Wow. That is how this week's reading left me after finishing the last page, and no it's not because I finished it all in one day, but because of the content. With Chapter 10 incorporating the arts and crafts movement's origins, I found Chapter 9 really intriguing. The Industrial Revolution played a key role with innovations making printing and typing more efficient, as well as photography first being developed. From hand printing and hand-type setters moving onto steam-powered printing presses and the Linotype/Monotype machines, the Industrial Revolution definitely revolutionized technology at the time.
The one thing that really peaked my interest was the innovations in typography. Utilizing the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and changing their appearances in height, width, thick and thin strokes. Also, the origins of where fonts received their names such as Robert Thorne's Egyptian style, a thinner style of Egyptian called Iconic, another altered version of Egyptian called Clarendon, and many more. In addition, decoration was added to letters such as thin shadings around the letters, making them three-dimensional, shadings in letters, designs, etc.
As soon as I finished this section of the chapter, I started to look around my room and my house for all the labels and the types of fonts and shadings that were used. From various chip bags, cereal boxes, medicines, magazines, video game covers, book covers, all having different logos consisting of different style fonts and sizes. Call me dumb, but I never took into account that the design of letters on logos and labels fell under the category of graphic design. Because of this I look at letters, whether on billboards, company logos, or on my favorite cereal, differently now. It's interesting what started as the regular alphabet expanded to it having unique designs, decorations, shadings, being thin or thick. I have a better understanding of where some of the name of certain fonts came from and that letters even have their own history.
The incorporation of this type of design is still being used today. If all letters on advertisements, titles, labels, covers were all the same, there would be no unique appeal to the masses. I can only assume the reason why typefounders created different designs and layouts for letters was to stand out from everyone else. To market a service or product, and also following a certain theme. For example, the font design on the title of video game covers seem to correlate with the theme of a game: A game setting in the medieval era would have a font design related to that setting, a horror/survival game would have the font design in relation to it's genre, or a puzzle game having its title reflect the story of the game. Even though people say "don't judge a book by it's cover," some fonts on the covers of books are pretty enticing: shiny letters that bulge out a little further than the cover itself, uniquely designed like the children's book Goosebumps, and blocky-type ones as well. It seems that originality is a key factor from the origins of typography and companies are still recycling old ones, as well as making new ones.
*I'm showing these images that I mentioned for the font design, not for the images.
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