rickvanlieshout.com/content/posts/test/index.md

---
title: Test blog
date: "1970-01-01T00:00:00"
template: "post"
draft: false
slug: "humane-typography-in-the-digital-age"
category: "Typography"
tags:
  - "Design"
  - "Typography"
  - "Web Development"
description: "An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill takes the reader back to the year 1930. The year when a conflict between two worlds came to its term. The machines of the industrial world finally took over the handicrafts."
socialImage: "/media/42-line-bible.jpg"
---

- [The first transition](#the-first-transition)
- [The digital age](#the-digital-age)
- [Loss of humanity through transitions](#loss-of-humanity-through-transitions)
- [Chasing perfection](#chasing-perfection)

An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill takes the reader back to the year 1930. The year when a conflict between two worlds came to its term. The machines of the industrial world finally took over the handicrafts.

The typography of this industrial age was no longer handcrafted. Mass production and profit became more important. Quantity mattered more than the quality. The books and printed works in general lost a part of its humanity. The typefaces were not produced by craftsmen anymore. It was the machines printing and tying the books together now. The craftsmen had to let go of their craft and became a cog in the process. An extension of the industrial machine.

But the victory of the industrialism didn’t mean that the craftsmen were completely extinct. The two worlds continued to coexist independently. Each recognising the good in the other — the power of industrialism and the humanity of craftsmanship. This was the second transition that would strip typography of a part of its humanity. We have to go 500 years back in time to meet the first one.

## The first transition

A similar conflict emerged after the invention of the first printing press in Europe. Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type and used it to produce different compositions. His workshop could print up to 240 impressions per hour. Until then, the books were being copied by hand. All the books were handwritten and decorated with hand drawn ornaments and figures. A process of copying a book was long but each book, even a copy, was a work of art.

The first printed books were, at first, perceived as inferior to the handwritten ones. They were smaller and cheaper to produce. Movable type provided the printers with flexibility that allowed them to print books in languages other than Latin. Gill describes the transition to industrialism as something that people needed and wanted. Something similar happened after the first printed books emerged. People wanted books in a language they understood and they wanted books they could take with them. They were hungry for knowledge and printed books satisfied this hunger.

![42-line-bible.jpg](/media/42-line-bible.jpg)

_The 42–Line Bible, printed by Gutenberg._

But, through this transition, the book lost a large part of its humanity. The machine took over most of the process but craftsmanship was still a part of it. The typefaces were cut manually by the first punch cutters. The paper was made by hand. The illustrations and ornaments were still being hand drawn. These were the remains of the craftsmanship that went almost extinct in the times of Eric Gill.

## The digital age

The first transition took away a large part of humanity from written communication. Industrialisation, the second transition described by Eric Gill, took away most of what was left. But it’s the third transition that stripped it naked. Typefaces are faceless these days. They’re just fonts on our computers. Hardly anyone knows their stories. Hardly anyone cares. Flicking through thousands of typefaces and finding the “right one” is a matter of minutes.

> In the new computer age the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.
>
> — Massimo Vignelli

Typography is not about typefaces. It’s not about what looks best, it’s about what feels right. What communicates the message best. Typography, in its essence, is about the message. “Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts.”, as El Lissitzky, a famous Russian typographer, put it.

## Loss of humanity through transitions

Each transition took away a part of humanity from written language. Handwritten books being the most humane form and the digital typefaces being the least. Overuse of Helvetica is a good example. Messages are being told in a typeface just because it’s a safe option. It’s always there. Everyone knows it but yet, nobody knows it. Stop someone on the street and ask him what Helvetica is? Ask a designer the same question. Ask him where it came from, when, why and who designed it. Most of them will fail to answer these questions. Most of them used it in their precious projects but they still don’t spot it in the street.

<figure>
	<blockquote>
		<p>Knowledge of the quality of a typeface is of the greatest importance for the functional, aesthetic and psychological effect.</p>
		<footer>
			<cite>— Josef Mueller-Brockmann</cite>
		</footer>
	</blockquote>
</figure>

Typefaces don’t look handmade these days. And that’s all right. They don’t have to. Industrialism took that away from them and we’re fine with it. We’ve traded that part of humanity for a process that produces more books that are easier to read. That can’t be bad. And it isn’t.

> Humane typography will often be comparatively rough and even uncouth; but while a certain uncouthness does not seriously matter in humane works, uncouthness has no excuse whatever in the productions of the machine.
>
> — Eric Gill

We’ve come close to “perfection” in the last five centuries. The letters are crisp and without rough edges. We print our compositions with high–precision printers on a high quality, machine made paper.

![type-through-time.jpg](/media/type-through-time.jpg)

_Type through 5 centuries._

We lost a part of ourselves because of this chase after perfection. We forgot about the craftsmanship along the way. And the worst part is that we don’t care. The transition to the digital age made that clear. We choose typefaces like clueless zombies. There’s no meaning in our work. Type sizes, leading, margins… It’s all just a few clicks or lines of code. The message isn’t important anymore. There’s no more “why” behind the “what”.

## Chasing perfection

Human beings aren’t perfect. Perfection is something that will always elude us. There will always be a small part of humanity in everything we do. No matter how small that part, we should make sure that it transcends the limits of the medium. We have to think about the message first. What typeface should we use and why? Does the typeface match the message and what we want to communicate with it? What will be the leading and why? Will there be more typefaces in our design? On what ground will they be combined? What makes our design unique and why? This is the part of humanity that is left in typography. It might be the last part. Are we really going to give it up?

_Originally published by [Matej Latin](http://matejlatin.co.uk/) on [Medium](https://medium.com/design-notes/humane-typography-in-the-digital-age-9bd5c16199bd?ref=webdesignernews.com#.lygo82z0x)._

<h1>Second post</h1>
<hr />

German inventor Johannes Gutenberg developed a method of movable type and used it to create one of the western world’s first major printed books, the “Forty–Two–Line” Bible.

**Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg** (c. 1398 – 1468) was a German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.

<figure class="float-right" style="width: 240px">
	<img src="/media/gutenberg.jpg" alt="Gutenberg">
	<figcaption>Johannes Gutenberg</figcaption>
</figure>

With his invention of the printing press, Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing, in around 1439. Among his many contributions to printing are: the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink; and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period. His truly epochal invention was the combination of these elements into a practical system that allowed the mass production of printed books and was economically viable for printers and readers alike. Gutenberg's method for making type is traditionally considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type. The alloy was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that melted at a relatively low temperature for faster and more economical casting, cast well, and created a durable type.

In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information — including revolutionary ideas — transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its people led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment of Latin's status as lingua franca. In the 19th century, the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by steam-powered rotary presses allowed printing on an industrial scale, while Western-style printing was adopted all over the world, becoming practically the sole medium for modern bulk printing.

The use of movable type was a marked improvement on the handwritten manuscript, which was the existing method of book production in Europe, and upon woodblock printing, and revolutionized European book-making. Gutenberg's printing technology spread rapidly throughout Europe and later the world.

His major work, the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible), has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality.

## Printing Press

Around 1439, Gutenberg was involved in a financial misadventure making polished metal mirrors (which were believed to capture holy light from religious relics) for sale to pilgrims to Aachen: in 1439 the city was planning to exhibit its collection of relics from Emperor Charlemagne but the event was delayed by one year due to a severe flood and the capital already spent could not be repaid. When the question of satisfying the investors came up, Gutenberg is said to have promised to share a “secret”. It has been widely speculated that this secret may have been the idea of printing with movable type. Also around 1439–1440, the Dutch Laurens Janszoon Coster came up with the idea of printing. Legend has it that the idea came to him “like a ray of light”.

<figure class="float-left" style="width: 240px">
	<img src="/media/printing-press.jpg" alt="Early Printing Press">
	<figcaption>Early wooden printing press as depicted in 1568.</figcaption>
</figure>

Until at least 1444 he lived in Strasbourg, most likely in the St. Arbogast parish. It was in Strasbourg in 1440 that Gutenberg is said to have perfected and unveiled the secret of printing based on his research, mysteriously entitled Kunst und Aventur (art and enterprise). It is not clear what work he was engaged in, or whether some early trials with printing from movable type may have been conducted there. After this, there is a gap of four years in the record. In 1448, he was back in Mainz, where he took out a loan from his brother-in-law Arnold Gelthus, quite possibly for a printing press or related paraphernalia. By this date, Gutenberg may have been familiar with intaglio printing; it is claimed that he had worked on copper engravings with an artist known as the Master of Playing Cards.

By 1450, the press was in operation, and a German poem had been printed, possibly the first item to be printed there. Gutenberg was able to convince the wealthy moneylender Johann Fust for a loan of 800 guilders. Peter Schöffer, who became Fust’s son-in-law, also joined the enterprise. Schöffer had worked as a scribe in Paris and is believed to have designed some of the first typefaces.

<figure>
	<blockquote>
		<p>All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true. I have not seen complete Bibles but only a number of quires of various books of the Bible. The script was very neat and legible, not at all difficult to follow—your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses.</p>
		<footer>
			<cite>—Future pope Pius II in a letter to Cardinal Carvajal, March 1455</cite>
		</footer>
	</blockquote>
</figure>

Gutenberg's workshop was set up at Hof Humbrecht, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there may have been two presses, one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454–55.

In 1455 Gutenberg completed his 42-line Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 copies were printed, most on paper and some on vellum.

## Court Case

Some time in 1456, there was a dispute between Gutenberg and Fust, and Fust demanded his money back, accusing Gutenberg of misusing the funds. Meanwhile the expenses of the Bible project had proliferated, and Gutenberg's debt now exceeded 20,000 guilders. Fust sued at the archbishop's court. A November 1455 legal document records that there was a partnership for a "project of the books," the funds for which Gutenberg had used for other purposes, according to Fust. The court decided in favor of Fust, giving him control over the Bible printing workshop and half of all printed Bibles.

Thus Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt, but it appears he retained (or re-started) a small printing shop, and participated in the printing of a Bible in the town of Bamberg around 1459, for which he seems at least to have supplied the type. But since his printed books never carry his name or a date, it is difficult to be certain, and there is consequently a considerable scholarly debate on this subject. It is also possible that the large Catholicon dictionary, 300 copies of 754 pages, printed in Mainz in 1460, may have been executed in his workshop.

Meanwhile, the Fust–Schöffer shop was the first in Europe to bring out a book with the printer's name and date, the Mainz Psalter of August 1457, and while proudly proclaiming the mechanical process by which it had been produced, it made no mention of Gutenberg.

## Later Life

In 1462, during a conflict between two archbishops, Mainz was sacked by archbishop Adolph von Nassau, and Gutenberg was exiled. An old man by now, he moved to Eltville where he may have initiated and supervised a new printing press belonging to the brothers Bechtermünze.

In January 1465, Gutenberg's achievements were recognized and he was given the title Hofmann (gentleman of the court) by von Nassau. This honor included a stipend, an annual court outfit, as well as 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine tax-free. It is believed he may have moved back to Mainz around this time, but this is not certain.

---

Gutenberg died in 1468 and was buried in the Franciscan church at Mainz, his contributions largely unknown. This church and the cemetery were later destroyed, and Gutenberg's grave is now lost.

In 1504, he was mentioned as the inventor of typography in a book by Professor Ivo Wittig. It was not until 1567 that the first portrait of Gutenberg, almost certainly an imaginary reconstruction, appeared in Heinrich Pantaleon's biography of famous Germans.

## Printing Method With Movable Type

Gutenberg's early printing process, and what tests he may have made with movable type, are not known in great detail. His later Bibles were printed in such a way as to have required large quantities of type, some estimates suggesting as many as 100,000 individual sorts. Setting each page would take, perhaps, half a day, and considering all the work in loading the press, inking the type, pulling the impressions, hanging up the sheets, distributing the type, etc., it is thought that the Gutenberg–Fust shop might have employed as many as 25 craftsmen.

![Movable metal type, and composing stick, descended from Gutenberg's press. Photo by Willi Heidelbach. Licensed under CC BY 2.5](/media/movable-type.jpg)

_Movable metal type, and composing stick, descended from Gutenberg's press. Photo by Willi Heidelbach. Licensed under CC BY 2.5_

Gutenberg's technique of making movable type remains unclear. In the following decades, punches and copper matrices became standardized in the rapidly disseminating printing presses across Europe. Whether Gutenberg used this sophisticated technique or a somewhat primitive version has been the subject of considerable debate.

In the standard process of making type, a hard metal punch (made by punchcutting, with the letter carved back to front) is hammered into a softer copper bar, creating a matrix. This is then placed into a hand-held mould and a piece of type, or "sort", is cast by filling the mould with molten type-metal; this cools almost at once, and the resulting piece of type can be removed from the mould. The matrix can be reused to create hundreds, or thousands, of identical sorts so that the same character appearing anywhere within the book will appear very uniform, giving rise, over time, to the development of distinct styles of typefaces or fonts. After casting, the sorts are arranged into type-cases, and used to make up pages which are inked and printed, a procedure which can be repeated hundreds, or thousands, of times. The sorts can be reused in any combination, earning the process the name of “movable type”.

The invention of the making of types with punch, matrix and mold has been widely attributed to Gutenberg. However, recent evidence suggests that Gutenberg's process was somewhat different. If he used the punch and matrix approach, all his letters should have been nearly identical, with some variations due to miscasting and inking. However, the type used in Gutenberg's earliest work shows other variations.

<figure>
	<blockquote>
		<p>It is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams… Through it, god will spread his word.</p>
		<footer>
			<cite>—Johannes Gutenberg</cite>
		</footer>
	</blockquote>
</figure>

In 2001, the physicist Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Princeton librarian Paul Needham, used digital scans of a Papal bull in the Scheide Library, Princeton, to carefully compare the same letters (types) appearing in different parts of the printed text. The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, suggested that the variations could not have come from either ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. While some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, suggested that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also appeared to reveal substructures in the type that could not arise from traditional punchcutting techniques. They hypothesized that the method may have involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in “cuneiform” style in a matrix made of some soft material, perhaps sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the matrix would need to be recreated to make each additional sort. This could explain the variations in the type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed images.

Thus, they feel that “the decisive factor for the birth of typography”, the use of reusable moulds for casting type, might have been a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggest that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s. Others have not accepted some or all of their suggestions, and have interpreted the evidence in other ways, and the truth of the matter remains very uncertain.

A 1568 history by Hadrianus Junius of Holland claims that the basic idea of the movable type came to Gutenberg from Laurens Janszoon Coster via Fust, who was apprenticed to Coster in the 1430s and may have brought some of his equipment from Haarlem to Mainz. While Coster appears to have experimented with moulds and castable metal type, there is no evidence that he had actually printed anything with this technology. He was an inventor and a goldsmith. However, there is one indirect supporter of the claim that Coster might be the inventor. The author of the Cologne Chronicle of 1499 quotes Ulrich Zell, the first printer of Cologne, that printing was performed in Mainz in 1450, but that some type of printing of lower quality had previously occurred in the Netherlands. However, the chronicle does not mention the name of Coster, while it actually credits Gutenberg as the "first inventor of printing" in the very same passage (fol. 312). The first securely dated book by Dutch printers is from 1471, and the Coster connection is today regarded as a mere legend.

The 19th century printer and typefounder Fournier Le Jeune suggested that Gutenberg might not have been using type cast with a reusable matrix, but possibly wooden types that were carved individually. A similar suggestion was made by Nash in 2004. This remains possible, albeit entirely unproven.

It has also been questioned whether Gutenberg used movable types at all. In 2004, Italian professor Bruno Fabbiani claimed that examination of the 42-line Bible revealed an overlapping of letters, suggesting that Gutenberg did not in fact use movable type (individual cast characters) but rather used whole plates made from a system somewhat like a modern typewriter, whereby the letters were stamped successively into the plate and then printed. However, most specialists regard the occasional overlapping of type as caused by paper movement over pieces of type of slightly unequal height.

<h1>Third post</h1>
<hr />

**Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique** senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu libero sit amet quam egestas semper. _Aenean ultricies mi vitae est._ Mauris placerat eleifend leo. Quisque sit amet est et sapien ullamcorper pharetra.

Vestibulum erat wisi, condimentum sed, commodo vitae, ornare sit amet, wisi. Aenean fermentum, elit eget tincidunt condimentum, eros ipsum rutrum orci, sagittis tempus lacus enim ac dui. [Donec non enim](#) in turpis pulvinar facilisis.

![Nulla faucibus vestibulum eros in tempus. Vestibulum tempor imperdiet velit nec dapibus](/media/cherry.jpg)

## Header Level 2

- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
- Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.

Donec non enim in turpis pulvinar facilisis. Ut felis. Praesent dapibus, neque id cursus faucibus, tortor neque egestas augue, eu vulputate magna eros eu erat. Aliquam erat volutpat.

<figure>
	<blockquote>
		<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus magna. Cras in mi at felis aliquet congue. Ut a est eget ligula molestie gravida. Curabitur massa. Donec eleifend, libero at sagittis mollis, tellus est malesuada tellus, at luctus turpis elit sit amet quam. Vivamus pretium ornare est.</p>
		<footer>
			<cite>— Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.</cite>
		</footer>
	</blockquote>
</figure>

### Header Level 3

- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
- Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu libero sit amet quam egestas semper. Aenean ultricies mi vitae est. Mauris placerat eleifend leo. Quisque sit amet est et sapien ullamcorper pharetra.

```css
#header h1 a {
  display: block;
  width: 300px;
  height: 80px;
}
```

Vestibulum erat wisi, condimentum sed, commodo vitae, ornare sit amet, wisi. Aenean fermentum, elit eget tincidunt condimentum, eros ipsum rutrum orci, sagittis tempus lacus enim ac dui. Donec non enim in turpis pulvinar facilisis. Ut felis. Praesent dapibus, neque id cursus faucibus, tortor neque egestas augue, eu vulputate magna eros eu erat. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nam dui mi, tincidunt quis, accumsan porttitor, facilisis luctus, metus.