Typography

Reflective Blog 01

Typography is the splendid play of text around us incorporated with visuals that not only appeal to the viewer’s eye but also execute a message creatively such that its easily accessible, legible, and readable. Our first session initiated with the basic understanding of readability and legibility that was quite helpful in making me understand the difference between them. While discussing the legibility in typography, I was intrigued to know how the individual alphabets play an important role in the overall readability of the typographical layouts. The alphabets have been around us for ages; and are probably the initial thing learned by every kid, but I never focused on the individuality of each in typography.

I was amazed to know that even these alphabets have a history of gradual evolution behind. This is something that I never thought about before. The part of our discussion that made me curious about the history of type was the fact that the instructor, Sir Yawar shared regarding the names “Upper-case” and “Lower-case” letters; coming from how the metal type was organized hundreds of years ago. Through my research, I came to know that since the small letters were most frequently used; they were kept in a lower case for quick access whereas the capital letters were placed in an upper case. During this research, I also came across the terms, ‘majuscule’ for capital letters and ‘miniscule’ for the small ones. Initially, only the majuscule letters existed and hierarchy was created by increasing the size of the first letter to emphasize the beginning or by the addition of decorations such as illustrations, pictorial motifs, etc. Reflecting on this fact, I believe that would consume more space and time for the scribes to complete their work as well as referring to the 4th rule of copy-fitting; Text set in all capital letters severely retards readability; so that would have created readability issues as well. However, this could have been a great start for the illuminated, decorated initials or graphical visuals but the readability issue still existed. Therefore, the use of minuscule letters along with majuscule letters must have resulted as they were faster and easier to write as well as improved readability and legibility greatly due to their implied rounded and organic shape.

Here, I’d like to discuss an example using the word, “Bob”. One may notice that it contains the letter ‘B’ twice, but it looked different each time. And we are easily able to read it as a word immediately due to its implied organic shape. But if it is written as, “BOB”, we’d immediately grasp it as an abbreviation first and might have a bit difficulty concerning its legibility following a solid rectangular shape.

But until now, this distinction of majuscule and minuscule letters still does not exist in all writing systems such as in certain Indian, Chinese and Japanese alphabets. This makes me ponder over the fact that over the years, like everything, the type has been evolving and new rules, formats, and standards have been setting for the development to reach better readability and legibility; so maybe after years or decades from now, we may expect the use of miniscule letters in many of these languages as well as the establishment of new techniques and standards to reach further improvement in typography.

Source: https://ilovetypography.com/2020/08/20/history-of-illuminated-initials/