Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

“Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile” by William Morris, published by Kelmscott Press 1894.

The book “Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile” was one of the first books in the MASC that caught my attention. The book was published by Kelmscott Press, which is a private press created by William Morris in the 1800s. The press has a very specific/trademark type of design, with intricate artwork intertwined with lettering. Looking at images of the pages, one can see the Italian Renaissance inspiration. The book seems more decorative than anything else, seemingly untouched with designs that do nothing necessarily to help readers understand the words. This pristine condition might also be due to the fact that this is a religious text, and therefore seen as more worthy of respect.

The typeface itself is very humanist/organic, with intricate designs of flowers, leaves, and

“Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile” by William Morris, published by Kelmscott Press 1894.

vines. One of the interesting things I noted was that each paragraph starts with an image of black leaf, rather than an indent. Some sentences begin with large, complex letters, with designs similar to the cover page. Other beginning letters are similar but smaller, and it leaves the reader wondering why. Perhaps they signify a new chapter. The first sentence that is coupled with that larger letter is all capitalized. They are all upright. The typeface also has a lot of curves, decorative serifs, and contrast between thin and thick portions. You can see the inspiration from quill and paper hand writing, despite the fact that this was most likely printed on wood. Most of the letters have the same x-height and baseline, with a few ascenders and descenders for capital letters and lowercase letters, like f, p, and g. Even the capital P has a descender, which is unusual. This book represents the connection between art and typeface, even after hand writing was no longer used in published books.

This is an example of typography found in The Fleuron, a journal of typography. This particular example is a piece created by Peter Behrens.

Looking through the various documents in the MASC, one that really caught my eye was this typography example I found in the book The Fleuron. I was entranced by the eye-catching and bold forms and shapes, as well as the contrasting colors. This specific example would not be out of place in a Soviet propaganda poster and was my first impression when seeing it.

I’m not really sure how this lettertype was made; the text is a reproduction of the original work, and any indication of exactly how it was made seems to be lost in translation. I think that it was probably typed rather than handwritten, however. The lack of variation in letter differences seems to indicate a level of reproduction that would be near-impossible to create by hand.

I think that this typeface provides a strong visual presence due to the strong geometry of the letter shapes. Each form is very geometric in shape and seems to fit a modular design. All the letters are uppercase, with no lowercase examples to be found. All the letters sit on the baseline, with no examples of the letters falling beneath it. The x-height seems to be very centralized in the letter; the text doesn’t seem to be skewed up or down. The combination of thick, upright text and a wide set width create the impression that this text is very loud, serious or both.

Something that I found intriguing was the way that this typeface designer handled the letter curves. On closer inspection, many of the curves (such as the G, the P, and the S are good examples) are diagonal lines rather than smooth curves. This further accentuates the geometric aspect and modularity of this typeface.

Of The Friendship of Amis and Amile by William Morris, published 1894, photo taken in MASC at WSU

For my example, I chose to took at the fairytale type book Of The Friendship of Amis and Amile by William Morris, which was published in 1894. The book is 67 pages and categorized as “medieval poetry”. 500 copies were published and it was published by Kelmscott Press, making this small book very rare.

The font in the book is very ‘old world’, where the words use a more ‘wavy’ type, as every letter is curved in some way. There are no traditional serifs, but the ends of the  letters gets smaller toward a point, from the larger thicker middle. Most noticeable on the capital L, and on the word “Lucca”, and the letter u. The letters look as though they could have been hand written, but are in fact made from an early type printer. There is red writing in the upper right hand corner, where it gives the name of the chapter. The font looks very calligraphic, and in order to signify a new paragraph the book uses a small leaf. The font is hard to distinguish from upper to lowercase, as the letters all stand on the same baseline, or are roughly the same height all through it. The letters relate to the text, as it feels very ‘old world’ and fairytale, which is what the plot of the story roughly is.  There is also the fancy letter in the beginning of the second paragraph on this page. It is also used to signify a more important second paragraph, rather than the leaf just signifying a normal change in paragraph. The fancy “T” is a bit of a more different font than the other normal areas of the book, in order to stand out from the rest of the page.

A prohibition leaflet. Pullman Council for Social Betterment. Prohibition leaflets, ca. 1936. Gift of C.M. Brewster, 1956. Washington State University Library.

I was drawn to this type because it is about Pullman and because it uses both serif and san-serif fonts. This prohibition leaflet was made in 1936 by the Pullman Council for Social Betterment. It was printed with type rather than handwritten. You can see how the ink didn’t completely cover each of the letters so there are some spots that show the paper; this gives the text a handmade feeling even though it was printed. When you zoom-in on the text you can even see where the ink was smudged across the words “some people”.  

A close up of the bold text.

First, I want to discuss the bold, san-serif font that is at the top and bottom of the leaflet. With this font there is a mix of both uppercase and lower-case letters and completely uppercase words. Some of the words are also smaller than others. This brings attention to certain words and decreases attention to others. Although the letters do look like a solid block, there is some detail. On almost each letter there is a small line that almost gives the letters a three-dimensional feel. As I mentioned, the letters are san-serif but there is some elegance to them. The F is angled as well as the tail of the u, the tops of the l’s, the beginning of the m etc. Although I wouldn’t consider these serifs, they do add a different dimension. The bottom of the Q in Liquor is the only descender in the san-serif font. This Q was interesting because it didn’t have a design that was regular to the rest of the type. The curve of the descender was not a straight line cutting across the O-shape like we would expect, but rather an elegant curve which contrasts with the thick, upright, bold, font.

A close up of the serif text.

Secondly, the smaller letters are more normal in regards to set width and have well defined serifs. They match the larger letters in regards to the thin line making them look slightly three-dimensional. The x-height of the letters is all very regular except for the cross bar in the capital A which sits lower than the x-height. There is much more contrast in the serif font compared to the san-serif font which didn’t have any contrast. At first I though that these fonts were geometric/organic, but after reviewing, I now think the represent a humanist/organic feel.  The letters are rounded or, in regards to the capital A, cut off at the top so it is not a triangle (which would be more representative of a geometric A). There are angles and the O’s are not perfect circles.

This leaflet draws viewer’s gaze immediately because of the drastic contrast in text size. With the contrast of bold, large letters and small, serif letters, the viewers eyes have a to be drawn to and a place to rest.

瀛環志略 by 徐繼畬. A series of documentation about geography in China – printed on double leaves, oriental style, in wooden boards.

One of the texts that stood out to me was the Chinese one, where the characters were ‘stamped’ onto the pages. I say stamped because there are indications that led me to such suggestion. Another indication that led me to that conclusion was that next to certain characters, there would be lines next to certain characters – which lead me to hint that these were the outlines of the stamp themselves. I examined a character, and examined the same character on the same page at a different sentence; in which there were no difference between the two. Other than the fact that maybe one received more ink and is just a bit more prominent than the other – the character’s height were all the same. The characters seem to have all been designed onto some sort of stamp block that had a set height and width, where they fit into a proportional square. When I say proportional square, I mean that the way Chinese characters are written, people imagine a square – in which the character is written out in a proportional manner to evenly fit said square. The stamp itself seems to also follow this logic of the hand writing technique. This text stood out to me because the fact that the entire documentation was done by a stamp of some sort. The English alphabet is composed of 26 letters, whereas the Chinese language has hundreds and hundreds of words. The fact that this was done by stamp is just astounding to know that the person who created the pack of documents had to select from an abundance of choices and line them up properly.

A close up on a page of 瀛環志略 

I wouldn’t necessarily state that the characters have a serif style to it, mainly because it seems that the font is trying to mimic like that of the brush strokes. Traditionally, the characters are written in a certain stroke order and were written by brushes back in the days. The difference in certain thickness and certain aspects from the ‘stamp’ is trying to mimic that of when someone applies more or less pressure to create said thickness.  Everything is upright and has no lowercase or uppercase; everything single character is treated the same.

A page of one of the maps from 瀛環志略.

What’s also interesting, is that on the map portion of the documentation; the fonts appear to be different from the main body. The font on the map seems to be actually be handwritten, because they’re smaller than the original body text – which would make sense because they had to fit the text inside certain regions of the map. They also don’t appear as uniformed as the stamped letters were.

Designers uses typefaces as a design element for different audience, and situation. There are many different forms, variations of typefaces to choose from. It was first modeled on calligraphy and was later printed from the machine. Typography evolved throughout the years, and was influenced by many styles from handwritings, engraving, and other. Different writing instrument can produce many types of stroke with thickness, sharpness, depth, and others. Many typefaces available today are due to writers, designers, printers, reject the old style, and creating their own style. They gain inspiration from the old traditional letter structure and experiment with the thickness, vertical horizontal stress, and other attribute like serif and stem.

The type font from the Money collection by Ed Carver remined me of the Monster fonts described from the reading “Letter”. The font was first introduced by Bodoni and Didot. They created a font that collided with the traditional typographic, and added some bizarre element, an abstract and dehumanized form to the letter. The typeface is big and bold. The height, width and depth can be expanded, contracted, shadowed, inlined, fattened, and floriated. The raise of the industrial revolution, and consumer consumption demanded a new form of communication typography. It was mainly used as advertisement. Th new style structure can draw the attention of the audience, with its big bold, and unique design. The typeface design on the money is bulky, and with the center of the stroke being hollow, and sharp curves. There is no smooth curve, every outline cut is straight. However, it’s not pixeled, it a combination of triangle edges, and rectangle shape. The terminal and finial on the letter has a straight edge, kind of look like a check mark. The Letter I and F has a quadrilateral shape with I on top, and F on the top-right. The hollow of the letter starts at the middle of the letter, the top half filled with black color, and the bottom half empty.

Picture for reference 

The example that I have chosen to write about was the movable wooden-block text. The text is one of the few in the MASC that was movable or manipulable. During the discussion of the text, it was mentioned that the original forms of this style of text was created with lead. However, due to the larger size of the text, was no longer able to be formulated using lead and was converted into wood. I believe that to imitate the color of lead, which was closer to dark gray or black, the wood was painted black. The text blocks were enclosed into small rectangles which limited the height and width of the letters. Because of the rectangular enclosure, this did not allow for much variation of the text, as we can see that the text is also fairly rectangular as well.

Each letter is evenly spaced within its own block which creates an even spacing when combining these letters together to form words. Because each letter has a specific enclosure to remain in, the letter spacing will also follow the block-to-block format. Each letter is also in its own space. We see occasionally when specific fonts combine letters or connect specific letters together to give it a certain style, however, with this text we find that no letter deviates from the basic format and always stay within the boundaries of the wooden blocks. The blocks are made of wood and can be shifted around to create different letter patterns, so we can say that this form of text is modular and materials-based. Modular text is often related to movable text and this example fits exactly that description just as it fits the materials-based definition by being made out of a natural material.