Type

Words, sentences, and thoughts are pecked out on the keyboard, but how they are viewed relates the story.

Today there are millions of type fonts available for the taking. Weird shapes for expression, variations of old familiar styles, and readable favorites.

Type design used to be a painstaking effort to create. After the Stone Age, and the hot metal age with it’s limited range of characters and styles, came cold type or computer design.

Many fonts were copyrighted and their manufactures fought the new wave of designers creating new type fonts based on years of drawing on paper with ink and pen and t-squares and triangles and French curves.

Arial, Futura, Palatina, Century Schoolbook challenged names like Helvetica, Times Roman, and Bodoni, and even Goudy brought new styles using press type rub on letters. The variety increased by imagination and the ease of slight changes in the width or height or italic made a new font.

Techniques, such as kerning, baseline shift, or leading fell by the way as the ease of the computer moving and shifting type to the eye of the typist.

An entire industry was overcome by technology.