cowboy signs.

Dimensional lettering, knocked-out lettering.

Ephemera, printed materials that aren’t meant to kept.  Such as concert tickets.

Old style

Transitional

Modern

Egyptian

Sans serif

            These are the five historic families of type.

Basic information about type faces: cap height, x-height, base line, descender line, and ascender line; all also known as point size.

Leading is the measurement from base line to base line or the space between text. Text is generally 20% (point size of face + 20%) 

2.Personal Thoughts

Knowing where certain fonts come from, makes life a bit easier when going to choose from the huge lists of fonts that you never knew existed. The simpler ones that are known as the five historic fonts are probably the most used because they are just simple. If you were to go into the cursive or detailed fonts people may get overwhelmed or bored. Bodoni for example is clean and simple, the font became very popular when the industry started to boom and with retailers needing to get costumers attention. They ended up creating fat face and as time went by the print got bigger and bigger. If they had stuck to the complicated and highly detailed fonts people would most likely ignore the signs. Today the fonts only changed slightly to appeal to the younger generations, but instead of plain back and white we add intense, bright colors to attract customers. Same ideas, just slightly different process, but altogether it has the same goal.

3.Questions

Did Charles really kill everyone else that couldn't be a printer?

Is there a place where the Rococo design wasn't accepted?

How long did it take Bodoni to spread across the country or world?