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As a formal language and a cultural force, typography is at once conservative and revolutionary, working to preserve information while making it accessible to a growing public. The permanence of the printed book has fostered the survival of traditional typefaces and classical page layouts, from decade to decade and century to century.
The rise of mass communications in the nineteenth century countered the conservative functions of typography with the transience of new printed media--advertisements, magazines, newspapers, popular literature. The expanding audiences for print stimulated demand for new typefaces. The introduction of the combined pantograph and router in 1834 revolutionized the production of wood type, used for printing posters and advertisements that required large letters. The pantograph enabled numerous variations to be traced and manufactured from a single base drawing. The principle of mechanically generating variations of a single letterform remains a prevalent design method today. Cameras have been used throughout the twentieth century to capture existing type specimens to be reissued for new typesetting technologies. In the 1950s, "hot" metal production was replaced with "cold" phototypesetting, in which a film negative is used to expose letters onto light-sensitive paper. Phototypesetting engendered new visual possibilities--the features of handwriting could be easily simulated, and the space between letters could be dramatically reduced. In the 1970s, a digital signal began to supplant the photographic negative as the means of reproducing typographic forms. In the electronic environment of contemporary type design, scanned alphabets can be endlessly manipulated by the type designer, serving either as models for accurate reproduction or as skeletons for new or hybrid designs. After the introduction of the Apple Macintosh computer in 1984, and the subsequent development of powerful page-layout software and extensive font libraries, digital typography quickly became the industry norm. PostScript, introduced by Adobe Systems in 1986, allows pages of text and images to be displayed and printed across a broad range of equipment, from video monitors to laser printers to high-resolution imagesetters. PostScript also permits graphic designers to condense, expand, outline, shadow, and slant existing typefaces, a freedom that has enraged guardians of good taste while delighting typographic tinkerers. The software program Altsys Fontographer, also introduced in 1986, democratized the arcane discipline of originating typefaces. Fontographer and similar programs let type designers immediately proof their work in a variety of sizes and see how letterforms fit together into words and lines, a crucial phase of the design process that once took months or even years to achieve. No longer is type production dominated by large corporate enterprises that can afford the design and manufacturing investment once required to introduce new fonts. The rise of the Macintosh triggered numerous transformations in the graphic arts. Designers acquired direct control over processes that formerly were divided among typesetters, photo retouchers, paste-up artists, and other specialized technicians. Microcomputers stimulated the proliferation of small design firms and challenged the supremacy of large studios with significant overhead expenses. Around 1984, the term "desktop publishing" entered the English vocabulary. The early page layout software was daunting for non-professionals, but by 1990, standard word-processing packages contained many of the features found in expert page design programs. Desktop publishing brought typography within the reach of students, office workers, and middle managers, building an appetite for typographic knowledge among the general public. Alongside the rapid ascendence of desktop publishing there has been a surprising revival of letterpress printing. This Renaissance technology has experienced its own renaissance, reborn as a viable medium for short-run printing and limited-edition publishing. The experimental books of Johanna Drucker and the music packaging of Bruce Licher's Independent Project Press have helped convert an outmoded technology into a contemporary medium. These artists have approached the inherent limitations of letterpress--from the strictly gridded lockups of the type bed to the limited inventory of characters and ornaments in the type case--as a gilded cage, luxurious yet restrictive, from which to compose their curious inventions.
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