Ch. 1+2 Reflections - Julia Keras

Chapter 1:
This timeline was really fascinating to explore, and I was immediately surprised to see such a recognizable typeface as early as 50 BCE - 500 BC Rome. The style known as capitalis quadrata (Fig 1-14) doesn't seem too far off from modern serif fonts. This all-caps simplistic style didn't really make a return until around eleven hundred years later the 1620's when the Vatican Press used a Roman-style capital text (Fig 1-64).

Fig 1-14, Pg. 3

Fig 1-64, Pg. 9

The fonts that were used and came out of following centuries appear much more stylized and complicated, and as a modern viewer, I had a difficult time making out certain letters and characters. However, while these styles were challenging to read, I was able to make associations with historic religious, specifically Catholic and Christian, texts and manuscripts. I have a background in Catholic education, where some of my studies included viewing these kinds of documents. This makes a lot of sense after reading about how impactful the technology behind the Gutenberg Bible (Fig 1-38) was, and how that style of type had a new means of being so widely distributed.

Fig 1-38, Pg. 6

Much later in the timeline, one of the images that really stood out to me was an 1836 example of a wood-type poster (Fig 1-94). At a glance, it seems to be one of the first instances of experimentation with combining multiple fonts, and multiple font styles. It includes, by my count, about 7 or 8 different fonts, generally in the larger text, whereas the body text is uniform. I first thought it was a little bizarre looking considering our discussion on combining fonts. However, I then began to think about in the context of being an advertisement poster, in which it succeeds in grabbing the attention of the viewer and highlighting important information in a way that was probably much more challenging before there was such a variety of fonts available.

Fig 1-94, Pg. 13

As the timeline reached the 20th century, it was overwhelming and awesome to see all of the developments that were made during these years. The shift from physical type to digital type is something that is so fascinating to me because it's something that I think about in both my major (Computer Science) and my minor (UXD). There are certain fonts that are good for writing code, those that resonate well on websites, and others that transfer nicely into the physical world. A really great example of the digitization of type is the Emperor font (Fig 1-183). This font's 'E' is just a collection of pixels, as were many of the early bitmapped typefaces. What strikes me if how fonts like these were turned into code because they weren't fancy and didn't require a lot of memory to use, and their accessibility has evolved into an enduring industry.

Fig 1-183, Pg. 24

Chapter 2:
This chapter starts right off with the components of letters and what goes into creating an alphabet. Without having given this much thought I would've assumed that all 26 letters were made up of maybe 4 or 5 structures that when combined a certain way created a letter. I was surprised to see that, for example, an apex is only found in an uppercase A (Fig 2-6), and a spine is only found in the center of an S (Fig 2-11). This information allowed me to get into a whole new mindset about the complexity and variation of typography and how there are a lot of aspects to consider when formulating a font.

Fig 2-6, Pg. 33

Fig 2-11, Pg. 33

As someone who loves Photoshop, Illustrator, etc., I'm constantly downloading free, open source fonts from the Internet, and experimenting with them on different projects. One of the things that always bothers me is when a font doesn't include numbers and/or special characters, which I thought when reading about fonts like Adobe Garamond (Fig 2-17). However, if reading this chapter taught me anything it's that the work that goes into conceptualizing and developing a font is tenuous, and I don't blame those font creators at all for choosing to stop at the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Fig 2-17, Pg 35

This may be more of a side note but I didn't realize until I was reading about the evolution of sans-serif fonts on Pg. 39 that all of the 'Historical Classification of Typefaces' descriptions were written in the style font they were describing. It was almost immediately into reading the first few words of Grotesque's description that my eye caught the absence of serif. I think the fact that I didn't notice this at first perfectly expresses the power of a font and the message or tone it is trying to convey.

Pg. 39