Job:03171 Title:Typography Referenced (Rockport)
Page: 10
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Typography, Referenced
Text
Job:03171 Title:Typography Referenced (Rockport)
Page: 10
Sixteenth Century
Garamond (74) (–) was the most distinguished type
designer of his time, perhaps of the entire Renaissance period. A
true typographic innovator, he was instrumental in the adoption
of Roman typeface designs in France as a replacement for the
commonly used Gothic, or blackletter (192), fonts. In , his
fi rst Roman type appeared in Paraphrais in Elgantiarum Libros
Laurentii Vallae. He also was one of the fi rst type designers to
create obliqued capitals to complement an italic lowercase (332).
Though Garamond’s designs were exceptionally popular
for a long time (the Helvetica [176] of their day), they did not,
however, enjoy uninterrupted popularity. After a time, new
French designs and styles created by English, Dutch, and Italian
foundries began to replace Garamond’s type as the design of
choice among printers. Not until the beginning of the twentieth
century (18) did new versions of Garamond style begin to appear
again in print shops.
The work of Robert Granjon (75) (–) is closely associated
with Garamond. Active from to , Granjon is credited
with introducing italic type form as a complement to the
roman faces popular at the time. His work provided the models
for Plantin and Times New Roman (165), as well as Matthew
Carter’s (85) Galliard. The face that bears his name, however, is
based on a design by Garamond.
Type designer Jean Jannon (76) (–) created the type-
face on which most modern Garamond revivals are based.
Jannon worked more than years after Garamond, and was the
fi rst to release revivals of the earlier Frenchman’s work.
Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries
During this period, English gunsmith-turned-type-designer
William Caslon I (72) (–) founded the Caslon Type
Foundry. He was one of the few wealthy type designers. His work,
based on earlier Dutch designs, does not possess irreproachable
perfection like that of Bodoni (156) or Baskerville (154). Caslon’s
strength as a type designer was not in his ability to create fl awless
letters, but to create a font that when set in a block of text copy
appeared perfect in spite of the vagaries and individuality of each
letterform.
The fi rst modern revivals of Caslon’s work came out in the
United States under the name Old Style. When American Type
Founders () was formed in , this design later became
Caslon . After that came many succeeding Caslons all
based on Caslon’s work: Monotype Caslon, Adobe Caslon, and
even Caslon. His surviving punches now reside in the St Bride
Printing Library in London.
When John Baskerville (70) (–) fi rst endeavored to
create fonts of type, he found that printing technology of the day
did not allow him to print as he wished. As a result, he explored,
changed, and improved virtually all aspects of the printing
process. He made his own printing press, a vastly improved
version over others of the period; he developed his own ink, which
even today is diffi cult to match for darkness and richness; and he
invented the hot-pressing process to create smooth paper stock,
even having a small mill built on his property to produce paper
that met his standards.
Today Baskerville’s “unpopular” type is one of the most popular
and most frequently used serif typestyles. It is represented in
essentially every type library, and can be reproduced on practi-
cally every kind of imaging device.
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