In 1720, an English engraver called William Caslon established his own type foundry and in 1725 cut his first roman type which was issued in 1734. He was the first British type designer and punch cutter to lead a successful enterprise. Before Caslon began to design type, English type founding was almost nonexistent; most printers were importing type from Holland. He designed Hebrew and Arabic alphabets before his first Romans in the early 1720s. Caslon was influenced by Dutch fonts from the 1600s, but he made significant improvements that resulted in a wide demand for his work. As the British Empire spread around the world, Caslon types developed an international following. The first printed versions of the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution were set in Caslon. Over the following decades, through the Caslon Foundry, he released variations of Caslon that were widespread in Britain and later in the United States. Benjamin Franklin was one of its fervent admirers, using it in his printing regularly. After 275 years, Caslon type is still widely used in publications, environmental graphics, and posters. His font was characterized by a medium to high contrast between the thick and thin letter strokes, large x-height, a near vertical stress, and fine bracketed serifs. It was the final expression of Old Style and could almost be regarded as a Transitional face.
“Why are William Caslon’s types so excellent and famous? To explain this and make it really clear, is difficult,” wrote the eminent historian of printing, Daniel B. Updike. “While he modeled his letters on Dutch types, they were much better; for he introduced into his font a quality of interest, a variety of design, and a delicacy of modeling, which few Dutch types possessed. Dutch fonts were so monotonous, but Caslon’s fonts were not so. His letters when analyzed, especially in small sizes, are not perfect individually; but in mass their effect is agreeable. That is, I think their secret—a perfection of the whole, derived from harmonious but not necessarily perfect individual letters. To say precisely how Caslon arrived at his effects is not simple; but he did so because he was an artist. He knew how to make types, if a man ever did, that were ‘friendly to the eye,’ or ‘comfortable.’” William Caslon left behind him a liberally extended letter family, both literally and figuratively. Three more William Caslons after him (II, III, IV) developed his family into a true ‘typefounding dynasty’. Caslon’s sinuous italic ampersands are distinctive and reflect the designer’s background as an engraver of ornate gunlocks and barrels. “When in doubt, use Caslon,” is an old adage often repeated to honor William Caslon’s readable and familiar fonts whose pleasing appearance makes them among the most widely used typefaces. According to a 1923 American Type Founders catalog, “The opinion of many printers is that one never makes a mistake by composing the job in Caslon.” The enduring popularity of types based on designs by William Caslon—the English type designer who cut his earliest roman types around 1725—is attributed to the warmth and legibility of his designs, as well as the vigorous energy generated by their sturdy and varied letter shapes. Design inconsistencies and a few eccentric letters, especially in the larger sizes, give Caslon a lively rhythm.
Twentieth-century revivals of Caslon encompass two distinct approaches. Some attempt to replicate the master’s work as closely as possible, while others deliberately depart from the originals. Among digital Caslons, Carol Twombly’s Adobe Caslon is quite faithful to Caslon’s text typefaces and is favored by many designers. The overall color is slightly lighter than some letterpress specimens from the Caslon foundry, and some inconsistent letters are regularized. Carol Twombly was born in Bedford, Massachusetts in 1959. The youngest of five children, she spent summers with her family at their house on a lake in New Hampshire. She enjoyed skiing, camping, swimming, and playing tennis. An “A” student throughout school, she studied very hard, but looked forward every day to her favorite subject—art class. Settling on sculpture, Carol followed her architect brother to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Once there, however, she decided that graphic design would be a more practical course of study. About this decision Carol says, “I discovered that communicating through graphics - by placing black shapes on a white page - offered a welcome balance between freedom and structure.” Though graphic design became her career focus, Carol hasn’t abandoned her other artistic pursuits, which include basket weaving, drawing, painting, and jewelry making. One of her RISD professors, Chuck Bigelow, and his partner, Kris Holmes, gradually introduced Carol to the world of type design. Working during summer months in their studio, she began to understand the intricate process of designing type. In addition to editing letters on an early digital type design system, she gained valuable experience by drawing outline letters on vellum, inking them in, and then tacking them to a wall where she would view them through a reducing glass.
After graduation, she embarked on a Master’s course in digital typography at Stanford University also under Bigelow. She went on to work with him at the Bigelow & Holmes studio. The program [at Stanford], since discontinued, awarded Carol and her colleagues Masters of Science degrees after two years of study in computer science and typographic design. Carol continued to work for the Bigelow and Holmes studio for the next four years and, during this time, entered her first type design in an international competition sponsored by Morisawa Ltd., a Japanese manufacturer of typesetting equipment. She won first prize in the Morisawa Typeface Design Competition in 1984 for her typeface Mirarae, a Latin design which went on to be licensed and released by Bitstream. Soon after, Carol began working for Adobe Systems and in 1988 became a full-time type designer in the Adobe Originals program. It was at Adobe that she began working with the Macintosh computer, Adobe Illustrator and FontStudio software. She prefers the simple, elegant drawing interface of FontStudio to the more common Macromedia Fontographer. When the design is fairly along, she transfers it to a Sun workstation running Adobe's proprietary FontEditor software, where she fine-tunes the letter shapes and their spacing. Twombly starts her designs with paper and pencil before working on the computer and often returns to her sketchbook to refine her designs: “Drawing with a pencil often helps because my hand can usually make pleasing curves intuitively, and then I can go back to the screen to recreate what my hand has realized on paper… The shapes drawn with the hand are more organic and unpredictable, and therefore more lively.”
During her nine years with Adobe, Carol has designed a number of very popular text and display typefaces. Designs like Trajan, Charlemagne, Lithos, and Adobe Caslon are inspired by classic letterforms of the past - from early Greek inscriptions, circa 400 B.C., to William Caslon’s typefaces of the 1700s. Designs like Viva and Nueva explore new territory while maintaining traditional roots. In 1994, she received the Charles Peignot award, given to outstanding type designers under the age of 35, from the Association Typographique Internationale for outstanding contributions to type design. She was the first woman and only the second American to receive this prestigious honor. Twombly retired from type design in 1999. About her life’s work, she says, “It seems that certain shapes resonate with me, and I express them whether I’m doing type design or other things.” A Caslon for the digital era, Twombly’s Adobe Caslon is a practical and homogenous synthesis of William Caslon’s text faces. It moderates the high contrast that is exaggerated in some Caslon revivals, but retains the exceptional crispness of the letters and the sharpness of the serifs. Carol made Caslon usable again as a text face, although in doing so she regularized it a bit and smoothed out a few of its peculiarities. She also expanded it into a type family of several weights, in accordance with Adobe’s philosophy of what’s needed for today’s typesetting. (Despite the range of weights, Twombly has been quite explicit that her Caslon is only a text face and should not be used larger than 18-point.) The Colourful italic is distinguished by a pronounced angle and a very distinctive ampersand. Adobe Caslon Pro is designed in three weights and includes a full range of alternates, ligatures, superiors, small caps, non-lining figures, swashes and ornaments drawn from the ornaments of the Caslon foundry.
Adobe Caslon is not recommended for display settings for an important reason: Althoough its weights, forms, and proportions mimic William Caslon’s text types quite well, when Adobe Caslon is enlarged to display sizes it appears totally different from Caslon’s originals. Adobe Caslon is crisp and refined; the letters are regularized; and serifs are more slablike in design. At text type sizes, the color and texture are remarkable expressive of the look and feel of Caslon’s original types. Adobe Caslon’s expert fonts and ornaments enable a designer to achieve a stunning range of typographic detail and subtlety. The variety of characters and alternate characters available make possible a high level of discriminating and elegant typography. Founder’s Caslon captures the warmth and irregularity of metal type while Adobe Caslon provides the tailored uniformity of a new digital rendition. Founder’s Caslon has one weight in four size variants, while Adobe Caslon has three weights.
No comments:
Post a Comment