Context of Practice Lecture 3

Chronologies

The first thing we learnt in this lecture was that Microsoft are the enemy of time. Basically they stole Helvetica as soon as it stopped being protected by copy write laws.

The need for typography comes from the need for a physical representation of our language to document history.
It started in Mesopotamia 3200 BC and Mesoamerica 600 BCE, a settlement based civilisation in the Persian gulf- Mediterranean.

The alphabet consistently assign letters to continents and vowels on an equal basis. Knowing this, we can see that the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet which was adapted from the Phoenician. Latin is a further development from the Greek.

It was when people started living closer and had the need to talk to each other that this was needed and made.

William foster passed the elementary education act in 1870-1895. This made sure that children got the education they needed because there was now a need to produce more written things an no one to do it.

Because of this rise in demand, they had to do mass production. This meant there was no time to do pretty hand made things so then came the time for things like letterset and typewriters. Johannes Gutenberg 1450, worked on the first printing press what was later developed for this mass production use.

They had to make new typefaces for example Helvetica was made to be clear and readable and mass producible. The same with Arial 25 years later.

In modern times, type is everywhere. Type is image, object, animation, print, internet.
Unfortunately it is more difficult to read long documents on the web as it strains your eyes and as the internet is all around us now, our brains have gotten used to reading short documents and is 'poisoning our ability to read long documents'
Unfortunately also is the fact that Microsoft limit our type options...one of them being comic sans...say no more.