The Human’s Type — Part 1
Part 1 of mini-series about typography and humankind: evolutions, historical events, brief stories and challenges.
Why speaking of type and fonts now?
“Typography is what language looks like” — Ellen Lupton
As an introvert and dyslexic person with a desperate need of communicating with people, ironically, I always felt empowered by the printed word. The liberating fresh air of spacing, the geometric stability, or the sudden slops, curls were and are a catalyst experience for me. How few lines, curves express an instant of reading that much or even disappear through the imagination of context?
My journey with design starts very early, even before realising what design is or before having a computer. It begins with some of my father’s Helvetica Stencil: they were so captivating; applying the stencil itself is a mindfulness experience, and the outcome is a blank sheet turned in a spoken language.
Type brings us together and is where my story begins, just like many others.
We start with a brief timeline of some of the events that entwined this long and beautiful journey.
1400, Venice — humanist writers reject Gothic scripts favouring “Lettera Antica”, finally, Rinascimento could be printed.
1924, Germany — Paul Renner designed the “today and tomorrow” typeface for publisher Jakob Hegner. Renner releases Futura in 1927.
A few years later, the Nazism Party forced Renner to relocate to Switzerland due to his modernist views.
1936, Budapest — Surgeons operate on grieving 17years old who swallowed the Letter Type stating the name of his passed away loved one.
1941, Germany — The Nazism Party informed the country to use only Germanic fonts. The notice used modernist Futura font.
1969, The Moon — NASA successfully lands the first human being on the Moon, the Landing Plaque, embodied in Futura and moonstone, states: “We came in peace for all mankind”.
1984, Cupertino — Apple unveiled the Macintosh, “The computer for the rest of us”. The first desktop computer to have nine typefaces and seven styles for each typeface.
2005, Stanford University — A fifty-year-old Steve Jobs spoke to new graduates when he dropped out from college and used his free time to study calligraphy and typefaces.
“It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture. I found it fascinating.”
2006, Internet — Oliver Reichenstein crashes the web, stating that “Web Design is 95% Typography”.
2008, Worldwide — Firefox and Safari implement CSS @font-face rule, making Web Typography accessible and consistent to the most.
2009, Worldwide — TypeKit (now Adobe Fonts) offers access to a catalogue of web types upon subscription under a single licensing agreement.
2010, Worldwide — Google Fonts is born, a free and open-source of font families.
2012, Worldwide — Google public release of Noto, a typeface for the world. Noto means, “I write, I mark, I note” in Latin.
The name is also short for “no tofu”, as the project aims to eliminate ‘tofu’: blank rectangles that are displayed when no font is available.
Today Noto covers more than 1000 languages and 150 writing systems.
