Personally, I think the 19th century (more exactly, from 1815 through 1914) is the most exciting in the history of typography - the teenage years, messy, conflicted and full of the discovery of the raw power being unleashed. ![]() You get the picture.Īnd then there are all the really great Victorian & Art Nouveau typefaces that I could not find in digital form. Who draws perfect circles with a broadpen nib? On the other hand, why would anyone want math symbols with a copperplate script? That is like blackletter small caps or a swash version of a geometric sans-serif. For example, I think a blackletter typeface should have a period that reflects the same broadpen characteristics as the letterforms. I think all of the characters should look like they belong with the font and not hauled out of the trash someplace. Then I found myself re-designing some of the non-alphabetic characters. Next, I became dissatisfied with fonts that were missing punctuation or special characters that were (or should have been) part of the original design, etc. I found it confusing and frustrating, so I started off giving back the original name some of the fonts I had accumulated. Over time, I evolved a growing dislike for the practice, that goes back to the earliest foundries, of copying and renaming fonts without attribution, as if each look-alike font was the product of original and independent effort. If a reader cannot recognize any of the letterforms, the reader will not be able to read any of the words formed by those letters and there will be no communication. A typeface must, at minimum, resemble other typefaces that already exist. Since alphabets have the purpose of written communication, a typeface cannot be TOTALLY original or it would be useless. By that I mean, every typeface has a context and a history and is a product of some person(s) creativity and effort. I am as interested in history as I am in typefaces and I firmly believe that no typeface is an island, either. HiH stands for Hand-in-Hand because I couldn’t do it alone - any of it. Included are German ligatures ch (alt-0123) & ck (125), two period ornaments (135, 175) and lower case o and u with Hungarian long umlaut (215, 247)). This font would not be my first choice for a spread sheet. After all, memories are part of who we are.įigures are old-style for text use. Hanna explained to us that the style was called Jugendstil and represented Art Nouveau as interpreted within the framework of their culture. One of the places Hanna proudly showed us was Otto Wagner’s Majolika Haus, built in 1898, and only about 8 blocks from Secession Hall. There a kind, young student named Hanna and her boyfriend took us under their wing. I was traveling with a college buddy and our next stop was Vienna. ![]() The letters are as soft and plump as the comforter on the bed I slept on in a Salzburg B&B many years ago. Most of the curve strokes look like commas to me. The original release was under the name Reklameschrift Secession. Fin-de-siecle Vienna, Austria is the source of this Jugendstil design from Schriftgiesserei Eduard Scholz.
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