Type: Research

"write a page or so (not including images) about this recurring typographic tendency or larger trend you observe from your research. how would you describe it? what are its traits? where did it begin? where does it appear? who’s doing it? why is it important?"

Where I feel this typography had started was with bitmap fonts, which most bitmap fonts are made up of a modular form or grid base. In any case this typography was a driven form for the computer screen because each font was and still is made of pixels. As a person would need a larger font for the screen the pixels of the font would expand and alter to the form. It is amazing to see the difference of where computers started, when computers dealt with a limited storage space and slow speeds, and the process of analog was key for fonts because at the time it was too expensive to render some complex font. As a couple of decades pasting, the font would render fast because the prices of storage and speed came down.

As for how I would describe bitmap fonts, they are extremely fast and simple to render depending on the type of grid system being used. This simple render could become more complex with the simple of altering the simplistic grid form. I feel like it has been around for so long that there are times people forget the beginning of fonts and how they have been used and changed throughout time. Which gets to my next part of my research dealt with grid structures.

With the typographic grid, it has a two-dimensional structure made up of a series of vertical and horizontal axes. It is usually serves as a way for designers to organize image and text. Before the raise in movable type and printing, the grid was based off of optimal proportions for handwritten text on a page, it was also known as the ‘Villard diagram’ and used since he medieval times. As for the evolution of the modern grid, designers such as Emil Ruder and Josef Muller-Brockman questioned the conventions of a layout. They began to come up with a more flexible method to achieve coherency in organizing a layout.

The grid was very important for the Swiss in modernism because they embraced the grid structures with the use of white space as the active element in communication. There is one person that pushed the boundaries of the grid, which was Wolfgang Weingart. He pushed it to the manner of typography becoming more expressive. Weingart made his work seem like it was free but yet controlled in the manner that he embraced the experimental aspect.