Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design - Hardcover

Tracy, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0860920852 ISBN 13: 9780860920854

Publisher: Gordon Fraser, 1986

Synopsis

The revolution in the technology of typesetting that began in the 1950s has accelerated in the last fifteen years or so. The same is true of the methods of producing type. But there has been no revolution, or even evolution, in type faces themselves, the letter forms used in printing and screen graphics for obvious reasons. Letters are a continuum. Any letter so designed as to bear no resemblance at all to its fundamental form would be self-defeating and useless. What has occurred is a rapid proliferation of type faces, because they are now much easier and quicker to produce than they used to After more than fifty years of professional observation of type faces Walter Tracy thinks the good designs of recent creation are outnumbered by the mediocre and the downright bad, and that this is largely due to a lack of published critical analysis of type designs. He has set down a personal view of the matter, in the hope that it will be useful to readers anxious to side-step the promoters hype and form detached aesthetic judgements of their own. The first half of the book, which recounts the basic facts about the nature of printing types and manufacture of them, is a preliminary to an analysis of the work of some of the great type designers of the frst half of this century: two American, one Dutch, one German, together with a detailed account of that phenomenon of twentieth-century typography, Times Roman. Anyone interested in the visual quality of print, whether as professional designers, typographers or as ordinary readers, will find this book a fascinating source of information and opinion, written with refreshing clarity and irony by a leading authority on the subject.

Edition details

• Publisher: Gordon Fraser
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0860920852
• ISBN 13: 9780860920854
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224