I used to think typography was just about picking fonts that looked nice.
Turns out, the whole history is messier than that—like, significantly messier. Before printing presses existed, monks spent decades hunched over vellum pages, hand-lettering biblical texts with quills and gold leaf, creating what we now call illuminated manuscripts. These weren’t just books; they were art objects, status symbols, declarations of devotion that took years to complete. The letters themselves were architectural—each capital letter might contain entire narrative scenes, tiny landscapes, mythological creatures curling around the ascenders and descenders. I’ve seen photographs of the Book of Kells, and honestly, the intricacy is exhausting to even look at. Every single letter was a deliberate choice, a physical commitment of ink and time.
Here’s the thing: those manuscripts weren’t meant to be read quickly. They were meant to be experienced, meditated upon, treasured. The letter forms—what we’d now call the typeface—were Carolingian minuscule or Gothic blackletter, depending on the region and century.
Then Gutenberg shows up in the 1450s with his movable type printing press, and suddenly typography becomes a technical problem rather than an artistic one. Wait—maybe that’s not quite right. It becomes both, actually. Gutenberg’s first typefaces mimicked the Gothic blackletter scripts monks had been using, because people didn’t trust printed books yet; they needed them to look handmade to be considered legitimate. But once printing spread across Europe, type designers started experimenting. Nicolas Jenson created a Roman typeface in 1470 that became the template for basically every serif font we use today—Times New Roman, Garamond, all of them trace back to Jenson’s obsession with classical Roman inscriptions. Claude Garamond refined this further in the 1500s, and his typefaces were so successful they were still being used, virtually unchanged, three centuries later.
The Industrial Revolution Turned Letters Into Commodities (Whether We Liked It Or Not)
By the 1800s, typography had become industrialized.
Foundries mass-produced metal type in hundreds of styles—fat faces, slab serifs, condensed sans-serifs designed to scream from advertising posters. This is when typography started to feel modern, or at least recognizable to us now. The letters weren’t sacred anymore; they were tools for commerce, for newspapers, for the expanding capitalist machinery that needed to sell things quickly and loudly. I guess it makes sense that the first sans-serif typefaces emerged during this period—1816, if you trust the records, though some historians think earlier examples existed and were just lost. Sans-serifs were considered vulgar at first, too plain, lacking the sophistication of traditional serifs. But they were legible from a distance, and that mattered more than elegance when you’re trying to sell soap or advertise a railway schedule.
Modernism Wanted Typography To Disappear (But Made It More Visible Instead)
Anyway, the 20th century brought the Bauhaus movement and Swiss modernism, both of which had very strong opinions about what letters should do.
Designers like Jan Tschichold and later Josef Müller-Brockmann argued that typography should be neutral, functional, almost invisible—a transparent vessel for information rather than a decorative distraction. This led to Helvetica in 1957, probably the most famous typeface ever created, used for everything from subway signs to corporate logos. Helvetica was supposed to be objective, universal, free from historical baggage. Except it wasn’t, not really. It carried the ideological assumptions of mid-century European rationalism, the belief that design could solve social problems through clarity and order. I’ve always found it slightly ironic that a typeface designed to be neutral became such a powerful symbol of corporate modernism—like, you can’t recieve a bank statement or walk through an airport without encountering Helvetica. It’s everywhere precisely because it tries so hard to be nowhere.
Digital Fonts Promised Infinite Variety But Gave Us Comic Sans
The shift to digital changed everything, obviously.
When Adobe introduced PostScript in the 1980s, fonts stopped being physical objects—metal blocks or photographic negatives—and became software, mathematical descriptions of curves and points. Suddenly anyone with a computer could create a typeface, and they did, thousands of them, many of them terrible. Comic Sans was designed in 1994 for Microsoft, intended for cartoon speech bubbles, and somehow became the most hated font in history despite being, objectively, pretty well-suited for its original purpose. The democratization of type design meant we got incredible diversity—fonts for every conceivable mood, context, language system—but also a kind of visual chaos. Digital fonts can be infinitely scaled, instantly distributed, layered with effects that would’ve been impossible in metal or wood type. Yet we’re still, in a weird way, constrained by the same basic structures monks used in the 1200s: ascenders, descenders, serifs or the absence of them, the tension between legibility and expression.
We’re Still Arguing About What Letters Should Look Like (And Probably Always Will Be)
Typography now exists in this strange liminal space between the historical and the experimental.
Variable fonts—introduced around 2016—let designers adjust weight, width, and slant along continuous axes rather than choosing from fixed styles, which is definately closer to how hand-lettering worked than traditional digital fonts ever were. Meanwhile, designers keep reviving historical typefaces, digitizing specimens from the 1500s or 1800s, trying to recapture something that was lost in the transition to pixels. I used to think this was nostalgic and backward-looking, but now I think it’s more complicated than that. Maybe we’re just recognizing that typography has always been about negotiating between the past and the present, between craft and technology, between the desire for letters to be functional and the need for them to carry meaning beyond their literal content. The illuminated manuscripts and the digital fonts aren’t opposites—they’re different solutions to the same fundamental human impulse to make language visible, to give words a body that can be seen and touched and remembered.
