The line, and the shapes of Minion’s italic letters are easy to The flow and rhythm of an italic hand moves the eye along The italic on the chancery hand of the Italian scribes of the 15th andĮarly 16th centuries, which was sometimes ornate but was always intendedįor reading. Typographic embodiment of that running hand.
Predecessors did: being a highly readable running hand, or rather a Minion’s italic is noteworthy for achieving what its Renaissance
Minion was designed to be a contemporary digital typeface with a classic feel –Ī goal that’s easy to state but difficult to achieve – and for the most part it Its x-height is taller, but not so much that it looks ungainly or inauthentic. More condensed than some of the Italian Renaissance types (though no moreĬondensed than many of the classic Dutch text typefaces of the 17th century) and Typeface you are reading right now is Minion 3.) The letter forms are a little Although Minion wasĭesigned originally with print in mind, it works well onscreen as well. Well at the various resolutions of today’s publishing. Its letter forms have a refined elegance reminiscent ofĬalligraphy and early metal type, but the engineering behind them renders them Unlike an adaptation or revival, Minion was designed from the ground up forĭigital typesetting. Will Powers/Minnesota Historical Society Press/University of Notre Dame Press. Minion used as a text face by Will Powers in his practical study of contemporary book typography, New Types for New Books (2003). It’s telling that he used Minion as the text Powers also praised Minion for its “color,” the texture Minion’s inclusion of true small caps: “How good it was to see that Minion,Įarly on, included these sorts.” They were an unusual addition to a digital (Book designer Will Powers, in his New Types for New Books, said of Since its introduction inġ990 it has become, for many designers with experience in fine book typographyĪnd an awareness of modern typesetting systems, the go-to typeface for a certain Letterform Archive.Īlthough Minion is not based directly on any of the Renaissance Italian orįrench types, its heart is in the same place. Specimen of Bembo, a revival for hot-metal machine composition, based on Griffo’s roman types, and released by Monotype in 1929. Many of those typefaces had their roots in the The text typefaces offered by Monotype, Linotype,īerthold, and other major vendors set a high standard of machine-setīook typesetting. Of the best designers studied the typography and printing of pastĬenturies in order to understand their context and how to use themĮffectively. Type-specimens, a wide palette of type designs to choose from, and many The result was that 20th-century book designers found, in contemporary These revivals were almost always interpretations, regularized to fit the unit systems of typesetting machines or expanded into multi-weight families to meet the demands of modern printing and advertising. Typeset in either high-contrast “modern” faces or revivals of Caslon’s types, by the early decades of the 20th century readers had become accustomed to reading pages set in historical revivals with names like Garamond, Granjon, Janson, and Baskerville. While books printed in the 19th century, especially in English, tended to be New York Public Library Digital Collections. Machine setting by the Monotype and Linotype companies.ĭetail of a page from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, showing the roman type cut by Francesco Griffo for the scholar-printer Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499. Typefaces, from the early revivals in foundry type by Deberny & PeignotĪnd American Type Founders to the later, highly successful revivals for Minion draws on the form and style of the book types of the Renaissance,īut it also draws on the robust 20th-century revival of classic Tradition of old-style text typefaces, used for books since not longĪfter the invention of printing with movable type. As a versatile and expansive digital type family, Minion 3 provides the tools for similarly polyglot publishing in the modern world. Scholarly works might require more than one script: notably Greek, alongside Latin, but sometimes other scripts from other writing systems, both contemporary and historical. Book publishing was central to the revival of classical learning that characterized the Renaissance, and the types cut for those books spanned multiple languages.
0 kommentar(er)
