Reflection: Typography in the Digital Age
Before the computer, typography was an occupation carried out by specialists who arranged type through manual means. During this time, the process of creation was just as crucial as the finalized product. Type-setting and creation was a tedious process of carefully analyzing the kerning of characters, the fitting of each line, and the composition of each page, it was not an easy task to complete. However, with the introduction of the machine, we see the mechanical printing press revolutionizing the printing industry, and many years later, we have the computer. Although the traditional way of approaching type is a beautiful artform and requires a craftsmanship that's becoming scarce in today's age, it comes at the price of slow production.Â
With just the printing press alone, there was a ten-fold increase in production rate, leading to the spread of knowledge on a mass scale, and the computer takes reproduction to an entirely different level. All of a sudden, the artistic form of type creation becomes nothing more than just tapping buttons on the screen and selecting from a list of options on the drop-down menu. However, the simplification of the working process comes with the benefits of faster processing time and more production output. Despite the benefits the digital age provides for today's typographers, the mass-culture based system it embodies takes away from the characteristics of traditional type, where each pen stroke and style comes with a logic and intuitive judgement. Also, with the rise in the availability of fonts due to the digital age, there are now thousands of font faces that may or may not be practical in terms of use. Either way, they seem to be growing at an ever-increasing rate, which makes it difficult to weed out the fluff forms from ones that have been meticulously thought out and created. The platforms made available through digital means all come with good intentions, such as Fonstruct (fontstruct.com), a simple editor for users to build share their own fonts. However, there is no historical references as to the basic necessities on what a basic typeface should embody. These important characteristics of the typeface, the history, the cultural significance, are slowly getting lost during the digital transfer.
Even though the digital age seems to bring a lot of side effects of mass-scale accessibility and ease issues, there are various ways that individuals are taking use of the medium from an educational approach as well. There are two interactive games based on kerning and shaping type, where the user tries to adjust type characters by tweaking the vector nodes or spacing out characters to fit their proper form. These two games are just one of the many effective representations of bringing back, or introducing the traditional ways of manually adjusting letterforms with the naked eye. There are also typography based films being released, such as Helvetica (2007), which provides the history of the typeface along with interviews from leading graphic and type designers. More recently, Lintotype: The Film (2012) came out and elaborates more on printing and how it changed society.
Representing the physical, printed format of typography into the digital realm introduces more ground for typography to venture into, especially with the mixture of various mediums. No longer are words confined to static forms, but have the potential to move and be manipulated through their digital representations. Although the digitization of typography comes with great benefits, it also comes with the cons of overlooking the significance of what made typography so unique in the first place. However, with the fusion of digital platforms intertwining the cultural background of type, there is great potential for projects to emerge, made through the ease of digital technology, reproduced quickly on a mass-quantity scale, and still retain the history and significance of its form.
