Typography is considered the oldest type of industrial design. From the middle of the 15th century. the book takes on the familiar form of a codex (bound together rectangular or square sheets in a binding), and readable antiqua fonts are used to type the bulk of the text. As is known,
antiqua (Latin antiquus - ancient) is a collective name for fonts with short (usually perpendicular) auxiliary strokes (serifs) at the beginning and end of the main strokes of the sign.
Over the centuries of the existence of typography, many classifications of fonts have been developed according to a variety of characteristics. One of them is based on the method of shaping, which can be ductal ("handwritten") or gliptal ("sculptural"). The typographic style of the serif baroque is a form of transitional serif based on the gliptal method: the letters are not drawn, but lined up.
The first transitional serif, Romain du Roi , was designed in 1692 in France. Further development of baroque serifs is associated with the name of the English publisher, inventor and type designer John Baskerville. He was born in 1706 in Wolverly (Worcestershire) and in 1725, at the age of 19, made it his life's goal to renew English printing art (Efimov 2006).
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John Baskerville noticed that old fonts - the creation of the famous English engraver and typographer William Caslon - printed on high-quality vellum paper with rich black ink began to give the impression of not being elegant enough. Baskerville made thick strokes thicker, and thin ones even thinner, provided the letters with the finest sharp serifs.
The refined high-contrast letters created by Baskerville were not appreciated by his compatriots, but his works influenced the development of type and publishing in Europe and the United States and subsequently inspired Firm Didot and Giambattista Bodoni - the creators of the new style of antique typefaces.
Hereditary French typographer and printmaker Pierre Simon Fourniercontinued the work of Baskerville on his side of the English Channel. In 1737, at the age of 25, he decided to work only with his own punches, dies and letters. He put into practice the requirements of an official decree issued in Paris in 1723, which included rules for typographers and booksellers, including regulating the ratio of font sizes and prescribing to make fonts for the main set of one, strictly defined height. Fournier added his own concepts to the correlation established in the decree.
His system was quite simple: using familiar units of measurement, he took the “inch” as a basis, divided it into 12 parts (“lines”), and each part into six “points” (points). All the main sizes for solid type had to contain an integer number of these typographic "points": in the nonparele there were 6 points, in the petite - 8, in the cicero - 12, and so on for the twenty pins fixed by Fournier. The use of a single base made it possible to maintain the relationships between different font sizes.
The inch, line, and point in the Fournier tables were not exactly the same size as the corresponding parts of the French foot (which, however, itself was of different sizes in different provinces of the country). Perhaps Fournier thought it right from a commercial point of view to produce typefaces not very different in size from those already used by other French typographers.
Based on his developments, Pierre Simon Fournier published a number of fine examples of typographic art, which eventually earned the status of monuments.
As noted by a contemporary American typographer Joseph Alessio ( Joseph Alessio ), in the transitional serif (which include Antiqua Baroque)
“Serifs become more graceful, less chopped, and more fluid, and symbols more proportional. The oval axes have become vertical (or nearly so). The main and connecting strokes are emphasized by contrast. Font elements are becoming more and more refined forms "(from the first part of the article Making Sense Of Type Classification , quoted from the translation of Dmitry Kabanov , which was available in 2014 at habrahabr.ru/company/uidesign/blog/194368 , and today - in a copy saved and supplemented by Vitaly Sheyanov ).
So, in a complex multifunctional object, such as a book, typefaces and layout techniques are important for the implementation of the author's intention no less than artistic design, creating the “architecture” of a book “building” (it is no coincidence that the birth of “pure” typography is associated with the name of John Baskerville, based solely on type design). The Baroque era in the art of creating the appearance and illustration of the book ended at the beginning of the 19th century, but typographical art has allowed its elements to survive: digitized versions of Baskerville and Fournier fonts are still used in books and magazines of exquisite printing, printed on a smooth, quality paper.
Literature
Efimov 2006 - Efimov V.Great fonts. Six out of thirty. Book. 1: Origins. M .: ParaTyp, 2006.181 p .: ill.
Typography 1987 - Typography as an art: Typographers and publishers of the 18th - 20th centuries on the secrets of their craft / Comp. R. von Zichovsky, G. Timman; ed. foreword I. E. Babanov; per. with him. V.V. Lazursky. M .: Kniga, 1987. 382, ​​[1] p .: ill., Fax.