9/27/2023 0 Comments Baskerville typeface terminology![]() This routine resulted in the development of higher standards for presses altogether.įolio Bible patented by the Cambridge University Press in 1763, Baskerville brought his own press to the university to complete his printing (Source: Typefaces for Books)Įxisting printing presses did not capture the subtleties of his type, so Baskerville redesigned the press replacing the wooden platen with a brass one in order to allow the planes to meet more evenly. As printers would not willingly reveal the methods within their print shops, Baskerville followed other printers closely and made the same purchases as them in hopes of setting up the same press. He created an intense black ink color through the tedious process of boiling fine linseed oil to a certain thickness, dissolving rosin, allowing months for it to subside and finally grinding it before use. ![]() John Baskerville developed his own method of working, resulting in beautifully bright woven paper and darker inks. ![]() Baskerville grew out of an ongoing experimentation with printing technology. It is difficult to appreciate the qualities of Baskerville without first understanding the process of its creation. Hand-carving Baskerville on a headstone for John Baskerville by Gabriel Hummerston (Source: ) Achieving crisp perfection John Baskerville, preface to Milton, 1758 ( Anatomy of a Typeface) ![]() I formed to myself ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and had endeavoured to produce a set of types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion. Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. The mathematically-drawn characters felt cold, and prompted Baskerville to create a softer typeface with rounded bracketed serifs and a vertical axis. At the time that John Baskerville decided to switch from owning a japanning business to a type foundry, Phillipe Grandjean’s exclusive Romain du Roi for Louis XIV had circulated and been copied in Europe. Baskerville was illiterate but became very interested in calligraphy, and practised handwriting and inscription that was later echoed in strokes and embellishments in his printed typeface.īaskerville is categorized as a transitional typeface in-between classical typefaces and the high contrast modern faces. As a servant in a clergyman’s house, it was his employer that discovered his penmanship talents and sent him to learn writing. The typeface was heavily influenced by the processes of the Birmingham-bred John Baskerville, a master type-founder and printer, who owed much of his career to his beginnings. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size.Designed by a perfectionist and self-taught printer, Baskerville is the eighth font to be explored in our ‘Know your type’ series.īaskerville, designed in 1754, is most known for its crisp edges, high contrast and generous proportions. For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include roman, bold, and italic fonts. The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or related set of fonts. Font families typically include several fonts, though some, such as Helvetica, may consist of dozens of fonts. For example, Times is a font family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are individual fonts making up the Times family. The design of characters in a font took into account all these factors.Īs the range of typeface designs increased and requirements of publishers broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (blackness or lightness) and stylistic variants (most commonly regular or roman as distinct to italic, as well as condensed) have led to font families, collections of closely related typeface designs that can include hundreds of styles.Ī font family is typically a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc., but not design. Historically, fonts came in specific sizes determining the size of characters, and in quantities of sorts or number of each letter provided. For example, 8-point Caslon Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslon Italic was another. In professional typography, the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font (originally "fount" in British English, and pronounced "font"), because the term font has historically been defined as a given alphabet and its associated characters in a single size.
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