The Letterform 101

History of Typography

From Gutenberg's press to variable fonts: the milestones that built the letterforms we use today. Click any image to zoom in.

1. 
   c. 1450

   Gutenberg & Movable Type

   Johannes Gutenberg's press in Mainz was not the world's first movable type — Bi Sheng had cast individual clay characters in China four centuries earlier — but it was the first built for an alphabet, and the first married to a metal alloy hard and precise enough to cast thousands of identical, reusable letters. His workshop cut a blackletter (Textura) face deliberately modeled on the manuscript hands readers already trusted, so a printed page wouldn't look suspiciously mechanical. By 1455 that type had set the 42-line Bible, and within decades the press had out-produced a millennium of scribes, feeding the Renaissance and Reformation with a speed handwriting never could.

2. 
   1470s

   Nicolas Jenson & the First Romans

   A French engraver working in Venice, Jenson broke from blackletter's condensed, angular grip and cut a roman type that fused Gothic sturdiness with the rounder, more open forms of Italian humanist handwriting. His own advertisements claimed the type "does not hinder one's eyes, but rather helps them and does them good" — a design argument as much as a sales pitch, and one later type designers kept making. Jenson's roman would be revived centuries on (most famously as Centaur, cut by Bruce Rogers in 1914) and remains a reference point for what a humanist serif should look like.

3. 
   1501

   Aldus Manutius & the Italic

   Venetian scholar-printer Aldus Manutius wanted to put classical literature into readers' pockets, not just libraries — so his punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut a slanted, closely-fitted type modeled on humanist cursive handwriting, letting far more text fit on a page. The resulting 1501 edition of Virgil was the first book ever printed entirely in italic, launching Aldus's line of small, portable classics at a fraction of the usual size and price. What began as a space-saving trick became a permanent second voice in the typographic toolkit, still used today for emphasis rather than economy — his printer's mark, an anchor wound by a dolphin, is still one of the most recognizable trademarks in the history of printing.

4. 
   16th century

   Garamond & the Oldstyle Tradition

   Working in Paris from the 1530s until his death in 1561, Claude Garamond cut romans with low contrast, a calligraphic diagonal stress, and soft bracketed serifs — proportions traced directly to the humanist pen rather than an engraver's tool. His punches were sold off piecemeal after his death; the only complete surviving set lives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and the type is best known today through a 1592 specimen sheet issued by the Egenolff-Berner foundry, three decades after he died. Prized as much for economy as elegance — Garamond's letters famously use less ink than most of their rivals — it became the default "old style" serif across Europe for two centuries.

5. 
   1757

   Baskerville & the Transitional Style

   A Birmingham writing-master turned printer, John Baskerville chased a crisper page than 18th-century paper and ink could support — so he invented his own: a smoother hot-pressed paper, a denser black ink, sharper punches cut with his engraver John Handy. The higher stroke contrast and more vertical axis this precision allowed made his 1757 Virgil look startling next to Caslon's warmer old-style romans; English critics called it eye-straining, and some accounts have it informally shunned at Cambridge. The French and the young United States thought otherwise — Benjamin Franklin was an admirer — and the "transitional" style Baskerville pioneered became the hinge between Oldstyle tradition and the Modern extremes still to come.

6. 
   1780s–1790s

   Bodoni & Didot Define the Modern

   Giambattista Bodoni, court printer to the Duke of Parma, and Firmin Didot in Paris arrived independently at the same conclusion: the copperplate engraver's precision could be pushed into type itself. Both pared their romans down to hairline, unbracketed serifs and near-vertical stress, driving stroke contrast to an extreme no pen could produce by hand — a look that read as pure Enlightenment rationalism, all geometry and no trace of the hand that cut it. Bodoni's own Manuale Tipografico, a 265-page specimen of romans, italics, and ornament, was published by his widow in 1818, five years after his death, and the Didone style it showcased still signals luxury and fashion whenever a masthead needs to look expensive.

7. 
   Early 19th century

   Slab Serifs for the Industrial Age

   Industrial-era advertising needed type that could shout from a wall, not just sit quietly on a page — and the delicate hairlines of Didone romans couldn't survive at poster scale. Vincent Figgins answered with what may be the earliest documented slab serif, in an 1815 specimen (some sources date the actual issue to 1817): thick, block-like serifs with almost no contrast, built to stay legible in wood type at enormous sizes. Early reviewers reportedly dismissed the style as a "typographic monstrosity," and the exotic label "Egyptian" stuck to it more from Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian campaign and the ensuing craze for all things Egyptological than from any real connection to Egyptian writing. Robert Besley's 1845 Clarendon later softened the form with bracketed serifs and became the genre's most enduring name, still doing duty on wanted posters and Old West signage in the popular imagination.

8. 
   1816

   The First Sans-Serif

   In his own foundry's final specimen book before selling up, William Caslon IV — great-grandson of the celebrated William Caslon — included a caps-only, numberless oddity technically named Two Lines English Egyptian: the first general-purpose sans-serif type known in the Latin alphabet. It landed with a thud; contemporaries found the stripped-down letters ugly and illegible next to the serif tradition they knew, and the style went nowhere for over a decade. Vincent Figgins didn't even coin the term "sans-serif" until 1832, and it took William Thorowgood's 1834 Seven Line Grotesque — the first sans-serif with a lowercase — to prove the idea could actually be set as real text, not just shouted in capitals.

9. 
   1920s–1930s

   Geometric Sans & Modernism

   The Bauhaus treated the alphabet the way it treated a chair or a teapot: strip it to its structural essentials. Herbert Bayer's 1925 experimental Universal typeface went furthest, proposing to drop capital letters entirely — "the voice does not make capital sounds," he argued, "why then should the eye require them?" — though the design itself was never released as a working font. Paul Renner, sympathetic to Bauhaus ideals without ever teaching there, built a design that did ship: Futura, released in 1927 and constructed almost entirely from circles, triangles, and squares rather than historical letterforms. Its geometric confidence made it the era's definitive statement of modernity, later chosen — of all the world's typefaces — for the plaque Apollo 11 left on the Moon in 1969.

10. 
    1957

    Helvetica & Univers

    At Switzerland's Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann reworked the 1896 workhorse Akzidenz-Grotesk into something tighter and more neutral, first sold under the unglamorous name Neue Haas Grotesk before an international rename to Helvetica in 1960 made it marketable worldwide. The same year, in Paris, Adrian Frutiger took a more systematic approach with Univers: a single family of 21 numbered weights and widths designed together from the start, rather than bolted on afterward. Between them the two typefaces became shorthand for the International Typographic Style's whole philosophy — a typeface should carry the message, not compete with it — and Helvetica in particular went on to become probably the most reproduced typeface in history, from IRS forms to the New York City subway.

11. 
    1984

    Desktop Publishing & PostScript

    Three products arriving within two years of each other quietly ended five centuries of typesetting as a specialist trade: Apple's Macintosh in January 1984, its bitmap screen typefaces (including Susan Kare's Chicago) hand-drawn pixel by pixel; Adobe's PostScript page-description language, which let a printer render curves instead of dots; and Aldus PageMaker, software that put page layout on the same screen as the type itself. For the first time a single person, at a single desk, could set, design, and print a document that used to require a compositor, a proof press, and a stat camera — and typography stopped being something only professionals touched.

12. 
    1990s–2000s

    Web Fonts

    The CSS2 specification defined an @font-face rule as early as 1998, and Internet Explorer 4 shipped support for it that same year — but font licensing fears (any linked font file could, in theory, be freely copied) kept it dormant for a decade, with almost every site defaulting to a handful of "web-safe" system fonts. Matthew Carter's Verdana and Georgia, drawn in 1996 specifically to stay legible on the low-resolution monitors of the day, were as close as most designers got to real typographic choice online. The turning point came in 2010 with WOFF, a compressed, licensing-aware format built with input from Mozilla, Type Supply, and LettError, which finally gave foundries a format they trusted enough to let designers use actual typefaces on the actual web.

13. 

    Hamburgerfont
    2016

    OpenType Variable Fonts

    Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe jointly published the OpenType Variable Fonts specification in September 2016, an addition to OpenType 1.8 that lets a single font file hold a continuous, steplessly interpolated range of weights, widths, and styles instead of a separate file per style. The performance case was immediate — one file instead of a dozen — but the creative case ran deeper: a typeface could suddenly respond live to its context, animating weight or width the way a headline might breathe on hover. It is the exact technology at the core of NBR's own typefaces.