Chapter 7: Renaissance Graphic Design

Nicolas Jenson

1405

Master of the Royal Mint of Tours, France, was a highly skilled cutter of the dies used for striking coins. He established Venice’s second press. One of history’s greatest typeface designers and punch cutters, his fonts were characterized by extreme legibility and established a new standard of excellence, with wider letterforms, lighter tone, and a more even texture of black strokes on the white background.

Roberto Valturio’s manual on warfare, De re militari

1455

Printed by Johannes Nicolai de Verona; includes examples of the fine-line style of woodblock illustration that became popular in Italian graphic design later in the fifteenth century. This extraordinary book is a compendium of contemporary techniques and devices for scaling walls, catapulting missiles, ramming fortifications, and torturing enemies. The text is set in a tight column with wide margins, and the freely shaped images are spread across the pages in dynamic, asymmetrical layouts.

Italian Typographic Book Design.

1465

Venice, the center of commerce and Europe’s gateway to trade with the eastern Mediterranean nations, India, and the Orient, led the way in Italian typographic book design. The first Italian press was opened in Subiaco in 1465 by two guys named Sweynheym and Pannartz.

1470 edition of De civitate Dei

1470

A goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, Johannes de Spira was given a five-year monopoly on printing in Venice. He printed the first typographic book with page numbers, the 1470 edition of De civitate Dei, and designed an innovative and handsome Roman type that cast off some of the Gothic qualities found in earlier fonts.

Calendarium

1476

Erhard Ratdolt’s Calendarium was published in Venice in 1476. Sixty diagrams printed in black and yellow were used to scientifically explain solar and lunar eclipses. The understanding of eclipses moved from black magic to predictable facts, and the book contains a three-part mathematical wheel for calculating solar cycles.

Aldus Manutius

1494

Aldus Manutius was an important humanist and scholar of the Italian Renaissance who established Aldine Press in 1494 and published major works of the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman cultures.

Francesco Griffo (Francesco da Bologna)

1495

A brilliant typeface designer and punch cutter who cut Roman, Greek, Hebrew, and the first italic types for Aldine Press editions. His initial project in Venice was a Roman face for De Aetna by Pietro Bembo in 1495, which survives as the book text face Bembo. He researched pre-Caroline scripts to produce a Roman type that was more authentic than Nicolas Jenson’s.

Hans Holbein's "Imagines Mortis"

1497

Hans Holbein the Younger created a series of forty-one woodcuts illustrating Imagines Mortis (The Dance of Death), in which skeletons are depicted leading the living to their graves.

Virgil’s Opera

1501

In 1501, the Aldine Press published Virgil’s Opera (Works), which was the prototype of the pocket book. This edition had a 3.75-by-6-inch page size and was set in the first italic type font. Between the smaller type size and the narrower width of italic characters, a 50 percent gain in the number of characters per line of a given measure was achieved over Nicolas Jenson’s and Francesco Griffo’s types.

La Operina da Imparare

1522

The publication of Ludovico Arrighi’s small volume of 1522 entitled La Operina da Imparare di scrivere littera cancellarescha was the first of many sixteenth-century writing manuals and marked the beginning of a new era that ended the exclusive domain of the scriptorium.

Geoffroy Tory

1529

Geoffroy Tory was a publisher, printer, author, orthographic reformer, and prolific engraver who was mainly responsible for the French Renaissance style of book decoration and who played a leading part in popularizing in France the roman letter as against the prevailing Gothic. His important publications include a number of Books of Hours and his famous philological work "Champfleury"

Tory’s Champ Fleury

1529

Tory’s Champ Fleury was the author’s attempt to analyze, describe, and prescribe rules of the French language, both spoken and written.

Oronce Finé's Arithmetica

1533

He illustrated his own mathematics, geography, and astronomy books and worked closely with printers, particularly Simon de Colines, in the design and production of his books. The border on the title page for his 1533 book Arithmetica used carefully measured strapwork, symbolic figures representing areas of knowledge, and a criblé background. This border, combined with de Coline’s typography, created a masterpiece of Renaissance graphic design.

Claude Garamond

1540

Claude Garamond, the first punch cutter who worked independently of printing firms, established his type foundry to sell cast type that was ready to distribute into compositors’ cases. The fonts he cut during the 1540s achieved a tighter fit than allowed closer word spacing and a harmony of design between capitals, lowercase letters, and italics.

Robert Granjon

1543

He created delicate italic fonts featuring beautiful italic capitals with
swashes to replace regular capitals that were being used with italic
lowercase letters. The fleurons he designed were modular and could be put together in endless combinations to make headpieces, tailpieces, ornaments, and borders.

Christophe Plantin: copperplate engravings

1550

When a serious arm injury ended Christophe Plantin’s bookbinding career in the early 1550s, he changed his occupation to printing, and the Netherlands found its greatest printer. His company became the world’s largest and strongest publishing house and printed a full range of material, including classics and Bibles, herbals and medicine books, music, and maps. Plantin’s main design contribution was the use of copperplate engravings to illustrate his books.

Typography during the 17th century

1600

Not much innovation occurred in typography during the seventeenth century in Europe. Since there was an abundance of stock ornaments, punches, matrices, and woodblocks, there was little incentive for printers to commission new graphic material.

The Whole Booke of Psalmes

1639

In 1639, Stephen and Matthew Daye, a Bristish locksmith and his son, designed and printed the first book in the English American colonies, The Whole Booke of Psalmes (now called The Bay Psalm Book). The design and production of this book understandably lacked refinement. In spite of strong censorship and a stamp tax on newspapers and advertising, printing grew steadily in the colonies.