Lecture 4 - Study of type -The Sequel

Production and Distribution

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For our second instalment on type, we looked into the production side. We discussed people such as Max Miedinger a Swiss typographer and designer the creator of the typeface Helvetica, which happens to be my favourite typeface and the typeface I'm using to write this post with. Helvetica was the first clean, open to interpretation type, giving the audience a chance to focus more on the function of the type then the appearance. In 1982 the type face Arial was introduced and there was a lot of controversy about how similar Helvetica and Arial are. But I'm not going to give me view on that.

In 1990 there was a shift in the world of design, the birth of the new generation of type began, this was due to the availability of the mac computers, these aloud the public to create there own digital art work, which in turn lead to the mass production of different typefaces.  Another drastic change in the following years was the introduction of the internet. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee who earns no profit from creating such an important thing in todays culture. In turn this brought us Internet Explorer created by Bill Gates in 1995,which only had the use of 8 typefaces, which included Arial, and Comic Sans to name a few. Due to the creation of the internet there was less call to make well phone calls, and more of a demand for typefaces, due to online chat, or text messages. This lead to the creation of the emojicons, which almost a complete circle in the world, as we have returned to using symbols to communicate instead of using text.

I found this lecture to be extremely interesting, learning about something that I've used almost everyday with out knowing about its vast history was something I found to be really enjoyable.