1.
Reviving the Lettera Antiqua (Con't)

"Even as the Gothic Spirit reached its height in the other areas of Western Europe, Italy was slowly evolving a revival of the culture of antiquity: a renaissance ...there arose an interest in all of the relics and ruins of Roman life; an interest that lead to the discovery of works art such as the Apollo of Belvedere and the Laocoön (above).The same sort of interest within the realm of literature lead to literary sleuthing: all over Europe long lost manuscripts were located and purchased or copied by literary agents, such as the famous Poggio. Although thought to be original ancient Roman documents, in many cases they were copies written in Carolingian manuscript.
See entry #15 on The Evolution of Handwriting for more information.

2.
Combining Majuscules and Minuscules

“It has often been pointed out that the [Roman] capitals and the (Carolingian] minuscules were not homogeneous elements, the capitals were unmistakably an incised letter style; the Carolingian was strictly a pen design ...of course the scribes noticed that the capitals and small letters did not fit together well so they performed a styling job of adding serifs and finishing strokes in order to suit them to the capitals. By the time the craft of printing was introduced to Italy, the Humanistic writing afforded a fully developed basis for the type style we now call 'roman.'" (Nesbitt)

3.
Northern Printers migrate to Italy & the Humanistic style.

Printing partners Sweynheim and Pannartz (trained in Germany) were among the first to bring their craft to Italy. They worked in the abby of Subiaco (1464) but shortly thereafter moved to the Massimi Palace in Rome.

Sweynheim, an engraver, was most likely the punch cutter. His designs were influenced by the calligraphic style of the Italian Humanists—yet still retained influences from the Gothic— a hybrid or semi-humanistic form.

See the complete work here
at the National Diet of Japan

4.
Venice, Printing Capital and
Home of roman letterforms

Many other printers left Germany, often due to bloody political upheavals, and migrated to Italy, especially to the wealthy sea trading city of Venice making it one of the greatest printing centers of the Renaissance.

Fonts derived this stylistic era often have names containing words such as Antiqua, Ancient, Renaissance, Venetian or Garalde. Garalde, a sub category of Old Style merges the names Garamond and Aldus Manutius. Generally speaking it is a later, more refined development of Old Style.

5.
Venetian Old Style Type
Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira

The first book printed in Venice was completed in 1469. It was Epistolae ad familiares by Cicero, and its printer was Johann van Speyer (Giovanni da Spira) The type used by Van Speyers has extraordinary clarity. It consists of purely roman forms that are directly recognizable as such even by modern standards. The brothers made great claims for their design, seeking in fact to patent it as a new invention. They succeeded in obtaining legal if not practical protection against plagiarism for five years." *
* (Chappell and Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed Word)

Oldstyle metal type, although influenced by the punchcutter's critical decisions, still carried the diagonal stress and line weights of the wide nib pen. The sturdy strokes weights were necessary to hold up to the limitations of the early printing process, including uneven pressure from a screw press and rough paper surfaces.

6.
Nicholas Jenson + full roman
1470

Jenson, a Frenchman sent to learn punchcutting in Germany, traveled to Italy where he is thought to have made the final definitive break from blackletter style towards a fully evolved roman letterform. (See an example 1470 edition of Eusebius, De Evangelica Praeparatione.) "Jenson was a success in his own time, both artistically and financially. Beyond his time he has remained an inspiration ...his early training [of goldsmithing] gave him even greater sensitivities to the sculptural nature of type...the letters Jenson employed were capitals, often beautiful capitals that could summon the spirit of Rome.*

Jenson's highly legible and evenly colored typeface, based upon Humanistic scripts, has been reinterpreted through the centuries by numerous type designers, most notably William Morris's Golden Type, Bruce Roger's Centaur (1914), Morris Benton's "Cloister Oldstyle" (1926) and Robert Slimbach's digital Jenson for Adobe (1996).

7.
Aldus Manutius, printer
Francesco Griffo, punch cutter.

Fifteen years after Jenson's death a Venetian publisher, Aldus Manutius, ran a scholarly printing concern that introduced a number of typographic innovations. His early concentration was on Greek literature, necessitating a new Greek metal face which Aldus commissioned from Francesco Griffo.

Griffo later produced a number of Latin, or roman fonts, mostly notably for an essay De Aetna, by the Italian scholar Pietro Bembo—for whom the design was named. It was the basis for Stanley Morison's Monotype Bembo in 1929 and subsequent Bembo derivatives. Another face Morison revived from Griffo was Poliphilus, from the text design of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499.

A type faces could be named for a punchcutter, printer, a book title or an author.

8.
Griffo's Italics
1499

Manutius wanted to produce a smaller hand-held size book and sought a more closely-spaced and condensed typeface to accommodate the reduced page sizes. He looked to Griffo cut the first face based upon chancery manuscript, a hand written style that met the space demands. The chancery model Griffo used was the work of Niccolo Niccoli, an offical scribe in the Vatican. It was comprised only of lower case characters.

Although first called Aldinian, it quickly was referred to as italic (the named derived from Italian). Italic was a separate and distinct face, not a sub-version of a roman family as we use in contemporary type design.

9.
The French Typographic Renaissance

The great patron of the arts and letters, King Francois I (1494–1547) was infatuated with the Italian Renaissance style and sponsored its establishment in France. Louis supported massive architectural projects reflecting the Renaissance style in royal residences at Chambord and Fontainebleau.

He collected Italian books and manuscripts for the royal library and then opened it to scholars from around the world to encourage scholarship. He appointed the first official printer to the king which later lead to the founding of the Imprimerie Royale, (French Royal Printing Works). See below

His reign was tolerant to religion allowing numerous Protestant printers to operate freely. The expanded field of printers helped raise the quality of French printing to the best in the world.

10.
The Golden Age of French Typography 1500–1585

The Italian Renaissance influenced a French period of prolific type design and superior printing by French printers Robert Estienne, Simone de Colines and Geofroy Tory.

Robert Estienne
His father, Henri was one of the first important French printers — producing books that combined scholarship and high quality printing. Robert was appointed by Francois I as a royal printer of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. According to James Craig, Estienne commissioned Garamond to produce the first matched set of roman and italic faces. (Source, Thirty Centuries of Graphic Design, Craig

Claude Garamond (1480–1561)

Garamond began his career apprenticing and working for printers Simone de Colines and Henri Estienne. When Estienne the elder died Garamond became independant —the first punchcutter to design and produce type faces for sale to other printers. His type designs, while still classified as Old Style moved further from the characteristics of calligraphy. Garamond falls into a subdivision of Old Style named Garalde, (Aldus + Garamond).

The type design sold today under the name of Garamond was not his, but the work of Jean Jannon, who modeled his later type design on Garmond's work.

Robert Granjon
Granjon designed Civilité, a face based upon gothic cursive writing, as a competitor to the Italian cursive "italic."

Rubens, Prometheus Bound, PMA

Le Romain du roi

11.
Baroque (1600-1750)
Legibility and Economy

Baroque art reflected the spiritual and emotional aspects of the Catholic Revival or Counter Reformation. The Baroque style featured abundant detail, dramatic use of light and dark (chiaroscuro), vibrant colors and emotional drama.

The Baroque period is responsible for some of the most legible type faces—mostly referred to as 'transitional" meaning that they are developmentally between the Old Venetian Style and the future Modern Style.

"Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition;"

12.
Jean Jannon & "Garamond"
(discovery by Beatrice Warde)

"The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. He trained as punch-cutter in Paris. He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman typeface and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that typeface at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms."
Excerpt from Storm Type Foundry

13.
Philippe Grandjean
Le Romain du roi, 1692

King Louis the XIV commissioned an exclusive typeface for the Royal Printing House, The Imprimerie Royale. The face is a product of a committee of mathematicians, philosophers and others who used mathematics rather than calligraphy for the basis of their design—a totally rational approach.

One of the purposes for the face was to authenticate a document's origin from the royal press. Severe penalties, including death, were punishment for using the Roman du roi.

Squares were divided up into a grid of 64 units & then another 36 units for a total of 2,034 units. Some type historians regard this as the first type design not reflecting the method of production — "calligrapher is replaced by engineer." The final punches were cut by Grandjean.

15.
Pierre Simon Fournier
Manuel Typographic
Paris, (b.1712 - d.1768)

The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. One volume is an account of punch cutting and type founding and another is a display of his font and ornamental designs. Shown above is one of his rococo style samples.

After studying art and apprenticing at the Le Bé type foundry, Fournier opened his own type design and foundry operation. He pioneered standardized measurement through his table of proportions based on the French pouce, a now-obsolete unit of measure slightly longer than an inch. The resulting standard sizes of type enabled him to pioneer the “type family,” a series of typefaces with differing stroke weights and letter widths whose similar sizes and design characteristics allowed them to be used together in an overall design.
Fournier designed a wide range of decorative ornaments and florid fonts, enabling French printers to create books with a decorative design complexity that paralleled the architecture and interiors of the period. Because French law forbade type founders from printing, Fournier often delivered made-up pages to the printer, thereby assuming the role of graphic designer."

17.
The Didots

Francois Didot further refined Fournier's type gauge system to use point measure rather than names for sizes. His son, Firmin Didot's type faces were designed with the stark clarity of the neo-classical period utilizing an extreme contrast between the stroke weights as well as greatly reduced brackets on the serifs.

Below the text Design Writing Research, Lupton and Abbott:

"Bodoni and Didot completed the typographic erasure of calligraphy; these faces polarized letterforms into extremes of thick and thin and reduced serifs to wafer thin slices. While the humanists had hoped to discover absolute proportions legislating the forms of letters, and the creators of the roman du roi pursued a norm grounded in scientific and bureaucratic legality, Bodoni and Didot reduced the alphabet to a system of oppositions—thick and thin, vertical and horizontal, serif and stem. Typography was no longer compelled to refer back to an ideal cannon of proportions: instead, letterforms were understood as a set of elements open to manipulation, While Bodoni and Didot called their work classic, typographers since the early 19th century have classified them as modern."

In 1924, Monotype based this face on types cut by Pierre Simon Fournier circa 1742 and called “St Augustin Ordinaire” in Fournier’s Manuel Typographique. These types were some of the most influential designs of the eighteenth century, being among the earliest of the “transitional” style of typeface, and were a stepping stone to the more severe “modern” style made popular by Bodoni later in the century. They had more vertical stress than the old style types, greater contrast between thick and thin strokes and little or no bracketing on the serifs.

16.
NeoClassicism 1760-1850
In reaction to the frivolous period of the Rococo, artist again looked back at the classical styles of ancient Greek and Rome.With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism. Even before 1789, popular taste had begun to turn away from the disarming, lighthearted subjects of rococo; as revolution neared, artists increasingly sought noble themes of public virtue and personal sacrifice from the history of ancient Greece or Rome. They painted with restraint and discipline, using the austere clarity of the neoclassical style to stamp their subjects with certitude and moral truth.

(Visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum here)

"During the 1600's, religious intolerance and government censorship played a major role in determining where printing would flourish and where it would languish. Holland became dominant, while England struggled to establish a viable printing industry."
30 Centuries of Graphic Design, James Craig.

19.
Christophe Plantin ( –1589) Antwerp, Belgium (later Flanders)
Born in France and originally trained as a book binder, an injury lead Christophe Plantin to start printing in 1555. He was strongly influenced by the quality of his French counterparts. Plantin's masterpiece, the Polygot Bible, 1572, was an eight volume edition printed in five languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Aramaic). The title page was an elaboratly engraved illustration, a refinement over using wood block prints.

Anton Janson
The type design known as Janson was modeled on the types of seventeenth-century Hungarian punchcutter Nicolas (Miklós) Kis, who trained in Amsterdam under Dutch punchcutter Dirck Voskens, circa 1680. This fine book face was named for Dutch printer Anton Janson, who, for many years, was mistakenly credited with originating the Kis designs. The original letterforms show minor inconsistencies that only add to the charm of this typeface. These design quirks were lovingly integrated into Monotype's version, digitized by Patricia Saunders and Robin Nicholas and issued in 1985. Janson is beautiful and readable, and remains a favorite for classic text typography.

Nicholas Kis
Hungarian in Holland
1650-1702

Transylvanian protestant who, sent to Holland in the last quarter of the seventeenth century to learn printing, became one of the leading punchcutters of his time before returning to Transylvania to print bibles.

(Visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum here)

Christoffel van Dyck(Dijck)
1601-1669

Amsterdam was a city that enjoyed relative religious tolerance which allowed a healthy printing industry. The famous Elzevir printing firm purchased the type of the estate of van Dyck. Van Dyck's design was derived from Garamond but was more condensed, had little contrast in stroke weight and heavy serifs. Stanley Morrison wrote "Although his type faces are not as important to the historian than those of Garamond, they are certainly more beautiful."Van Dyck's sturdy faces were possibly the basis used by William Caslon for his roman type. (Below: Digital sample from the Dutch Type Library).