Emigre and the Adobe team (made up of Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach) were active on the West Coast of the United States and were influenced by their location, which functioned as a center of technological innovation. King chose those places as visible centers of typographic activity. “New Faces: Type Design in the First Decade of Device‑Independent Digital Typesetting (1987–1997)”, 1999. Her work was sparked by a desire to understand the circumstances behind the proliferation of new typefaces at the time. This trend toward an independent small-scale activity is explained in writer and curator Emily King’s extensive investigation into type design in London, the Netherlands, and the East and West Coasts of the United States between 19. “The Digital Wave.” Eye, Summer 1992.ĥA few years later, most type activity was indeed coming from individual type designers and small foundries. Meanwhile, software and computer hardware companies like Adobe and Apple were on the rise, accompanied in their ascent by small foundries such as Emigre, the Enschedé Font Foundry, and FontShop/FontFont, which worked from the desktop. Kinross focuses on the downfall of the metal and photographic type industry, with some exceptions that hung on or found niches in the market. Historical contextĪ handful of theoretical studies written between 19 help contextualize the subject of my report, providing an account of the digital type industry after the digital revolution of the 1980s.ĤIn his article “The Digital Wave”, Robin Kinross described the changes wrought by this revolution, prompted by the introduction of PostScript technology. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, which also produce type, are not, for the purposes of this study, considered foundries. Additionally, this report does not include in its scope the Monotype corporation, as well as other “major” companies owned by Monotype - including Linotype, ITC, Ascender, and Bitstream. Most font labels today are independent entities, not owned by larger conglomerate businesses, so the phrase seems increasingly redundant.ģType designers who rely on other foundries for visibility, sales, and promotion are not, for the purposes of this study, considered to be running foundries. In the first version of this report, the term “independent” was used in conjunction with “type foundries”. This terminology was carried over from metal type production into the digital era. “Foundries” and “type foundries” are companies that design, produce, and sell fonts directly and/or through font distributors. Also included here are branches of graphic design studios that sell retail type. Terminologyġ 2In the context of this study, the terms “foundry” and “type foundry” specifically refer to companies created and mainly controlled by designers, including both small foundries and more established companies such as Emigre, Font Bureau, or FontFont/FSI. Although the theoretical studies I summarize here help us understand how type foundries emerged after the digital revolution and hint at the present and future of the industry, a more recent, thorough examination has not been undertaken until now. The literature on type foundries is not extensive. (See also MS&J, Amsterdam, and Haas.) For a look at today’s foundries, click in the right margin. This image of the Linotype factory, from the 1919 Mergenthaler book Newspaper Heads, gives a sense of what type founding looked like in the metal era: massive, industrial operations with thousands of employees.
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