New: History of Type

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his short course will explore how time, tradition, and technology influenced the making of Latin typefaces in Europe from the seventeenth century to today.

Delivered over three consecutive afternoons, each session will look at a distinct typographic era – Type in the Age of Enlightenment, (1650–1800); Type in the Age of Industry, (1800–1920); and Type in the Modern Age, (1920–1990) – and the threads that link them all.

In Type in the Age of Enlightenment, we will discuss how material advances and social and cultural changes shaped type making from 1650 to 1800. We will consider the influence of earlier typographers such as Christoffel van Dijck on the work of William Caslon, and the subsequent departure from renaissance typographic traditions led by John Baskerville in England, and Giambattista Bodoni in Italy.

In Type in the Age of Industry, we will examine how, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mechanisation divided typographic practice and made a distinction between type making as a hand-based craft and type making as a machine-led trade. We will look at the work of the Arts & Crafts Movement and William Morris’s fifteenth century inspired Golden Type set against the era’s mechanical types including fat faces, slab serifs and sans-serifs.

Finally, in Type in the Modern Age we will discover how the typographic past was revived in historical typefaces such as Garamond, Bembo and Baskerville. Revivalism was accompanied by a trend for typefaces designed by artists rather than typographers, including alphabets by Eric Ravillious and Edward Bawden. To conclude we will look at how these ornamented types were balanced by typographic modernism and the arrival of Helvetica, Futura and Univers.

Throughout the course we will place developments against the changing role of typography and the type designer, and visit the work of the type historians who have documented and shaped how we approach type making from the Enlightenment to today.