Typography

Blackletter, or as it is often mistakenly called, Gothic or Old-English, is an all-encompassing term given to a range of fonts which started with Gutenberg's 42-Line Bible. It strongly maintained its roots in the calligraphic scripts and organic shapes of its ancestors-in-influence for the following 500 years as it remained in strong use.

In this feature-length article Grunge Type is looked at a little more thoroughly than most who employ such fonts would think to do. While there isn't anything wrong with type that has been beaten and broken, there is definitely an issue with most of the fonts that are put under this category. Let's have a look at how to do it well and how to give your headings real world grunge character.

A list of numbers that make it easier to set type. But why these numbers? What relationships do they hold with one another? Is there some mythical secret held by the casters of the fonts of old? Why is it that when you combine 8, 10, 14 and 36 points of height something beautiful happens? In an effort to better understand this list of numbers I did that which excites any warm-blooded designer – I played with typography.

There are many typographic marks which are familiar to most, but understood by few. Most of these glyphs have interesting histories and evolutions as they survived the beatings given to them through rushed handwriting of scribes and misuses through history. They now mostly live on our keyboards and in our software, and a few are used often, so it seems only fitting to know where they come from and how to correctly use them.

Oh man! Has he done it now! Neither rain, nor snow, nor death of the night, can keep him from his duty. Hogwash! Welcome to the horribly late review of the Type Directors Clubs' Typography 8, 1987.