Bigelow & Holmes Blog

Note: This essay was originally published in 1989 in Fine Print: The Review for the Arts of the Book. In the intervening quarter-century, vast terrains of typography have shifted from print to screen, and many “books” are now read on digital displays, not in print. We can no longer limit typography discussions to the art of the book; we have to consider the art of typography in both analog and digital, print and screen. For that reason, in 2012, I organized a symposium at Rochester Institute of Technology on "Reading Digital", to review the science, technology, art, and design of...

Here is the second installment of the article on "Technology and the Aesthetics of Type" from The Seybold Report of August 24, 1981.  I wrote the main article, Jonathan Seybold edited it and added parts of the conclusion. This installment discusses digital type technology and digital type designs that were state of the art in 1981. It also makes some predictions about the future. It is fun to look back at predictions made decades ago, to see how they correspond to what we know now (or what we think we know). Upon re-reading predictions from the last page of the...

Digital type has gone from a handful of commercial implementations in the late 1960s to the dominant technology of text transmission today. Surfing along with Moore's Law, digital type shot past metal and photographic type and disrupted the 500 year hegemony of analog printing to become today's dominant mode of written information transfer. Nearing its half-century anniversary, digital type is older than most of the people who use and read it, but its vast scope and influence means that interest in its early days is growing.       I began to study digital type in the late 1970s, and...

Hermann Zapf is admired as the greatest type designer of his era. Vast reams have been written about his work and many more will be written. Now he is gone and I am sad. I first met Hermann Zapf in 1979, when I studied calligraphy and type design with him in summer courses at RIT. Our acquaintance continued and became friendship over the next 36 years. In remembering him now, I want to tell the one story that means the most to me.  The German firm of Dr. Ing. Rudolf Hell, noted for their ultra high-quality digital scanning, color, and...

Apple’s developer release of its grotesque sans-serif font family “San Francisco” is generating discussions, including: its replacement of Helvetica and comparisons to Helvetica; Helvetica’s replacement of Lucida as Apple’s OS X UI fonts two years ago; comparisons of Lucida to Helvetica. These raise bigger questions of legibility of Grotesque sans-serifs (the genre that includes Helvetica and San Francisco) versus Humanist sans-serifs (the genre that includes Lucida and Frutiger). Here are references to on-line articles, blogs, and research papers on these subjects. Apple release of San Francisco fonts to developers http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/12/apple-releases-san-francisco-system-fonts-for-ios-os-x-and-watchos-2-to-developers Apple video introduction of San Francisco fonts:https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=804 San Francisco in...