Greek letterforms up to the fifteenth century, in three points Here, I will very briefly go over a few key contributions to Greek type design up to the end of the nineteenth century, before expanding on more recent developments. The twentieth century, on the other hand, is not as well documented, and even less well researched–a regrettable fact, since it is a far more volatile and interesting period for Greek typography. This strand of early Greek type styles, in some ways a stylistic precursor to de Brocar’s, combined regularity with fluidity without indulging in over-complexity.ĭespite sizable gaps in published research, the development of the Greek typographic script up to the twentieth century is well established, at least for the non-historian. Despite its simplicity and clarity, it fell victim to the commercial success of the Aldine model. This is one of the three main strands of early Greek type styles. Typeface by the Spaniard Arnaldo Guillen de Brocar. There are considerable Hellenic communities in Europe, North America, and Australia a significant number of academics working on ancient, Byzantine, and modern Greek and an important worldwide market for bilingual ecclesiastical texts. However, in a reflection of its history in the last five centuries, there is a huge interest for Greek typography from outside the boundaries of the Greek Statestate. In this context, the Greek script is a relatively minor, if indispensable, player. Furthermore, the assignment of candidate-for-entry status to several countries in central and eastern Europe, and the tightening of relationships with other countries in the region, foregrounded not only the requirements of the extended Latin script, but the different flavours of the Cyrillic script in use within the broader European area. An obvious arena was the broader European region: the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 which, at the same time as bringing the European Union closer to integration on a number of fields, marked a heightening of awareness in cultural characteristics, down to an explicit statement of support for dialects and local script variations. The last few years saw multilingual typography literally explode. Since 1997, my own work and that of other designers–both Greeks and non-Greeks–proved me right. I should add that this argument had two weak points: one, it was based on a small amount of personal experience in type design and a lot of intuition, rather than research and, two, it was quite possible that, as a Greek, I was making the ‘right’ choices by default. This position was based on my understanding of the decisions a designer must make in designing a Greek typeface. In other words, although a ‘typographically attuned’ native user should test a design in real circumstances, any designer could, with the right preparation and monitoring, produce competent typefaces. My position was that knowledge and use of a language is not a prerequisite for understanding the script to a very high, if though not conclusive, degree. It is worth keeping these points in mind when reading the text.]Īt the 1997 ATypI Conference at Reading I gave a talk with the title ‘Typography and the Greek language: designing typefaces in a cultural context.’ The inspiration for that talk was a discussion with Christopher Burke on designing typefaces for a script one is not linguistically familiar with. Only Adobe had made significant original contributions, and designers were just beginning to be interested in the challenges of Greek typeface design. In 1998 – even in 2000, when the second edit took place – the state of Greek fonts internationally was very different that nearly fifteen years later. 3 never materialised, and the text was later edited again for inclusion in the book published by ATypI with the occasion of the Bukva:raz competition (2001). The text was written in 1998 for the third issue of Type, the ATypI journal. [ n.b. This is a pre-publication version of the text that appeared eventually in Language, Culture, Type in 2002.
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