COP Lecture Series: The History of Type - Production and Distribution: Part 1

Type is what language looks like. It concerns tone, weight and pace of individual letterforms.
Typography is the organisation of the layout of letterforms, however the dictionary definition defines it as:

1. the art and technique of printing with movable type.
2. the composition of printed material from movable type.
3. the arrangement and appearance of printed matter.

These definitions are fairly outdated. According to Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style, typography is the craft of endowing human language. It requires an understanding of visual and cultural literacy.

The Importance of Chronologies

The development of type has documented change in visual culture, for example, hieroglyphics which were used around 7000 years BC. These use physical representations of language to communicate.

The origins of writing started around 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia, the western hemisphere. 

The Rosetta Stone (discovered 1799)

Displays the same set of words in three separate languages, including Egyptian, Demotic and Greek. This provided the first opportunity for linguistics in order to understand history and how language works. It suggests an agreement amongst cultures (principle one of visual literacy; all that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement amongst a group of people that one thing will stand for another).

This also required an understanding of proto-sinaitic and proto-canaanite scripts, which involved common interpretations and recognition of symbols. For example, the Greek alphabet. Through it's development, this then went on to form the characteristics of certain letterforms, as shown in fig.1.

Fig. 1. The development of the Greek alphabet.

Previously, type was only designed for specific purposes such as for use in social, cultural and political contexts. However, in 1870, William Foster changed the development and distribution of type when he produced the Elementary Education Act which allowed children to learn the ability to read, rather than it being exclusively for the privileged few.

"Since typography is a communication method that utilises a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics and so much more, there is no single approach within typography that applies to everything" - Shelley Gruendler.