Timeline of Typography
The design and making of type, from Gutenberg's blackletter of about 1455 through Jenson's roman, Aldine italic, Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni, hot metal, Futura and Helvetica to PostScript, web fonts and variable fonts in 2016.
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- 29 events ~1455 – 2016
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~1455: Gutenberg prints the 42-line Bible in textura
Johannes Gutenberg's Latin Bible, completed in Mainz in the mid-1450s, was set in a textura blackletter modeled on Gothic book script, with about 290 different characters, including ligatures and narrow variants for justifying each column. He is traditionally credited with a hand mold for casting type in a lead, tin and antimony alloy, though how he made his type is debated; movable type had been used earlier in China and Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible1470: Jenson prints with his roman type in Venice
Nicolas Jenson, a French engraver reportedly sent to Mainz in 1458 to learn printing, first used his roman type in Venice for Eusebius's "De praeparatione evangelica", pairing humanist lowercase with capitals based on Roman inscriptions. Printers in Rome and Venice, among them Konrad Sweynheym, Arnold Pannartz and Johann of Speyer, had used roman-style types earlier, but Jenson's became a model for later Venetian faces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Jenson1496: Griffo's roman debuts in Aldus's "De Aetna"
Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer who had begun with Greek texts, first printed in the Latin alphabet in February, dated 1495 in the Venetian calendar, with "De Aetna", Pietro Bembo's account of a journey to Mount Etna. Its roman, cut by Francesco Griffo of Bologna, popularized the level crossbar of the "e" and was a chief model for French types from the 1530s; Monotype revived it as Bembo in the late 1920s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bembo1501: Aldus prints a pocket Virgil in italic type
Francesco Griffo, punchcutter to the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, cut the first italic type, modeled on humanist cursive handwriting; after a brief appearance in 1500, it set an entire small-format Virgil in April, opening Aldus's series of portable classics. Italic was then a text face in its own right, with upright capitals, not a companion for emphasis; it was copied within a year despite Aldus's Venetian privilege.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type1530s – 1550s: Garamond and Paris punchcutters refine the roman
In the 1530s the Paris printer Robert Estienne began using romans adapted from the Aldine type, and by the 1540s Claude Garamond, one of the first independent punchcutters, was rated the city's best; his types and his peers' supplied French printing for two centuries. Whether he cut Estienne's first romans is disputed, and many 20th-century "Garamond" revivals copy types shown by Jean Jannon in 1621, as Beatrice Warde showed in 1926.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamond1702: Romain du Roi appears in a royal medal book
Commissioned in 1692 for the sole use of Louis XIV's Royal Printing Office, the Romain du Roi was drawn on fine grids by the Bignon Commission and cut by Philippe Grandjean, who softened its geometry. First used in a book of medals celebrating the king's reign, its vertical stress and sharp contrast between thick and thin strokes influenced the transitional types of Pierre Simon Fournier and John Baskerville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romain_du_Roi1734: Caslon issues his foundry's type specimen sheet
William Caslon, a London engraver of gun locks turned typefounder, showed the romans, italics and other types he had cut since the mid-1720s. Until the 1730s British printers mostly bought type in the Low Countries; Caslon's types, closely based on Dutch models, largely ended that dependence and were exported across the British Empire, including its American colonies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caslon1737: Fournier proposes a standard typographic point
Pierre Simon Fournier, a Paris typefounder, proposed measuring type sizes in points, dividing the cicero size into twelve units rather than relying on names alone. His "Manuel typographique" of 1764 explained the system. François-Ambroise Didot later standardized a larger point based on the French royal inch; American founders adopted a different point in 1886, so a point did not yet mean the same size everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)1757: Baskerville publishes his Virgil in Birmingham
John Baskerville, a former writing master enriched by japanning, printed a quarto Virgil in type cut to his designs by John Handy, with sharper contrast and a more vertical axis than William Caslon's, using smooth wove paper made by James Whatman. Praised abroad by Benjamin Franklin and Giambattista Bodoni but criticized at home, the type, now called transitional, was sold to France after his death and revived in the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville1778: Bengali movable type appears in Halhed's grammar
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's "A Grammar of the Bengal Language" was the first significant book printed with movable Bengali type, cut by Charles Wilkins of the East India Company with Panchanan Karmakar, a Bengali metalworker; sources divide the credit between them differently. Karmakar later cut types for several other Indian scripts, including Devanagari, at the Serampore Mission Press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grammar_of_the_Bengal_Language~1816: Caslon IV foundry shows an early sans-serif type
William Caslon IV's London foundry showed "Two Lines English Egyptian", a capitals-only face that is the earliest known sans-serif printing type for the Latin alphabet in England, though no contemporary use of it is known. Sign painters had used such letters on London shops by 1805; foundries were also issuing bold "fat faces" and slab serifs for posters, and sans-serifs, later called grotesques, spread from 1828.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif1818: Bodoni's widow publishes the "Manuale tipografico"
Giambattista Bodoni, head of the ducal press in Parma, had developed, in parallel with the Didot family in Paris, the "modern" style of type, with vertical stress, flat hairline serifs and extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes. Five years after his death his widow, Margherita Dall'Aglio, issued his specimen book; the style, now called Didone, dominated printing by the mid-19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Bodoni1869: Gamble teaches electrotyped type-making in Nagasaki
The missionary printer William Gamble, head of the American Presbyterian Mission Press in Ningbo and Shanghai, had electrotyped Chinese type matrices from about 1859 and arranged type cases by character frequency. He taught the method in Nagasaki to Motoki Shōzō, whose workshop and pupils founded modern Japanese typefounding, pairing kana with Ming-style characters, still the most common text style in Chinese and Japanese print.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_typography1886: Linotype goes into daily use at the New York Tribune
Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German-born machinist in Baltimore, built a keyboard machine that assembled matrices into a line and cast it as one metal slug, so a few operators could set a daily newspaper; the New York Tribune began using it in July. Tolbert Lanston's rival Monotype, developed from 1885, cast single letters from punched paper tape, and such hot-metal machines remained mainstays of typesetting into the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine1891: William Morris founds the Kelmscott Press
Reacting against cheaply produced Victorian books, William Morris set up a hand press in Hammersmith, London, with Emery Walker and drew a type called Golden from enlarged photographs of Nicolas Jenson's roman. The press's 53 books, printed until 1898, started the fine press movement and helped turn printers back from 19th-century modern faces to revivals of Renaissance and 18th-century types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelmscott_Press1916: London Underground adopts Edward Johnston's sans-serif
Commissioned in 1913 by Frank Pick of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, Edward Johnston's alphabet took its proportions from Roman capitals rather than from the heavy grotesques of the 19th century. It began the humanist sans-serif genre, versions of it still identify London's public transport, and it was the model for Gill Sans, which Johnston's former student Eric Gill designed for Monotype, released from 1928.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)1927: Bauer Type Foundry releases Paul Renner's Futura
Paul Renner, a German book designer and teacher, began the design in 1924, building letters from near-circles, triangles and squares with strokes of almost even weight, with a single-story "a" and capitals on classical proportions. The Frankfurt foundry marketed it as "the typeface of our time"; it followed Jakob Erbar's slightly earlier geometric Erbar, was widely imitated, and later set the plaque left on the Moon by Apollo 11 in 1969.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)1928: Tschichold publishes "Die neue Typographie"
Jan Tschichold, a Leipzig-trained calligrapher won over to modernism by the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, set out rules for the "New Typography": asymmetric layouts, sans-serif type, standard paper sizes and clear hierarchies of size and weight. Arrested by the Nazis in 1933, he moved to Switzerland, later rejected the book's dogmatism for classical layouts, and applied those to Penguin Books from 1947 to 1949.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold1932: The Times introduces Times New Roman
Stanley Morison, typographic adviser to the Monotype Corporation, had criticized The Times's spindly 19th-century type. With the lettering artist Victor Lardent he produced a sturdier, condensed face based on Monotype's Plantin, itself loosely based on a 16th-century type by Robert Granjon. It debuted on October 3, went on general sale a year later, and later became widely distributed with personal-computer operating systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman1941: Nazi decree abandons Fraktur for roman type
German printing had long used blackletter, chiefly Fraktur, alongside roman type, and Nazi propaganda first promoted Fraktur as German. A circular signed by Martin Bormann on January 3 then declared roman the "normal" type, baselessly calling blackletter "Schwabacher Jewish letters", and ordered schoolbooks, official documents and eventually all printing converted; roman type became the norm in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute1946: Higonnet and Moyroud demonstrate the Lumitype phototypesetter
René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud, French engineers, showed in September a machine that flashed characters from a spinning disk onto film, taking cast metal out of typesetting for offset printing. Developed in the United States as the Photon, it set a complete book in 1953; with later cathode-ray-tube machines that drew letters from digitized data, phototypesetting displaced hot metal in the 1970s and 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting1957: Haas launches the typeface later named Helvetica
Drawn by Max Miedinger under Eduard Hoffmann of the Haas Type Foundry near Basel to rival Berthold's Akzidenz-Grotesk of the 1890s, Neue Haas Grotesk was shown in June at the Graphic 57 exhibition in Lausanne, as was Adrian Frutiger's large, matched Univers family. Renamed Helvetica when adapted for Linotype machines, with first matrices in 1960, it became a staple of the Swiss International Typographic Style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica1978: Knuth releases the TeX typesetting system
Dismayed by phototypeset galley proofs he received in 1977 for a new edition of a volume of "The Art of Computer Programming", first printed from Monotype hot metal, the Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth wrote TeX, with the Metafont font-design language and the Computer Modern typefaces. With Leslie Lamport's LaTeX macros it became widely used in mathematics and the sciences; its design was frozen at version 3 in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX1984: Adobe releases the PostScript page description language
John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who had left the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to found Adobe Systems in 1982, released a language that described whole pages, with letters as outlines of cubic Bézier curves, so one file could print at any resolution. Adobe's encrypted Type 1 fonts carried "hints" that kept small text legible on coarse pixel grids, and its unit of 1/72 inch became the standard digital point; Adobe ended Type 1 support in its applications in 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript1985: LaserWriter and PageMaker launch desktop publishing
Apple's LaserWriter, announced in January and the first printer to ship with PostScript, gave the Macintosh 300-dot-per-inch output with built-in outline fonts. Aldus PageMaker, released in July by a company named after Aldus Manutius, let users lay out pages on screen; Aldus founder Paul Brainerd coined the term "desktop publishing", and page layout, once the work of typesetting firms, moved onto personal computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing1991: Apple ships TrueType outline fonts in System 7
Designed by Apple to avoid per-font royalties and the limits of Adobe's Type 1 format, and licensed to Microsoft, TrueType arrived with the Macintosh System 7 in May and with Windows 3.1 the following April, giving both systems scalable outline fonts on screen and in print. Its programmable hinting gave designers fine control over how letters fell on screen pixels, while Adobe had opened its rival format by publishing the Type 1 specification in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType1996: Microsoft and Adobe announce the OpenType font format
Microsoft and Adobe extended TrueType into OpenType, accommodating TrueType outlines and PostScript-style outlines in the Compact Font Format. Unicode encoding and layout tables supported ligatures, alternate glyphs and the contextual shaping needed by scripts such as Arabic and Devanagari. The 1.0 specification followed in 1997, and the format became the basis of the international Open Font Format standard in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType2010: WOFF and Google Fonts bring custom type to the web
In practice web pages had been limited to fonts installed on readers' computers, such as Microsoft's free Core fonts for the Web of 1996, including Matthew Carter's screen-oriented Verdana and Georgia. As browsers adopted the Cascading Style Sheets @font-face rule, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft submitted the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in April, and Google opened a free library of open-source web fonts in May.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography2016: Four companies introduce OpenType variable fonts
At the Association Typographique Internationale conference in Warsaw on September 14, Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft announced OpenType Font Variations, in version 1.8 of the specification: one font file holding a continuous range of designs along axes such as weight and width. Adapted from Apple's TrueType GX variations of 1994 and recalling Adobe's Multiple Master fonts, it was supported by major browsers and operating systems by 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_font