Letterpress was invented in the 14th century by a German man called Johannes Gutenburg. Firstly there was movable clay type, first invented in China around 1040. Gutenburg borrowed money in order to invent the world changing technology of Letterpress, using wooden or metal letters. The letters were all individually carved out of blocks of wood and then put into rows to spell what was needed. These were then pressed into sheets of paper to create the pages of text. This was repeated the required amount of times for the copies, text was then also rearranged to create the next pages. In 1812, Fredrich Koenig invented the cylindrical press which sped up the process of printed quite allot, making it easier to create copies.
It has made the progress of our thinking of type today go so far, although we tend to use computers now for most of our typefaces, designers and type enthusiasts would much prefer to use letterpress. I think that it gives the viewer a more personal feel to what they are looking at. Like an old photograph made in a dark room, that photograph has been handled for certain amounts of time, with perfect timing, this takes practice and skill to build and I think this has the same kind of process. It is a costly process, both time and money and so you need both of those to be able to make this way of type work well.
No comments:
Post a Comment