U N I T 2 CHOOSING AND USING TYPE In this Unit you will be introduced to the essential vocabulary concerning graphic design. You have already met some of this in Unit 1. This Unit will deal with the principles of logo design, the history of design and design terms. A. TYPOGRAPHY: A BRIEF OVERVIEW Par. 1 Many centuries before graphic design became a professional practice during the late 19th century, typography played an important role in European culture. Although Johann Gutenberg did not himself invent the printing press, oil-based inks or cast metal type, he seems to have been the first person in Europe to have combined these tools successfully to publish books. Around 1455, he published his famous Bible. It was set in a typeset variant of gothic script called Textura, a name that refers to the dense web of spiky letterforms that fill the completed page, meaning that the letters strongly resembled the calligraphic writing of medieval scribes. Textura was an example of blackletter type. Both columns of text are justified left and right. Par. 2 While Gutenberg had printed his works in blackletter, a new style, Roman letters, emerged in Venice in the 1460s. Around 1500, a Venetian humanist and printer, Aldus Manutius, published the first work in Roman Italic type. Manutius used stylish letters with, for example, the midbar of the F elongated, for aesthetic purposes. The volume in which he uses this for the first time is the volume De Aetna by the Italian poet Pietro Bembo. This style is the basis for a group of roman types called Old Style. Later, in Italy, Gianbattista Bodoni of Parma introduced the Modern Style influenced by the French printer, Firmin Didot. The publication of his Manuale Tipografico represented the culmination of the classic period of typography which had begun in the 15th century. The development of Roman type is directly linked to the central role that printing played in the Renaissance. Par. 3 Over the centuries, the art of displaying the written word has become a sophisticated area of graphic design. Each letter of a word can be viewed as an illustration. It is up to the designer to choose the most appealing and legible letter forms. Therefore, the graphic designer uses them as both a means of communication and as images in themselves which form shapes that can be manipulated. Knowing the structure of letterforms is essential to understand how typefaces differ. The typeface is also called lettering . The x-height represents the body of the type and the ascenders and descenders are those parts that extend above or below the x-height on lower case letters. GLOSSARY ascender: an ascending letter; a part or stroke projecting above letters such as x . to be up to: to depend on. blackletter: a heavy early style of type. cast metal type: a line of type cast as a single piece of metal. descender: a descending letter; a part or stroke projecting below 202 letters such as x . ink: coloured fluid used in writing. letterform: the graphic form of a letter. lettering: the action of writing letters. lower case letter: of a particular form often different and smaller than its corresponding capital letter. midbar: midstroke of a letter. shape: form. spiky: sharp-pointed. tool: instrument. typeface: the height of the letter x . x-height: corpus size; it refers to the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lower-case letters in a typeface.