Type Timeline
Baskerville 1757
In 1757 designed by John Baskerville as his reaction to improving the Caslon typeface Baskerville remains metaphoric of the transitional period [between the Old Style and Modern]. He practiced designing typefaces with higher contrast strokes and geometric letterforms which were less influenced by its more humanist cousin Caslon.
Baskerville’s ideologies were an influence to both Didot and Bodoni who lead the way to the modern type period.
Serif:
Didot 1783
Modern typefaces, characterized by consistently horizontal stress, flat and unbracketed serifs, and a high contrast between thin and thick strokes, were the final step in typography’s two-hundred-year journey away from calligraphy. In the late eighteenth century the style was perfected, and became forever associated with two typographic giants: in Parma, Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813), and in Paris, Firmin Didot (1764-1836). Didot was a member of the Parisian dynasty that dominated French type founding for two centuries, and he’s remembered today as the namesake of a series of Neoclassical typefaces that exquisitely captured the Modern style.
This typeface has many renditions done by many type designers, but the original is still only available in print form.
Palatino 1950
Named after 16th century Italian master of calligraphy Giambattista Palatino, Palatino is based on the humanist fonts of the Italian Renaissance, which mirror the letters formed by a broadnib pen; this gives a calligraphic grace. But where the Renaissance faces tend to use smaller letters with longer vertical lines (ascenders and descenders) with lighter strokes, Palatino has larger proportions, and is considered much easier to read.
Trajan Pro 1989
The inscription on the base of the Trajan column in Rome is an example of classic Roman letterforms, which reached their peak of refinement in the first century A.D. It is believed that the letters were first written with a brush, then carved into the stone. These forms provided the basis for this Adobe Originals typeface designed by Carol Twombly in 1989. Trajan is an elegant typeface well-suited for display work in books, magazines, posters, and billboards.
Minio Pro 1990
The Minion® design is an old-style serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach of Adobe Systems and was released in 1990 by Linotype. This typeface encapsulates the aesthetic appeal of the Renaissance and the exceptional readability of typefaces of the day. For this reason, Minion has proved to be a popular font for on-screen use.
Georgia 1996
Although inspired by the need for—and providing—clarity at low resolutions on the screen, Georgia is a typeface resonant with typographic personality. Even at small sizes the face exudes a sense of friendliness; a feeling of intimacy many would argue has been eroded from Times New Roman through overuse. This is as much testament to the skill of the typeface’s designer, Matthew Carter, as it is to any intrinsic quality of the face’s design, since the small pixel spaces of the screen can be a harrowing canvas for any type designer. In Georgia, Carter has successfully managed to create a typeface family which combines high legibility with character and charm. At high resolutions and larger sizes on screen, it’s evident that Georgia’s ancestory is essentially that of Didot and—most noticeably—of Scotch Roman. Carter acknowledges the influence of Richard Austin’s early nineteenth-century cut of Scotch Roman on the design of his letterforms. At the time he started Georgia he had been working on a new retail family called Miller, which is a version of Scotch Roman. Carter admits that he had always admired Scotch, particularly in its early forms as cut by Richard Austin for Bell and Miller. The influence of the Scotch model on Georgia is most clearly seen in the horizontal top serifs of the lowercase b, d, h, k and l, and by the flat top of the lowercase t, a typographic allusion to the typeface’s roots in Didot.
Marion 2006
Marion is a transitional font designed to be somewhat Century Schoolbookish with hammer-like attributes and french curve construction. In OpenType-savvy applications, you can access excessive swashes and logic bending ligatures: uprights only.
Athelas 2008
An attempt to go back towards the beauty of fine book printing, inspired in Britain’s literary classics. Athelas takes full advantage of the typographic silence, that white space in the margins, between the columns, the lines, the words, the letter shapes and finally, within the characters themselves. It is a typeface with open counters, elegant curves and graceful serifs.
Fluid shapes in its Roman variants meet their counterpart in a more angular italic. Athelas also takes advantage of the great advances and technical developments made in offset printing. Athelas shows its best side in finely crafted book editions and good printing conditions.
It has a large character set that covers most of the languages that use Latin script. Although inspired in British literature, this typeface respects the cultural values behind different languages, where diacritic marks have an utterly important role.
Athelas was part of the Tipos Latinos exhibition 2006, and was selected as winner of the Granshan competition 2008 in the text type category.
