Hello,
I realized recently that unlike many other types of creative endeavors (music, painting, content creation), type design has seen very little huge innovation in a long time. I don’t mean in term of technology, but rather in terms of the basic shapes of letters.
Besides serif and sans serif, most letters are instantly recognize able as themselves. I know that it isn’t a very good idea to make an unreadable font, but type design is a creative work as any other. Does anyone know of anything that would directly refute my thoughts are have any other thoughts on it?
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In recent centuries they have been dictated by rulers or government standards bodies.
Sometimes type designers have rebelled against this. The most notable case in recent history was when the EU failed to understand how currency symbols work and tried to define the euro symbol as a logo (that wouldn’t vary between typefaces) rather than as a currency symbol. Type designers laughed, said “that is idiotic” and largely ignored the dictate from on high, taking it as broad general guidance only, of what the euro might look like in a wide geometric sans serif typeface.
Unfortunately I don't know how it used to be, I only heard a story about the ruble sign, some important designers agreed to use this sign in fonts and the government just accepted it.
Maybe I just don't understand what this topic is.
It's just hard to even imagine what could change and why.
For what it's worth, if the government adopts something the type designers don't like anyway, they'll just coordinate among themselves and use what they see fit in their fonts and there's nothing the government can do about it.
I remember how long ago they talked about the shapes of Cyrillic letters, that they are not as rhythmic as Latin, but I do not even remember any alternative designs of letters, I think at a serious level no one even thought about it, just speculated, no more.
But I am sure that the Cyrillic alphabet is still waiting for changes, in fact, the current design of the Cyrillic alphabet is just something that will be developed and improved, if there will be persistent initiators.
I still think that I somehow misunderstood everything, but my English does not allow me to fully grasp the context, but I don't mind to speculate, so that's it
In regard to “creative” letterforms, one may cite as an example Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet, released in 1967. It was the subject much publicity, though even its creator later admitted, in 2009, "The New Alphabet was over-the-top and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable." When the type was used for the album cover of Joy Division's "Substance," the designer had to misspell the name to make it readable ("substance" became "subst1mce"). On the other hand, I can think of one example of creative letterform that was a great success: the Seven-Segment Display used for the electronic display of figures, invented in the first decade of the 20th century. Related to that are the OCR fonts, but all of these are very limited in use. (Once, when I was a guest critic at a design school I will not name, one student set an entire small book in an OCR font. I was admonished for laughing out loud!)
All I can say is good luck! Maybe you'll be the one who succeeds . . .
At that time, the single storey ‘a’ also became accepted as a basic roman character, and both these single-storey letter forms were promoted in early-learning primers.
These changes were additions, not replacements, but nonetheless “huge innovation” to the basic shapes, and occurred within the last 100 years.
Also, those might have been innovations in the area of roman typefaces, but the letterforms already existed in writing for several centuries, and they were promoted in early-learning primers precisely because they were the forms that were being taught in writing. [Research has since shown that children have no trouble recognising conventional roman letters even though these differ from what they are taught to write.]
Palmer Method, a simplified Spencerian script taught in U.S. schools from the late 1890s.
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Beginning in the 1940s, simple “geometric” printing replaced basic Palmer penmanship instruction in many U.S. schools. And now, we are witnessing the demise of cursive instruction in schools, as the emphasis switches to keyboarding.
A lot (if not most) of the typefaces with single-story a and g in the early 20th century came from German type foundries and designers, presumably influenced by more-familiar-to-them German blackletter, which typically has one-story a and g. Or perhaps these forms would make the faces look less "foreign" to the local market. The "schoolbook" y seems to come from this as well.
However, the 17th century was long ago, and the OP was asking after huge innovation in recent times, and I was attempting to come up with something.
So, nothing really huge in the Latin alphabet, since we kicked out the long “s” c.1800?
(Edit: cadels typically use broad nibs, not flexible nibs, as I now recall.)
This is not true. The advent of geometric “block printing,” as it was called, was intended as a precursor —a first stage—to the teaching of Palmer Method script, not as a replacement for it. I remember how, circa 1959-60, we were asked to “print” our names at the top of assignments that we continued in script, lest the script be illegible. Another essential use for “print” was—and still is—in the filling out of official forms. Some cultures, Russia’s for one, do not have a block print form.
Here is a fascinating a disturbing article from 2022 by the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, the former president of Harvard University, in which she explains how the lack of skills reading and writing script have prevented some of her students from reading primary source materials. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/gen-z-handwriting-teaching-cursive-history/671246/
Chiromarxists might call the devolved Scholastic cursive “late-stage copperplate.”