History of Typography

1400’s: Guttenburg created the first lead-based movable type. The typeface, blackletter was dark, fairly practical, and intense, but not very legible.

1470: Nicolas Jenson created Roman Type, inspired by the text on ancient roman buildings. It was far more readable than blackletter, and caught on quickly.

1501: Aldus Manutius created italics – a way to fit more words onto a page, saving the printer money. Today, we use italics as a design detail or for emphasis when writing.

1734: William Caslon created a typeface that features straighter serifs and much more obvious contrasts between thin and bold strokes. Today, we call this type style ‘old style’.

1757: John Baskerville created what we now call Transitional type, a Roman-style type, with very sharp serifs and lots of drastic contrast between thick and thin lines.

1780: Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni created the first ‘modern’ Roman typefaces (Didot, and Bodoni). The contrasts were more extreme than ever before, and created a very cool, fresh look.

1815: Vincent Figgins created Egyptian, or Slab Serif – the first time a typeface had serifs that were squares or boxes.

1816: William Caslon IV created the first typeface without any serifs at all. It was widely rebuked at the time. This was the start of what we now consider Sans Serif typefaces. During this time, type exploded, and many, many variations were being created to accommodate advertising.

1920’s: Frederic Goudy became the world’s first full time type designer, developing numerous groundbreaking typefaces, such as Copperplate Gothic, Kennerly, and Goudy Old Style.

1931: Times New Roman was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, from Monotype, and Victor Lardent, from The Times's.

1957: Swiss designer Max Miedinger created Helvetica, the most loved typeface of our time. This was a return to minimalism, and many other simplistic typefaces such as Futura surfaced around this time period.

1982: Arial (also called Arial MT), a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts, was designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography. This is the default for Google Docs.

1994: Comic Sans MS, a sans-serif script typeface designed by Vincent Connare, is released by Microsoft Corporation.

2000: Hoefler & Co. released Gotham, designed by Tobias Frere-Jone.