ATypI 2020

The first part of a presentation at ATypI 2020.

Steve Jobs – Robert Palladino

Steve Jobs made beautiful typography available on personal computers. He had dropped out of university and took a course in formal writing at Reed. Reed college had at the time perhaps the best calligraphy course in the States. Robert Palladino (pictured above) was Jobs’ teacher.

The genius of Sanvito

Bartolomeo Sanvito (1435-1511) was born and died in Padua. He constantly moved between Rome and Padua. His work is a great example of the Paduan script that became the model for the regular minuscule that is so familiar to us nowadays.

Quality & qualia

Quality (how good something is) is difficult to quantify. In this entry ‘quality’ means the peculiar character of something.

廣興紙寮 Guang Xing Paper Mill

Another video I made back in 2015 in Taiwan. This paper mill is worth a visit for paper lovers.

More foundational hand

The foundational hand that Edward Johnston created is important to understand regular script, the kind of script that we find in books. Practicing it is the best way to become acquainted with letter-shapes. 

Ri Xing & 324 Print Studio

日星鑄字行, 324版畫工作房. An old video from the archive about typography and letterpress in Taiwan.

Awakening

Edward Johnston recalls his youthful awakening moment when he realised ‘that there was something fascinating about letters… letters were intended primarily to be read … the forms of the written letters would somehow depend upon the pen that wrote them’ (Holliday, 2007).

Sight and touch

Extracted from Harold Speed’s The Practice and Science Of Drawing:
The fact that we have two flat pictures on our two retinas to help us, and that we can focus at different planes, would not suffice to account for our knowledge of the solidity and shape of the objective world, were these senses not associated with another sense all important in ideas of form, the sense of touch.

Impossible exercises

This entry is related to Handwriting and visual perception. Literacy has stagnated for more than a century in the West. In 1906, Edward Johnston was requested by the London County Council Education Committee to report on the pens and copy books in use at the time. ‘The ordinary blunt and pointed pens give indefinite and uncertain strokes […], he wrote.