Typographic Marks Unknown II: Ligatures & Blockquotes!

• September 21, 2010
  17 Comments // Typography

Much like the origins of the spoken word, those of the written are often forgotten.

And the marks that make up those words? Mostly never thought about. This can also be said of the question mark, the exclamation point, quote marks and the beautiful, beautiful ligature. Turns out their history is pretty interesting.

In September 08 I wrote an article on a small collection of typographic marks that had interesting histories, weren’t often seen in use or were often abused in their applications. It was a lot of fun and I wanted to give it another go.

But rather than have a look at a few of the lesser-known marks we use like I did with the previous article, I thought I’d go for the exact opposite — have a look at a couple of marks we all know about and use.

The Question Mark

Latin for question, quaestiō may be where the origin of the Question Mark can be found.

Whenever our Latin writing friends wanted to indicate a question or query, they would add quaestiō to the end of the sentence.

Lacking a sense of elegance, and not to mention taking up quite a bit of space, quaestiō was abbreviated to QO. This worked wonders for the scribes as their jobs became a little easier and they could produce texts quicker and have more space to work with.

But for some, QO seemed like a word with missing letters. To counter this, the O would be placed beneath the Q, rather than next to it — a clever little move that turned QO from an abbreviated word, to a glyph unto its self.

Being that this was now a sort of symbol that was always drawn by hand, the evolution of it to the question mark we know today is fairly evident (and pretty damn cool).

Borrowed from Wikipedia.

Blackletter

• May 11, 2009
  8 Comments // 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 which the darkness of the characters
over-powers the whiteness of the page
—Steven Heller—

A better opening than this elegant description of the oldest of fonts, I cannot give. So let’s forge ahead.

Carolingian Minuscule

As the class of intellects grew in Europe around the 8th century, a standard script was developed in the hope to have the Roman alphabet more readable and the forms and accents the letters bore be less dependent on the region in which the text was written. If it was written on one side of the country, it had to be read on the other.

This script, on which the earlier forms of blackletter was based, was a beautiful culmination of Latin, Greek, Irish and English scripts used for the religious texts of monasteries. The script became known as Carolingian Minuscule.

Carolingian Minuscule was developed at the request of the Emperor Charlenmange, to be used throughout his land, which included Western and Central Europe. While illiterate himself, he held a love of letters and realised that a unified writing system that would aid in literacy across his empire would be beneficial to its survival and growth.

With its ease-of-understanding for those newly-literate, use spread across universities and through the boom of literature that was spilling forth. In the original form developed under the emperor, the script’s letter were wide, and large documents were labour-intensive to produce. The script evolved over time and a few hundred years after its initial development, it found its place as the father of blackletter. The letters became smaller, thinner and the script had less of a cursive flare to it.

Ironically, the life this script lead ended with characteristics that were deliberately avoided during its inception.

The purpose of Carolingian Minuscule, above all else, was legibility. It was the first script in which a clear difference between capitals and lowercase letter-forms, as well as one of the first in which a strong space between words, was required.

Real World Grunge Type

• April 13, 2009
  12 Comments // Typography

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.

In theory, grunge fonts are lovely things, aren’t they?

They can be used to help give a feeling of tangibility—this piece of text, these words and their message have gone through hell to meet us. Through their beaten but still standing shapes they give a sense of longevity, all while having an air of the modern to them.

The real charm of these cracked letters is a result of our ever refined culture—the computer affords the designer the ability to make all the lines straight, all the circles perfect. Yet here are these forms that aren’t clean and neat and shiny. They serve as a break from our gloss screens and polished metal. They’re almost organic in a sense.

Or at least that’s their goal – to look as if they exist outside of the realm of pixels and vectors. If the computer makes things perfect, the real world gives it character. And this is what grunge fonts try to achieve – a sense of character and charm.

Too bad that this is almost never truly the case.

The Typographic Scale

• December 17, 2008
  14 Comments // Typography

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.

In its infancy, typesetting was much less an avenue for creative expression than it is today. That isn’t to say there was no beauty in the work done, it was more a case of limitations of technology. Which is an odd thing to say, as it was because of this technology that the rules could exist in such a defined manner. The typesetting was deliberately strict because it was now possible for it to be so. When our letters went from being written by scribes to being moved by the typesetter, the creativity in the hand-crafting turned into an element to be held by a different group of hands.

The Typographic Scale

With this new ability to set size, spacing and layout in stone (or
metal), it is no surprise that some habits became ruling and some rules
became habit.

While we are now able to set our text size at whatever we please, in the time of the true font (metal type in one face at one size of one weight), a number of predefined sizes were the norm.

Typographic Marks Unknown

• September 18, 2008
  56 Comments // 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.

The Pilcrow

History of the Pilcrow

As with many elements of language today, it all started with Latin. While the pilcrow has evolved to resemble a backwards P, this is nothing more than incidental. In its early forms, the pilcrow was a C, a shorthand used for the Latin word capitulum, meaning chapter, mostly in a religious sense, which may be why it isn’t uncommon to see it in use in Biblical texts today.

Replacing another symbol, the paragraphos, to become the new mark representing a paraph—a new line of thought or break in text—it evolved over time through the natural development of handwriting. Initially starting as the C, a slash was drawn through it, perhaps to make it more noticeable, then a second slash was added, and through time the C went from being the vertical centre of the lines, to the top of them. All this ended in what is often now seen as a P backwards.

The evolution of the Pilcrow

Using the Pilcrow

Initially the pilcrow was used to separate blocks of text, rather than dividing them with space. While this is, of course, now the normal thing to do, it isn’t impossible to find modern text that do the same as what was originally intended, mostly in an effort to insert a little bit of flare or maybe to serve as a throwback to typesetting that may be seen as a little more classical. An example that is often cited is Eric Gill’s An Essay On Typography. It is also used by proofreaders to denote a paragraph that should be split, and also as a mark used to reference a specific paragraph is legal documents (an example is included in the Section Sign below).

While graphic designers, and especially those outside the field, would have no major need to think about using the pilcrow, it is worth noting that they can be a pleasure to design for our typographic friends.

Typography 8: 1987

• March 16, 2008
  One response // Typography

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.

Obviously any talk of how relevant and cutting edge this modern design is can be thrown out the window because of my delivery custodian, so don’t get on my case about it—actually, please do. It’ll be 20 years before my mailman gets your letters to me anyway, so do your worst, world! Do. Your. Worst.

***

Alright, now that I’ve had my iced-tea and a light snack, I feel a little better. A little calmer. So it was a little late, what’s the big deal? Not as if it was a kidney, and I can still do a nice little write up on this gem, can’t I?

When flipping through the pages of any publication from this time, especially an annual, I get an odd feeling of nostalgia. The work that fills the pages reminds of me of the television shows I watched as a kid. When you compare the work found in this book to, say, Typography 27, it’s easy to see whats changed, what’s the same and what was obviously done in a fit of the-kids-will-love-it.The most comforting thing I found was, what was well crafted design then has held up amazingly well now. Which gives one the hope that if you put the right amount of effort, thought and enough of your soul into a piece of work you do now, you and others will still look at it and smile in two-decades time.

Oohhh the colour!

Let us start with the colour. Oohhh the colour! Such calming colour! Looking at some of the work in this book, you’ll be easily forgiven for thinking there was a colour prohibition recently lifted on pastels. Soft blues, soft pinks, soft yellows and soft purples all come out to play, and what a night they have! They drunkenly dance upon the skin of type and shapes across the dance floor that is the page, in an uncommon display of divergence among brothers of letters and shapes. A single world may contain three to four colours, one per letter. Or a sentence may have each of its words a different colour, which I’m sure was all in an attempt (marketing? finance? client?) to make the job really pop.