12/7/2022 0 Comments Bembo typeface history![]() ![]() Each font of type was designed to work at a specific size. However, cutting a 7-point lowercase ‘g’ takes a lot more skill than making a smiley-face potato stamp! The old masters of typeface design spent decades perfecting their craft. ![]() Woodcuts and potato stamps use a similar method. As a printing process it is fairly basic. Single letters were placed by hand to create words, words were aligned into sentences, sentences were stacked to make paragraphs, and these were inked and pressed into paper. These size-specific fonts consisted of individual letters made from metal alloy. A typeface was composed of fonts, one font for each size. Let me begin with a brief history.īefore digital typesetting and offset printing, there was the letterpress. As more questions were asked than could be answered, I wrote this article to explain myself. Aspects of the drawing and “color” of the well-known typeface Galliard, an earlier Carter design, are also evident in the Yale face.įirst developed for use in Yale’s current signage initiative, the Yale typeface was extended to include bold roman and bold italic fonts suitable for print and Web work and as of August 2014 it is provided in the OpenType file format which is cross-compatible with Macintosh, Windows, and Unix operating systems.At a recent panel discussion on New Zealand book design, I lambasted the overuse of Bembo in many New Zealand books. Matthew Carter’s “Yale” recovers the strength of the Aldine original and updates it by sensitively simplifying the essential letterforms and their details. Unfortunately, digital versions of Bembo lack the vigor and weight of either the De Aetna face or the original Monotype version of Bembo. It appeared regularly in Yale publications of all kinds. The resulting typeface, Bembo, proved to be one of the most widely used and highly regarded book faces of the twentieth century. In 1929, Stanley Morison of the Monotype Corporation in England led a project to revive Aldus’s De Aetna face. Arguably, it has had the greatest influence upon subsequent type design of any Renaissance typeface. A copy of this book may be found in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.Īldus Manutius was among the most prolific and successful publishers of printed books in his day, and the De Aetna face was used to set a number of his scholarly publications which were widely distributed and admired in Renaissance Europe. “Yale” is inspired by the late-fifteenth-century Venetian typeface that first appeared in Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, published by Aldus Manutius in 1495. ![]()
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