The following are some of the back-stories that underscore the meanings of type. Type design and typography are routinely informed by conscious and unconscious contexts that change with time. Practical and commercial motivations prevail but social and political rationales are never far away. Typefaces and typography are never designed in a vacuum. As if to prove further how mutable such symbolism can be, in the 1940s Tschichold lambasted the ‘New Typography’ as inherently Fascist, prompting a backlash by betrayed followers who saw him as Alvin Lustig characterised him, a turncoat. ![]() Yet in 1941, the Nazis abandoned its own Volk type in favour of more readable faces. In 1933, however, the Nazi government revived the blackletter face, proclaiming it Volk (or the people’s) type and condemned the New Typography as un-German. In the sixteenth century, blackletter stood for German protestantism and nationalism, in the 1920s it was attacked for being antiquated, replaced by the New Typography, characterised by sans serif type in asymmetrical compositions and codified in 1928 by Jan Tschichold. Around the same time Maximilian, the German king rejected Antiqua (used in Latin manuscripts) in favour of spiky blackletter. ![]() ![]() Believing that standardised typography would make governance easier, Garamond’s face was ordered to be used for all official papers, and became a symbol of French enlightenment as well as the nation’s first proprietary font. In about 1540 the French monarch François I commissioned Claude Garamond to design the typeface that bears his name. Not every typeface is transparent, not all typography recedes certain types symbolise philosophies and ideologies, some represent institutions, nations, and cults, many have intrinsic meaning.
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