C.O.P Lecture 4: The History of Type - Production and Distribution (Part 2)

 Lecture 4: The History of Type - Production and Distribution (Part 2)

“Since typography is a communication method that utilizes a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics and psychology.”

• The importance of ‘chronologies’
• The future is based on the past, we shape that future.
• Each typeface that we are using has a history.

• Type is a language based; comes from the spoken word.
• Transition from an oral traditions into something that happens physically, visually, in a written form.
• When we are talking about history and chronology, we have to be specific, where has it come from who has said it?

• True alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonant and vowels on an equal basis.
• Before 20th century - type was about production that determined how type looked and how letterforms were developed.

• After WW1 there was an opportunity to rebuild creativity.
• Common theme between form, what something looks like - what is it trying to achieve?
• Reductionist view of how you think about design, functionality and how something is made.
• Not everything is about form and function.
• When we start to look at the Bauhaus, it is really the first time that the industrial age had a visual language.
• Systematic, Pragmatic, increasing development of design.
• Helvetica was the epitome of type and the culture itself.
• Microsoft did the bare minimum of copying helvetica (Arial).
• 1990 - steve jobs - introduced the first apple macintosh - the birth of our use of type, the first computer we could design on.
• We moved away from brushes - we were using letterpress and digital technology.
• “By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product” -  Ellen Lupton Thinking with type.
• Within type, you have to have an opinion and a personal view.

1994 - Vincent Connare - COMIC SANS MS - worked for microsoft.

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee - created the ‘www’ - gave it away for FREE.

1995 - Bill Gates - Internet Explorer - he created a template for any internet browsers.

• Established the windows font set as a global standard for browsers - includes ARIAL and COMIC SANS.

“We realise now that long documents do not work on the web. We should never have thought otherwise….

But all those short documents we are reading instead are poisoning our ability to read long documents” - John Clark

• Relationship between spoken word and the written word are in a state of flux - the usage of calling was overridden by SMS.
• Emoji’s - global language, replacing words and phrases with pictures/smileys.
• Process of going through the oral, now going back to symbols instead of letterforms.

We have gone in a full circle - Simplicity.

“Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration” - Neil Postman

Postmodernism:

• Complexity, contradiction, dystopian/non utopian, appropriation.
• The language of protest

1979 - Barbara Kruger - Started to look at how to deliver a message effectively. - Who am I talking to, how do I want to communicate this?

Type in image - we can distribute our ideas through a whole range of media.

Not whether we can or can’t do something - whether we SHOULD do something.

• “With great power comes great responsibility” - we are responsible for the way people see the world - designers have a MASSIVE impact on people’s perceptions.
• If we are nice to the world - have a progressive view to the world, then we can impact and affect the way people act and think about the world. - if we don’t do that, we are leaving it up to chance.
• The context of practice that you are shaping is not just about YOU, it’s about the world around you - do not design in a bubble.