I mean artistically. I'm not so interested about the technological aspect, which is pretty clear. More appealing would be the repercussion of technological values in the artistic development of type. And with today I'm actually considering the last eight years. Books worth naming that handle this topic are also welcome.
No worries, no paper researching here. Just curious :-)
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1.mega families
2.sans serifs with a calligraphic touch
Here is a piece I recently wrote on contextuality: http://ilovetypography.com/2011/04/01/engaging-contextuality/
An older piece on script fonts: http://www.shinntype.com/Writing/Scriptom.pdf
I would refer you to my review of Karloff for Typographica’s 2012 “Best of” (yet to be published) that addresses another technologically driven issue: parametrics, which has certainly become integrated into the font production workflow.
Speaking of Karloff, Peter Biľak’s essays at Typotheque are always very smart.
OpenType technology has created a trend towards multilingual and multi-script typeface design.
Sorry, nothing in print.
And probably a much wider potential market (=more overall sales worldwide)?
Functionality and profitability have been recurrent topics since I got engaged in typography. No doubt they'll stay in the foreground.
But:
That leaves us with what? A bunch of humanist sans-serifs, another bunch of Helvetica parasites, and a bigger bunch of brushy ornamental script fonts?
Is it just me or are we being too unenthusiastic over here? (Yes, perhaps it's just me.) I was hoping you'd give me proves of great artistic diversity in recent years. It is a naive idea... Do trends always restrict artistic diversity, or do they actually promote diversity but in a focalized branch?
My next (naive) question: Have trends really changed in the past twenty years? How fast do trends in typography change/are changing?
I just see cans of worms everywhere waiting to be opened. My idea of trend was the former, but design trends have always been influenced by the market demand, it's a feedback system, so I guess it is not much of a difference to talk about one or the other. For a trend to change you need both a change in the current designs and a change in demand tendencies. Its a necessarily slow evolution.
I believe this is false. It is the inability of font formats to store optical size data that leads to huge families. And I think the biggest movement over the last decade has been the internationalization of the democratization of type design, which swallows OT and any stylistic trend like it was krill.
And the way that digital media can handle hairline weights with ease.
Multi-weight families are particularly evident today, with so many sans and slab faces.
Eight weights are not unusual in sans faces, but serif styles (other than slab) rarely go beyond three or four.
However, cramming all the “expert” styles into one OpenType font has cut down on family size, as measured in fonts — just look at Adobe Garamond 20 years ago.
Similarly, cross-platform capability has reduced font family size, although adding webfonts has pushed it up again.
The other major current trend is what I would call anticipatory typography, i.e. typographic design that occurs without knowledge of the particular content to be typeset and that is implemented far from the direct control of the typographer. There are historical precedences for this, in the specification of house styles or series styles for publications, in newspaper design, but in those cases there was still direct involvement of, if not a typographer, then a typesetter at the point of implementation. Today, content is served to devices that need to display the text in adaptive ways without direct involvement of any human, of any person other than the reader who is able to say whether the results are good. This means that more of the knowledge of the experienced typographer and typesetter needs to be captured in the font and in the software.
What time scale are we measuring typographic trends in?
But you are right if you refine the distress to a fine detail.
So are things repeating themselves online, that happened a few years ago in print?
I agree with David on the superfamilies (big ones lately: Trivia and Breve come to mind. — who needs so many different fonts? Newspapers? How many Latin newspapers will there continue to be?)
And Parametric / Automated type design seem to be having a moment (again?).