After Class 2/18

In class today we went over a lot of information, mainly the history of several different typefaces.  The ones that we covered are: Caslon, Garamond, Romain du Roi, Baskerville, Bodoni, and Didot.  Caslon is a very simple and plain font that was designed to be 'comfortable' and 'pleasing to the eyes', which means that it's good in body copy where a lot of continous reading is done.  An example of bracketed serifs can be seen in this typeface.  Garamond was designed by a French designer/printer.  He was influenced by Tory and this typeface was used to replace nearly all uses of textura.  Romain du Roi was designed primarily for governmental use, and if it was used for any other reason, the result was death.  Pretty strict, eh?    The unique aspect about this typeface is that was mathematically designed by using a 2,304 square grid system, all of which basically turned useless because the squares get too small to follow once the text was reduced in size.  Baskerville is a font still used today because of it's versatility.  It is a transitional typeface with slight uses of stress in letterforms, as well as different serifs.  The designer of this also created a new type of paper; it was a glossy, finer tooth paper that many people accepted right away.  Bodoni is a modern design with thin and straight serifs.  The designer increased the contrast of thin and thick with strokes, and he also condensed letter forms to make them taller and more geometric.  His competition was Didot, who also was a modern designer with sharp serifs and obvious thick and thinness.  

Yesterday we also learned where the terms upper and lower case came from.  (Pretty heavily weighted terms,...)  I also learned where leading came from, but where does the word kerning come from?

Another big topic was the introduction of the Rococo period, which lasted from 1720-1770.  This period can be described as symmetrical, floral, feminine, detailed and elegant.  It generally focused on the life of rich people,... mainly because only rich people could ever afford the first type of porn.  

A new form of graphics were introduced during this time as well- informational graphs.  Linegraphs, bar charts and pie charts were now being used to compare valuable information.

I am really surprised to hear about the Ludites, who were responsible for destroying printers and other forms of technology.  I can't believe that during vulnerable times, people refuse to advance (or let others) and make the world a better place.  There really isn't that bad of a side affect to printing, despite the fact that opinions and rumors were spread easier, but that occurs everywhere regardless if it's printed on paper.  I think I am going to make a movie about these fellas, the picture shown in class was terrifying.  I some crazy men bearing clubs demanded to locate my printers, I probably wouldn't think twice about it.  Loco.