Typography, for our purposes here in this article, is defined as the art and procedures for presenting words in a form that can be read by many people. Typography is a media and the visual part of a communications system. There's a very long history of typography stretching back thousands of years. Our modern typographic tradition is more than 500 years old. But typography keeps changing, especially in today's fast changing technological world. In the past century and a half we have seen numerous technologies that have forced us to reinvent our concepts of typography both by freeing us from older limitations and at the same time imposing new ones. It is a process that will continue for many more years as we struggle with our basic objectives of communicating information in whatever form happens to be in use at that time.
The latest technological development to radically change the nature of typography is the development of the World Wide Web (web for short). Some of the old technological limitations of the past have been eliminated opening up new opportunities for creative expression. But some new limitations have been added that can frustrate our efforts at typographic expression. The result is a new typography that we must struggle to understand for that is what we face for imaging problems today. We cannot rely on yesterday's typographic concepts for they are the result of rationalizing yesterday's technologies and problems. The result was yesterday's solutions. Today's problems are different and that requires a new set of concepts that will help us rationalize today's typographic problems and also help us develop today's solutions. Typography has to be reevaluated in the light of what the web brings us.
Historical context
In the past, typography developed as a direct result of the technology of the time. Perhaps it would be best to take a quick look at some of the major developments and circumstances that caused typographical development. We start our discussion with Gutenberg's important development of movable type. This giant leap in technology gave us a system of assembling type that we use to this day.
Gutenberg's metal type came with limitations but considering the technology of the time, none of them could be perceived as serious. After all, movable type was better than no type! Letterpress printing, the main process of printing to use the movable blocks of metal type, placed many limitations on typography. First, the design of the type was a part of physical blocks of type metal and couldn't be adjusted, modified, or altered in any way possible. All you could do, Gutenberg's main contribution, was to assemble the blocks in any combination you needed. Another characteristic was that the metal type would wear out or become damaged requiring replacement. Type was a product, a commodity that needed to be inventoried and managed.
Eventually, type was sold by specialized companies that would design and manufacture the type. Because of the high level of technical expertise and the expense of manufacture, it was very difficult for printers to create their own types. Type and typeface design became integrated into a single product and a single mentality. Even designers were unable to separate the two. And so it was, for literally hundreds of years.
With the development of automated type casting machines in the 19th century, the nature of typesetting changed. Linotypes brought the casting of type using brass matrix into the print shop. But the design and production of the matrix was still in the domain of the type manufacturers who employed type designers. Although printers and designers could now create an unlimited supply of type, the design of the typeface was still beyond their capability. This technological revolution allowed each printer to have an unlimited supply of fresh and brand new type for each job. This also eliminated the need to distribute the type back into the cases once the job was done eliminating a serious inventory problem.
With the development of photo composition, the type images moved from metal blocks to photographic film. Yet still, the design was integrated into the development of the film images. Could individual designers produce their own film masters? Not without a lot of knowledge of how the computerized typesetting system used the images and how the images had to be placed on the film. Instead of buying blocks of metal or even matrices that would cast them, designers now bought strips of film containing the master images of type. The control over the design was still beyond their capabilities.
As the digital revolution began, the first typographical application was to change the imaging system of computerized composition to digital yet retaining the same basic machinery. Using various technologies that solved the problem of transferring the mathematical formulas of the type to photographic paper ready for the rest of the printing process. Externally, designers now bought their type on computer disks. This amazing technology would more often baffle the designers who, now, couldn't even see an image on the disks let alone figure out how to create their own digital type. For those who could "break into" the system could only see computer code and not type images. How would one go about creating their own digital typefaces? The world could not get away from the proprietary hold that the manufacturers held over the design and distribution of type.
It was the desktop publishing revolution that made many changes to way we work with type and images. The system was actually designed as a way of generating images and obviously type was one of the most important of the images. The great leap in type technology is that the process of distribution of type was taken from the manufacturers of the type generating system and forever separated into a new category of typeface design and distribution. Distribute type not for a specific machine, but type that can be used in any desktop publishing imaging system. Collect them, mix them, do whatever you want with them!
It some respects, by freeing type from the specific machine (elimination of the proprietary system), we have cheapened type. The new desktop publishing revolution brought with it the mechanics for creating our own type. We have not had this power since Gutenberg's day when the first printers had to cast their own type. Programs were written to develop typefaces. Vector programs, such as Illustrator and Freehand, can actually help designers create the letter forms with a very high degree of precision. Designers now had the tools to create their own typeface designs.
Many designers eagerly began producing their own typeface designs. Anyone could do it! The first place they looked for inspiration was in the design of the old classics. Many took advantage of a loophole in the copyright laws that excluded typeface designs from being copyrightable. Anyone could easily use an existing typeface as a model for their own design; use it so closely that it would be almost impossible to tell the difference! With such ease of production the market of typefaces quickly flooded and, of course, the price dropped. Typefaces that used to cost hundreds for a few typefaces now were sold as collections of hundreds of typefaces for a few dollars! Almost overnight every desktop publisher could assemble a collection of hundreds of fonts and could use them in whatever way they pleased.
Type glut. That's what happened because we now went from a time when a designer would have access to only a few typefaces to use over and over to a time where a designer could easily be overwhelmed by the choices. Furthermore, today's desktop publishing system also gave us never-before-seen control over the individual font. We can do much with a single font to tailor it to our specific needs. Standard controls allow us to create expanded or condensed typefaces with a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts. Sizes became almost infinite because we could set them accurate to a few millionths of an inch! We now have incredible control over the typesetting process as never before.
Limitations of the press
But what happened? Well, reality set in. Although our computers have freed us from the limitations of the typesetting process and gave us freedom to design our own type, we have discovered that we are still bound by the limitations of the printing process. Type, for today's printing processes, can only exist as a sharp contrast break between image area and non-image. The image area must contain the printing ink (whatever color) and the non-image area is actually the paper surface that is not covered by ink. This is a requirement of today's printing process that has been with us even in the time of Gutenberg.
Because of these technical limitations, type cannot change. Sure, we had programs such as TypeStyler that would allow us to create interesting effects but the results still had to conform to the requirements of the printing process: solid inkable image area or leave it paper white for non-image areas. Pushing the limits, many designers explored creative typographic expression to try and bridge the two extremes. Type with blends and shadows have to be converted into halftones to conform to the press requirements. We began printing our type as halftones. Viewers looking closely could see the halftone dots. Print in color? Up to four sets of dots to create colorful effects but this brought into play more printing requirements, namely registration. It was difficult to make sure that all four of these colors would line up properly. If they didn't, the separate images would be out of register and the viewer would notice this instantly as a serious printing flaw. More subtle and less talked about, if the registration was "close" but not "perfect", the resulting image would appear somewhat blurred and the crispness the designer hoped for would be lost.
Although we were free to do what we wished with the type we were still bound by the printing process. That sure took a lot of fun out of the new desktop publishing revolution in typography. But new technological developments were about to change the nature of typography once again.
Web type
The World Wide Web required typography because type allows us to communicate ideas. We need the shapes of letters and a system of assembling them in order to make this (or any) media work. So it is logical that the concepts of typography were simply transferred to the web. Now this is when we really got into trouble!
What actually happened was that typography moved from being a printing technology to an entirely different media. Type was developed and perfected to serve the needs of the printing press as the output media for our typography. Change the output media and you obviously have to rethink how we apply typography.
But many people did not and as a result, much of the mentality we bring to web typography is actually print mentality because we have yet to learn how to rationalize this new media of web typography. There are some serious differences and they have to be understood and built into a new tradition of web typography. What about print? That's still the same and will be until we change the way we print. What has actually happened is that we now have two worlds of typography and they are not as easily interchangeable as one may think.
On the web we have a serious problem with resolution. Out image generating ability is severely limited and that has a lot of impact on the typeface designs. Print gives us much more control over the actual imaging with very high resolution and that resulted in greater flexibility in typeface design. But on the web that is gone and so is the huge choice of typeface design. That's a lot for a seasoned print designer to swallow. As a result of the lack of resolution, our favorite print typefaces cannot be imaged with the severe lack of imaging pixels. We can actually see the individual screen pixels that create the type and they stick out with incredible annoyance. Many times, type in the form of graphics, will actually create intermediate gray shaded pixels that reduce the harshness of the pixel edges. The results is often blurred type for it is now a technical challenge to create type that is not blurred. This has enormous impact on the design possibilities of our type with the result that many good typefaces must be abandoned because they cannot be made to produce visually pleasing type.
Blurred type, being the result of extremely low resolution and the designer's need to push the typographic system to its limits, brings out a basic functional requirement of type that the letterforms must be sufficiently contrasted from the background page. This is easy to do in print for the system is naturally set up to produce high contrast image. Further, it has been perfected over centuries with countless refinements. We can only imagine that the web will follow such course of refinement in the future allowing us to produce words that are sufficiently high in resolution to allow for precise letterform shapes (typeface designs) as well as minimizing any unnecessary degradation (blurring) just to make it work.
If it weren't bad enough that many of our favorite typefaces were taken away from us, it became further apparent that the typefaces that did work were assigned to us! We were told we could only use Times Roman, Helvetica, Ariel and little else. For technical reasons, this is it! Print designers haven't faced this limitation since the old days when they would have to ask the printer which typefaces they had in their cases of handset type or on their linotypes. We also have little control over the size of the type. We can assign HTML code to make some type larger or smaller, but no control over specific size.
It is a computerized world where the viewer exerts control over the typographic appearance of the type they read, it is a far cry from the days when the designer was in total control over every aspect of typography with the viewer only having the choice of either read or not read. It's a radically different typographic world where the reader participates in typography and today's type designers will have to respect this.
Web typography is a new experience for designers and for most, not a very pleasant one. For those skilled in the highly refined and perfected print world, web typography is filled with limitations and technological problems. Yet, it are these problems and their eventual solution, that will shape the very nature of web typography separate from the nature of print typography.
Web's promise of typographical freedom
But all is not bad. The imaging of web typography brings us a new advance that is far superior to print. Each imaging element, the screen pixel, is capable of up to 16.777 million different colors whereas print only had one. Full color type can be very interesting and the web makes it easy for designers to break away from may of the old fashioned ideas about type largely imposed by print's limitation of only one color of ink or paper white. We can do more with letterforms then ever before. This freedom can transfer into incredible design flexibility in our display type and other visual graphics that are typographic, pictorial or a combination of the two.
The blurring that can be a disaster in small sized type can help the viewer's eye transition from color to color as well as shape to shape. But the pixels of blur are actually shades of color within themselves and we are learning how to control and use them to our advantage in ways we could not do with print. New opportunities of viewing the basic twenty-six letterforms holds much opportunity for designers and almost unlimited expression. Special effects type, especially combined with pictorial images, can be much different than the print counterpart. It may even be so that many of tomorrow's capabilities will present challenges to bring the web typography effects to the more limited print media.
New shapes for our letterforms will be developed within the confines of web capabilities and limitations without the distraction of the print typographic world which really is so different it cannot be depended upon to solve our new imaging problems. Web typography will eventually have its own style and look complete with its own type design and assembly requirements.
It is hoped that future developments in computer technology will eliminate some of the serious limitations such as higher screen resolutions which should allow for the use of more than just a few typefaces. As the technology evolves so will web typography become more defined.
Conclusion: Changing nature of how we view typography
So what does all this mean? This article has strived to put a very brief history of typography into an entirely different perspective, one that is intended to show that print and web typography are basically different. True, we have spent a half millennium developing the art and technology of typography but it is only now that we must realize that web typography is not just an extension of the old print media, it is something new. With an understanding of the limits and possibilities of this new web media, we are reinventing type today by developing a new concept of typography especially for the web.
Nor are we replacing the old print media and it's supporting typography, or even altering it by developments in the new web typography. We must recognize that web typography is a different media and that requires a new typography. Nothing in the old print typography will change as a result of these new developments. There is, however, possibilities that some exciting development in web typography will find its way into the old print typography having an impact to expand that media. It will simply be the existence of an abundance of new ideas, some of which may be useful to help in the continuing development of print typography.
To reach this new media we must be prepared to put aside our long held beliefs of the old print typography. We must be prepared to explore this new media for what it requires of typography. As a result we then produce in our minds a new definition of web typography which will be somewhat different. Our last task is to be able to hold both clear and separate in our minds as we pursue our craft of typography. We must be careful to watch the developments in either branch and readily upgrade our skills, ideas, knowledge and procedures.
Will the two separate typographies merge together to form a single concept? They may, in the future, but for now they are significantly different enough that warrants separation of their respective concepts. Will there be enough concepts common to both that we may then find it more convenient to simply list the differences? This may be a good way to help us keep our concepts of typography, be it web or print, organized and as up to date as possible. But make sure that the commonalties are thus and make sure there is nothing lost in a process of averaging or generalizing simply for the purpose of finding common ground. Respect for the differences in the two media is very important at this time.
Typography, as we have seen, is not merely a single simple typography. Beneath all this discussion are two separate typographies forcing us to look at something we have lost sight of or have taken for granted so long that we consider it obvious. Typography itself must be reexamined and redefined. The underlying concepts of typography as a communications system and any objectives this implies must be seen in two separate ways, one for print and another for web. It is the basic foundation of typography that is common to both and we must rediscover this. Avoid confusing the next level of understanding, the actual practice of typography as being the real foundation for it is not. For the actual practice of one media will confuse the basic concepts of a different media and its newly developing practices. Today's typography is different and today's designer must understand both typographies in order to successfully recognize and follow the concepts that are common to both.
