But in fact, the improvements were more significant. For one thing, the daisyhead mechanism allowed for proportional fonts—where different characters occupy different amounts of horizontal space depending on their shape—for the first time in a personal typewriter.
For another, the efficiency of this method was so great that the world of computing adopted it wholesale. Before graphical user interfaces, some computers would create print outs using daisywheel printers. Well after the introduction of laser and dot-matrix printing in the late s, the daisywheel remained the primary printer mechanism because of its relative affordability.
Even after its time had passed, landmark digital devices like the Apple Laserwriter emulated its command set. In the sphere of mass-production printing presses, the major innovation was phototypesetting, first introduced in by the Photon Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is how it works.
The operator then selects a magnifying lens to determine the size of the projected character. Finally, the projection falls upon light-sensitive photo paper or film, and like magic, the typed words appear. This film can in turn be used to create an off-set mold, which can be inked and reproduced again and again. The only difference is that wood or lead molds are replaced by the relatively high-tech media of light and chemically treated paper.
The Digiset machine, however, was a different animal. Created in the mid s by the German printer Rudolf Hell, Digiset still projects light onto photo paper, but it does so via a Cathode Ray Tube CRT —the same technology that televisions used. The big difference is that in this case, light is not being projected through a physical character cut-out.
Rather, the light is distributed into tiny points—the equivalent of pixels—that are projected in the shape of the selected letter, which is formed using a grid in what would come to be known as bitmap format. In other words, it was digital. Since the information was digital, the documents could even be saved on floppy disks once these came on the scene.
The Digiset machine was thus a forerunner to desktop publishing programs on personal computers. It was just way, way bigger. The advances in printing technology necessitated complementary changes in the practice of typography. In striving to adjust to the requirements of the new machines, typographers like Adrian Frutiger created the predecessors to modern digital fonts.
While phototypesetting had plenty of advantages, it also had its setbacks. The aim with Univers, created in the mid s, was to supersede Futura as a sans serif for phototypesetter machines. For Frutiger, the result was a product of necessity, not of art:. V and W needed huge crotches in order to stay open. I nearly had to introduce serifs in order to prevent rounded-off corners — instead of a sans-serif the drafts were a bunch of misshapen sausages!
Yet some thirty years later, Univers wound up becoming much more: a model for the emerging world of digital type. Frutiger probably was not thrilled. His CRT-based Digiset machine required digital fonts to be designed using points of light on a grid—i. The result was Digi Grotesk grotesk meaning sans serif , shown above in its normal and bold forms.
Considering its trailblazing status, Digi Grotesk looks great. A heck of a lot better than the blocky bitmap fonts which emerged in the 80s. The reason for this difference is that the later bitmaps had to deal with the extremely low resolutions of early PC monitors.
Another key moment on the cusp of digital typography was the movement to improve OCR—Optical Character Recognition—in the late s and early s. OCR is the mechanism by which a machine such as a computer recognizes printed characters and converts them into digital information that can be stored.
This sort of information processing capacity was important to industries like banking as well as government agencies. In the days of primitive computers, OCR required a typeface in which every letter was completely distinct from every other—so the computer would not make any mistakes—while still being recognizable as conventional letters to the human eye.
You might recognize this typeface, because it is still sometimes the one that appears on things like International Standard Book Numbers ISBNs and passports. Europeans were not so thrilled with this American solution, however, so in the s they hired Frutiger shown above left to design an update. The resulting typeface, OCR-B, still meets the machine recognition requirements while hewing closer to human aesthetic standards. By the mids, the personal computer was clearly revealing itself to be the next big thing.
You can play a great game in the grid or a lousy game. But the goal is to play a really fine game. At Total Design, the studio he co-founded in , Crouwel directed all printed matter for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam after , with every item designed systematically on the same invisible squared grid. In , Crouwel's poster for an exhibition named "Vormgevers" made the grid visible, exposing a fundamental design tool that is almost always hidden from view.
The "Vormgevers" poster marked an advance in the use of constructed letters, becoming the core element of the design and a product of their own systematic construction method. Drawn by hand with a pen, a straight edge and a compass, the monolithic geometric shapes of the Vormgevers' imposing black and white binaries anticipated the bitmap, dot matrix and LED typography of early computer displays. Frutiger During the early s, sans serif typefaces like Helvetica had become so ubiquitous that they were beginning to seem vapid, dated and dull.
In the design of his eponymous face for Charles de Gaulle Airport, Adrian Frutiger sought to breathe new life into the sans serif by merging the rational, stripped-down features of his earlier Univers typeface with the calligraphic principles found in older humanistic faces from before the advent of the sans serif.
What will the office look like in 10 years? Although it is not hugely fashionable today, Frutiger has been in the bestseller lists ever since its release in In , asked to reflect on the phenomenal success of his eponymous typeface Frutiger said: "It has already become to some extent a stylistic expression of the s and s.
All media have adopted it spontaneously. It was simply a face which could be read comfortably. It was the 'other one' between Univers and Helvetica. Chicago As an undergraduate student in the s, Steve Jobs would occasionally attend calligraphy classes simply out of interest: "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces," he said, " This was the start of what we now consider Sans Serif typefaces. During this time, type exploded, and many, many variations were being created to accommodate advertising.
This was a return to minimalism, and many other simplistic typefaces such as Futura surfaced around this time period. Present : With the internet, we have such a vast variety of old and new typefaces available for us to peruse and use. Ben Barrett-Forrest, a Canadian graphic designer, put together this beautiful and clever video that brings the history of typography to life:. I just came across your blog post while doing research on typography and it was really helpful.
But I wanted to point out one common mistake you made. Gutenberg invented the printing press, but he did NOT invent movable type. That was actually a Chinese peasant named Bi Sheng, who invented movable type way back in the s. He did invent the first mechanical movable type.
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