Articles

The start­ing point in a new round of de­vel­op­ment of type design is con­sidered to be 1692, when the French king Louis XIV ordered the de­vel­op­ment of a new type ac­cord­ing to “sci­entif­ic laws” for his roy­al print­ing house. Many aca­dem­ics were in­volved in this, in­clud­ing the math­em­atician and ty­po­graph­er Nic­olas Jaugeon, who pro­posed pla­cing all the let­ters in a square con­sist­ing of 2304 small squares of the same area. The new font was called “Ro­main du Roi” and was cre­ated ac­cord­ing to the laws of geo­metry and draw­ing. In terms of design, it was more "dry", "mech­an­ic­al" and did not have cal­li­graph­ic prop­er­ties. However, it fea­tured in­creased con­trast, crisp serifs, and an even bal­ance of the shapes of each let­ter. In 1702 it was first used in the tome “Medailles sur les prin­ci­paux evene­ments du regne de Louis le Grand, avec des ex­plan­a­tions his­toriques.” Des­pite all its short­com­ings (in­clud­ing the in­ab­il­ity of oth­er print­ing houses to use it), many began to use it as a basis when cre­at­ing their own fonts.

An­oth­er prom­in­ent fig­ure in the field of type design was Pierre Si­mon Fourni­er Jr., a gif­ted en­graver and son of a ty­po­graph­er, who at the age of 24 foun­ded the fam­ous type foundry and was one of the cre­at­ors of the mod­ern sys­tem­at­iz­a­tion of type (by ty­po­graph­ic­al points). He con­duc­ted an in-depth ana­lys­is of all ty­po­graph­ic fonts used at that time. Fourni­er's goal was to try to some­how sys­tem­at­ize and stand­ard­ize them. In 1737, he be­came something of a pi­on­eer in this area: he de­veloped a ta­ble of op­tim­al pro­por­tions, a uni­ver­sal unit of meas­ure­ment for fonts (ty­po­graph­ic point) and much more. His works in 1742 res­ul­ted in the first book of mod­els of prin­ted char­ac­ters for the print­ing press, “Modèles des caractères de l’im­primer­ie.” In­spired by Ro­main du Roi, Fourni­er cre­ated his own typefaces. Ex­per­i­ment­ing with the width, height and thick­ness of each char­ac­ter al­lowed him to find laws for sys­tem­at­iz­ing dif­fer­ent fonts, com­bin­ing fonts in­to fam­il­ies that were visu­ally com­pat­ible. Pierre Si­mon Fourni­er also set stand­ards for the design of dec­or­at­ive ele­ments (such as or­na­ments).

Fourni­er worked for many years on a four-volume book on ty­po­graphy, Manuel Ty­po­graph­ique, but after the pub­lic­a­tion of the first volume in 1764, he be­came ser­i­ously ill and, shortly be­fore his death in 1768, man­aged to pub­lish the second (last) volume. Al­though his life's work was only half com­pleted, Fourni­er cre­ated more ty­po­graph­ic in­nov­a­tions and had a great­er in­flu­ence on graph­ic design than any oth­er per­son of his era. The very fact that dur­ing Fourni­er’s life­time his fonts were act­ively copied speaks of his great skill and tal­ent.

The early 18th cen­tury also saw a surge in design cre­ativ­ity in north­ern Europe, with Dutch type makers be­gin­ning to mi­grate to Bri­tain. The res­ults of their work in­spired the Eng­lish en­graver Wil­li­am Caslon. The own­er of one of the loc­al print­ing houses in­vited Caslon to his place of work to cre­ate fonts. His first com­mis­sion was an Ar­ab­ic script for the So­ci­ety for the Propaga­tion of Chris­ti­an Know­ledge. Al­most im­me­di­ately this led to stun­ning suc­cess, and after some 2 years in 1722, based on Dutch fonts, he made his first font, which was named in his hon­or - “Caslon Old Style”. This cre­ated his world­wide fame and repu­ta­tion as a re­spec­ted mas­ter.

His "Caslon" series of typefaces was not par­tic­u­larly fash­ion­able or in­nov­at­ive. It owes its enorm­ous pop­ular­ity to its out­stand­ing read­ab­il­ity and good tex­ture, which made it “com­fort­able” and “friendly to the eyes.” All Caslon fonts are var­ied in design, giv­ing them an ir­reg­u­lar and rhythmic tex­ture that makes them visu­ally in­ter­est­ing and ap­peal­ing. In 1785, the book “A spe­ci­men of print­ing types” was pub­lished, ded­ic­ated to the Caslon fonts.

For many dec­ades, al­most all of Eng­land and its colon­ies used Caslon fonts for print­ing. Ben­jamin Frank­lin him­self, be­ing a ty­po­graph­er, used his type when print­ing the first edi­tion of the no­tori­ous De­clar­a­tion of In­de­pend­ence.

In par­al­lel with Caslon, an­oth­er Eng­lish ty­po­graph­er, John Bask­erville, worked in the type field. He was an in­nov­at­or who broke the rules of book design and print­ing. Since child­hood, he “ad­mired the beauty of let­ters,” but de­voted al­most his en­tire life to the craft (mak­ing boxes, can­dle­sticks, watches, etc.), which brought him a large for­tune. In 1751, at the age of 47, hav­ing achieved everything he dreamed of, Bask­erville re­turned to his child­hood love of let­ters. He began ex­per­i­ment­ing with ty­po­graphy and type design, striv­ing for graph­ic per­fec­tion. Bask­erville's fonts, which bear his name to this day, rep­res­ent a trans­ition­al type between the old style and mod­ern type design. They had in­nov­at­ive el­eg­ance and light­ness. His typefaces were wider, with in­creased con­trast between the thick and thin strokes of each let­ter. In Bask­erville fonts, serifs flow smoothly from the main strokes and end in el­eg­ant dots. When design­ing his books, Bask­erville al­ways strived for con­cise­ness and el­eg­ant sim­pli­city; his goal was to re­new the art of print­ing in Eng­land.

Bask­erville's ex­tens­ive ex­per­i­ence in the craft al­lowed him to in­de­pend­ently de­vel­op ma­chines, molds, glossy pa­per, inks and much more for his print­ing house. Un­for­tu­nately, many crit­ics did not ac­cept Bask­erville as a pro­fes­sion­al out of simple envy of his tal­ents. Some of them claimed that his fonts "hurt the eyes due to the harsh­ness and con­trast." Of course, none of this was true. Even Ben­jamin Frank­lin ad­mired and re­spec­ted Bask­erville. Dur­ing his life, John Bask­erville pub­lished 56 books, but in pro­fes­sion­al circles in Eng­land he was met with either in­dif­fer­ence or hos­til­ity, al­though in con­tin­ent­al Europe his in­nov­a­tions in type and book design were highly in­flu­en­tial.

The basis for con­struct­ing in­form­a­tion graph­ics (in­fograph­ics) was ana­lyt­ic­al geo­metry - a sec­tion of geo­metry de­veloped by Rene Descartes back in the mid-17th cen­tury. Its laws were used by Scot­tish writer and sci­ent­ist Wil­li­am Play­fair to trans­form stat­ist­ic­al data in­to sym­bol­ic visu­al graph­ics. In 1786, he first pub­lished his Com­mer­cial and Polit­ic­al At­las, in which he used line graphs and bar graphs (his­to­grams) to visu­ally com­pare sev­er­al stat­ist­ics. Sub­sequently, he up­dated it sev­er­al times. It also oc­curred to Play­fair to di­vide the circle in­to parts, the area of each of which would be equal to the area of a sep­ar­ate city, state or coun­try. So for the first time at the turn of the XVIII-XIX cen­tur­ies. the well-known pie (sec­tor) dia­gram ap­peared. His in­ven­tion was very im­port­ant for a num­ber of reas­ons.

Firstly, at that time, hu­man­ity had ac­cu­mu­lated a large amount of vari­ous data that needed to be some­how pro­cessed. Visu­al present­a­tion of data in the form of graphs and dia­grams has made it pos­sible to sig­ni­fic­antly re­duce the com­plex­ity of pro­cessing and make a sig­ni­fic­ant leap in sci­ence and tech­no­logy.

Secondly, Play­fair un­wit­tingly dis­covered a new area of graph­ic design (in­fograph­ics), which is act­ively be­ing de­veloped by de­sign­ers today.

A truly mod­ern style in book design began to emerge around 1770 after the gradu­al ex­tinc­tion of the Ro­coco style in France. Dur­ing this peri­od, many began to aban­don lush and not al­ways ap­pro­pri­ate pat­terns in the design of books and fonts. The term “mod­ern style” it­self was in­tro­duced in­to use by the pre­vi­ously men­tioned Fourni­er in his multi-volume book “Manuel Ty­po­graph­ique”. By it he un­der­stood a set of new trends that were ob­served in book design in con­nec­tion with the de­par­ture from the Ro­coco style. To fill the void, graph­ic de­sign­ers began to use clas­sic­al forms of an­cient Greek and Ro­man art.

The ini­tial im­petus for the de­vel­op­ment of the mod­ern style is con­sidered to be the Bask­erville fonts, which in the mod­ern clas­si­fic­a­tion are called trans­ition­al type serifs. When design­ing them, Bask­erville tried to in­crease the con­trast between thick and thin strokes to im­prove the read­ab­il­ity of the text. In ad­di­tion, he aban­doned heavy or­na­ments and used more free space on the pages, which gave them light­ness and air­i­ness.

The de­vel­op­ment of the style es­tab­lished by John Bask­erville was con­tin­ued by the Itali­an ty­po­graph­er Gi­am­battista Bodoni, born in­to the fam­ily of a poor print­er. He spent his youth in Rome, gain­ing ex­per­i­ence in a loc­al Cath­ol­ic pub­lic­a­tion. He was strongly in­flu­enced by Fourni­er, Caslon and Bask­erville. After the sui­cide of his teach­er in Rome, he de­cided to go to Eng­land in 1766 to work with Bask­erville him­self, but ill­ness pre­ven­ted him. In 1768, at the in­vit­a­tion of Prime Min­is­ter Ferdin­and I, he headed the Ducal Print­ing House of Parma, where he worked on Fourni­er’s equip­ment. Three years later, Bodoni pub­lished a book on or­na­ments and cap­it­al let­ters, Fregi e majus­cule, which was visu­ally very sim­il­ar to the volumes of Manuel Ty­po­graph­ique by Fourni­er. This book re­flects the evol­u­tion of design from the Ro­coco style to the mod­ern style and made Bodoni fam­ous not only in Italy. Bodoni pub­lished his first fonts only in 1771, and in 1782 he de­veloped samples of fonts for the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet.

In 1788, he com­piled and pub­lished the first edi­tion of the ty­po­graph­ic manu­al "Manuale Tipo­grafico", which in­cluded an al­pha­bet of his own in­ven­tion. In the same year he de­veloped let­ters for the Greek al­pha­bet.

By 1790, Bodoni stopped im­it­at­ing Fourni­er and began to de­vel­op com­pletely new fonts built ac­cord­ing to geo­met­ric laws. In the design of books, he gradu­ally aban­doned the or­na­ments in­her­ent in the Ro­coco style, modi­fy­ing the design of Ro­man let­ters, cre­at­ing them more math­em­at­ic­ally veri­fied and “mech­an­ic­al”. He had to re-cre­ate the serifs, mak­ing them thin­ner. This ap­proach in­creased the con­trast of the text. “Mech­an­ic­al” fonts were in­spired by the ap­proach­ing era of in­dus­tri­al ma­chines, the in­dus­tri­al re­volu­tion began. The pat­terns and typefaces that had made Bodoni fam­ous in the past were re­leg­ated to the mar­gins of his­tory and he de­cided to cre­ate more rig­or­ous and eco­nom­ic­al graph­ic design ele­ments that were sim­il­ar to the func­tion­al ty­po­graphy of the 20th cen­tury. Bodoni's work was char­ac­ter­ized by open, simple page designs with large mar­gins, wide let­ter and line spa­cing, and large areas of white space.

Bodoni strived for per­fec­tion in everything, so he wanted to have all the fonts avail­able at that time in his print­ing house. Dur­ing his life, he cre­ated Lat­in, Greek, Hebrew, Ar­ab­ic, In­di­an and many oth­er exot­ic fonts, in­clud­ing ro­man and it­al­ic Cyril­lic.

Bodoni was an in­cred­ibly pro­lif­ic per­son: he pub­lished about 345 books, de­veloped over 300 fonts in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, left over 25 thou­sand punches and 50 thou­sand matrices! For his ser­vices, Bodoni was called the “print­er of kings” and the “king of print­ers.” He pro­duced ex­clus­ive gift edi­tions of books (mostly an­cient au­thors) for roy­alty, so ques­tions of money did not both­er him; in his print­ing house he could de­vote him­self to his fa­vor­ite work without re­serve. However, in pur­suit of beauty and har­mony, Bodoni did not pay much at­ten­tion to the prin­ted text, so ty­pos could of­ten be found on the pages of his books.

At the end of his life, he, like Fourni­er, wanted to re­is­sue his ty­po­graph­ic manu­al “Manuale Tipo­grafico”. Un­for­tu­nately, he did not live to see this mo­ment. After his death, Bodoni's wid­ow pub­lished a two-volume manuale Tipo­grafico in 1818, which was con­sidered the stand­ard in the 19th cen­tury.

At the end of the 18th cen­tury. Among the galaxy of em­in­ent ty­po­graph­ers and book print­ers, the Eng­lish poet and artist Wil­li­am Blake ap­peared. This man was very ex­traordin­ary. Ac­cord­ing to him, at the age of 4 he saw the head of God in the win­dow, and later the proph­et Ezekiel in the fields and “a tree full of an­gels with spark­ling wings.” In West­min­ster Ab­bey, he re­peatedly said that he saw Christ and the Apostles. In 1784, at the age of 27, after com­plet­ing his stud­ies at the Roy­al Academy of Arts, Blake opened his own print­ing house, where he worked with his be­loved young­er broth­er Robert. They had very few or­ders; Blake earned money mainly as an artist by selling wa­ter­col­or works.

In 1787, his broth­er Robert died of tuber­cu­los­is; this event greatly in­flu­enced Blake’s ty­po­graph­ic fate. He spent the last two weeks of his life with his broth­er, and at the mo­ment of death saw “his lib­er­ated soul as­cend in­to the heav­ens through the ceil­ing, clap­ping his hands for joy.” Blake sub­sequently claimed that after this, Robert came to him re­peatedly in vis­ions to chat with him. In one of his vis­ions, his broth­er gave Blake the secret of a meth­od he called the “il­lu­min­ated seal.” It is based on the etch­ing print­ing meth­od, but with some modi­fic­a­tions. Blake ap­plied the re­quired text or il­lus­tra­tion to a pre­pared pol­ished met­al (usu­ally cop­per) plate us­ing a brush or pen dipped in acid-res­ist­ant var­nish. Next, he im­mersed the plate in a bath of acid and etched those areas that were not pro­tec­ted by var­nish. At the end of the etch­ing pro­cess, Blake washed off the var­nish and thus ob­tained the fin­ished print­ing plate. Then he ap­plied black print­ing ink to it. Then he placed slightly moistened spe­cial pa­per on the res­ult­ing print­ing form and rolled everything on a ma­chine with a cyl­indric­al shaft. The pa­per ac­ted as an ab­sorb­ent, ab­sorb­ing paint un­der high pres­sure. The ac­cur­acy of this print­ing meth­od was very high, and the strength of the print­ing plate made it pos­sible to pro­duce a large cir­cu­la­tion of books. This meth­od was com­mer­cially very prof­it­able, as it did not re­quire high labor in­tens­ity. To provide stable fund­ing for his fam­ily, Blake switches from paint­ing to ty­po­graphy. After mak­ing prints of the book pages, Blake and his wife col­lab­or­ated to hand-col­or them with wa­ter­col­ors, then bound them in­to books and sold them at reas­on­able prices.

In his il­lus­tra­tions, Blake tried to re­flect more of the spir­itu­al, and did not strive for real­ism. To do this, he used his ima­gin­a­tion, emo­tions and ima­gin­at­ive think­ing. Dif­fer­ent col­ors in the il­lus­tra­tions helped to cre­ate the ne­ces­sary se­mant­ic ac­cents. Un­for­tu­nately, his works were con­sidered by his con­tem­por­ar­ies to be un­nat­ur­al, dry, and some spoke of them even harsh­er: “a jumble of non­sense,” and Blake him­self was called “an un­suc­cess­ful mad­man.” However, as his­tory has shown, he made great break­throughs not only in graph­ic design, but also in art in gen­er­al. Blake's books show his tal­ent for skill­fully in­teg­rat­ing let­ters and il­lus­tra­tions.

Blake was a typ­ic­al rep­res­ent­at­ive of ro­man­ti­cism, and his il­lus­tra­tions be­came the fore­run­ners of ex­pres­sion­ism, mod­ern­ism and ab­stract art. As is of­ten the case, Blake's tal­ent was not ap­pre­ci­ated dur­ing his life­time. Many con­sidered him crazy, so he died in poverty next to his be­loved wife, work­ing un­til the last on il­lus­tra­tions for Dante.

XVIII cen­tury ended with vi­ol­ent polit­ic­al re­volu­tions in France and Amer­ica, and Great Bri­tain be­came the cen­ter of an in­dus­tri­al so­ci­ety and ma­chine pro­duc­tion. With the ad­vent of the In­dus­tri­al Re­volu­tion, all as­pects of the hu­man ex­per­i­ence, in­clud­ing graph­ic design, un­der­went pro­found and ir­re­vers­ible changes.