To quote Ellen Lupton,
from her book Thinking with Type, ???Typography is what language looks like.??? Language has
always been symbolic, although the origins of such symbols (of certain letterforms relating
to, for example, animals) has largely been lost in written English; instead, we now have
rather more abstract symbols designed for repetition on the page or screen.
However, from the early calligraphy that was created by hand, through the movable type
(invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg during the 15th century) that enabled massproduction
printing via molded letterform casts, to the most advanced desktop-publishing
software available today, the ultimate aim of type has been one of record and information
provision. In other words, type itself is important from a design standpoint because it
needs to record whatever information is being written about, and that information needs
to be easily retrievable by anyone who wants to understand it.
Like all aspects of design, typography has massively evolved over the years, particularly
over the past couple of decades, where computers have enabled designers to more rapidly
experiment with lettering. Despite this, many conventions formed much earlier still have a
part to play:
Myriad fonts exist, and each one has a different look, and therefore a different
???feel;??? you need to choose the most appropriate one for your purpose. (This is further
complicated by there being only a certain number of web-safe fonts, as you??™ll
see later.
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