Summed up in one video
I really enjoyed watching this video by Struthless because of the way it connected the dots between various developments in the history of writing and symbols.
My favorite fun facts in this are:
- Before there was writing and fonts, there were tiny clay sculptures that represented different kinds of animals and items
- Black Letter, which is a font I’ve used in some of my art, was the very first font ever used on a printing press! I love it because it has a classic “Ren Faire” vibe, but I didn’t even realize that it isn’t a modern interpretation of “Medieval” writing, it was really a bridge between illuminated manuscripts and the printed word.
- Roman fonts with serifs have been in use for over 2,000 years
- Calson Egyptian was the first sans-serif font, designed in the early 1800s.
- The use of mix-matched fonts for individual letters that I typically associate with the Punk movement of 1970s Britain actually dates back to the Dadaist movement, which was a reaction to the chaos of World War I.
- Modern fonts like Helvetica after World War II represented a detachment from a tragic past and a look forward into the future. It was considered Utopian at the beginning, but became a bit corporate.
- Funky 1960s fonts were a throwback to Art Nouveau fonts (a similar thing I’ve noticed is that some psychedelic ’60s fashions were a throwback to the late Victorian and Edwardian periods in fashion)
- Paul Rand believed that graphic design had the potential to be a universal language based on simplicity and geometry
- Steve Jobs labeled typefaces “fonts” in the 1980s, and that terminology has stuck.
- Comic Sans was invented for a talking dog avatar on Microsoft computers in 1994
- To paraphrase Bender in “Futurama”, “If you pick your fonts right, no one will even notice them at all.”
- Fonts show how deep the desire to communicate goes– and you can see it everywhere.