Evolution of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Landmark Typefaces - Hardcover

SEDDON TONY

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500241481 ISBN 13: 9780500241486

Publisher: THAMES HUDSON, 2015

Synopsis

Tony Seddon traces the development of type design and typographic style through a detailed survey of 100 important typefaces, from Nicholas Jensonā€s early use of Roman letterforms in the mid 15th century to Selva, a blackletter typeface designed in 2012. For each design, Seddon describes its creator and its development, and provides examples of the typeface and a large, annotated illustration of a capital and a lower-case letter showing their distinctive typographical elements and innovations.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Seddon is a freelance designer, art director and writer. He has authored and co-authored five books on graphic design, art direction and typography, including Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans: A Designer's Almanac of Dos and Don'ts. He lives in East Sussex, UK.

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Foreword

Type is a fundamental part of written language in the modern world, and yet it is commonly treated as a static thing. Once cast into metal, it is fixed in time.

But type is alive!

Each typeface has an individual history. It is often born out of specific necessity, influenced by the artistic world in which its creator lives or designed to solve a particular problem. Some typefaces die soon after they fulfill this initial purpose, but others can live on far beyond their designers' intentions. They can travel through design movements, traverse formats and substrates both analog and digital, and evolve into the typographic offspring that we refer to as revivals and reinterpretations. If a typeface survives these journeys it can continue to live on as a tool in the hands of future generations, producing work its creator never imagined.

And just as music has its archetypical artists or composers who represent a given genre (be it classical, blues, folk or rock), so does type. Certain typefaces define their classification or style; they set a standard, becoming the forebears by which all their followers are judged and compared. We know many of these classics well, whether its from the pages of our design-school textbooks (Bodoni, Garamond, Caslon, Futura) or the default font menus on our computers (Gill Sans, Times, Palatino, Helvetica). But how much do we really know about them? What was the context of the design world in which they were drawn? Were they in competition with other typefaces of the time? What life did they live after they were released? How did they survive the transition from metal to film to digital? Did they survive at all? Which typefaces followed in their shadow?

In this book, Tony Seddon makes a daring and worthwhile attempt to answer these questions. The Evolution of Type is a biography of these living things we call typefaces. It tells their individual stories, and while at it, tells the story of typography as a whole.

Stephen Coles

Edition details

• Publisher: THAMES HUDSON
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500241481
• ISBN 13: 9780500241486
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256