Wanting to discuss all things related to the Digital period in graphic design, we'll take a look at digital typography this week. I wonder if Gutenberg could have even imagined where type was going to be in the future, in this period. I'm sure that what is being done today in typography, during the digital era, would have blown Gutenberg's mind. I'm not talking about digital type, like in the image below, but that was a groundbreaking way to display electronic type when it first came out to the public, on calculators, clocks, and VCRs. Remember VCRs?
When I think of digital type, I think of fonts that couldn't possibly done in any traditional method. Letters that look like broken glass on the ground, or letters in various colors that would drive a traditional press operator bonkers, from trying to recreate all the different swatches. I'm thinking of type like this:
And, like this:
There is no way that type of the following examples could be done any other way, than with a computer. Hand-drawing the type would be a long and arduous chore that would take too long to complete normally. Most of the type that looks like this, digital, is usually distressed looking, or broken into pieces, and the drawback to that is that this type of font would really only work as a display font, or a title, or header. You would still want to use a font that was easy to read when choosing a font for reading material, that would be used in books, newspapers, blogs, and websites.
Some more examples of digital type above. These samples would be perfect for the title of a book, or even a movie. Some styles of digital type are more than type, they are pictures in their own right, conceptual images and type, a style that emerged out the Contemporary period in graphic design.
