How Claude Garamond Changed the Type Industry
Claude Garamond, a French publisher and punch cutter from Paris, “created visual forms that were embraced for two hundred years.” His work not only paved the way for other punch cutters but he altered the industry.
“As the first type designer and punch-cutter to sell his punches in retail to other printers, Garamond led on the establishment of the trend for many other typographers, punch-cutters, printers, and publishers to make the same sales in retail, which helped spread new typefaces all around. He was one of the leading type designers of his time” (History Graphic Design).
“Around 1530 Garamond established an independent type foundry to sell cast type ready to distribute into the compositor’s case. This was a first step away from the all-in-one “scholar-publisher-typefounder-printer-bookseller” model that had begun in Mainz some eighty years earlier” (Meggs and Purvis).
His work was so clean there was greater harmony of design between capital, lowercase, and italics letters in a closer and tighter space. It allowed printers to print books with extraordinary legibility during the sixteenth century. He is also credited with playing a major role in eliminating Gothic styles from compositors’ cases all over Europe, except in Germany.
