Modern Typography

Modern Typography, 2nd Edition is a completely updated and revised edition of Robin Kinross's classic survey of European and North American typography since 1700, first published in 1992. In addition to numerous new illustrations and revised text, Modern Typography has been re-scaled to a new, convenient pocket format. Kinross's overview breaks ground by focusing on the history of typography as an intricate web of social, technical, and material processes, rather than a parade of typeface styles. Eye magazine calls Modern Typography the book that tells "how modern typography got to be the way it is." Together, Kinross's clear, concise writing combined with his extensive knowledge of the history of typography create a gold standard for how design history ought to be written.

A revised edition of the standard guide to the avant-garde origins of modern graphic design and typography, illustrated with many iconic examples.

Since it was first published in 1969, it has served as the standard guide to the impact of twentieth century avant-garde movements on graphic design and typography.

"Probably the most important work on typography and graphic design in the twentieth century."--Carl Zahn, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Drucker skillfully traces the development of this critical position, suggesting a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara. Drucker explores the context for experimental typography in terms of printing, handwriting, and other practices concerned with the visual representation of language. Her book concludes with a brief look at the ways in which experimental techniques of the early avant-garde were transformed in both literary work and in applications to commercial design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

6 different typography designs are issued on twelve notecards. This collection features typography coverying popular classics and unique hand-drawn type experiments from the 1920s to the 1960s. Each card is accopmanied by the story of its origin.

This is a style guide for making decisions about layout and typography. Drawing on a variety of sources, old and new, it presents an overview and analysis of two fundamentally different typographic approaches - the traditional style that evolved over centuries from the Renaissance book, and the modern style that reflects the German-Swiss philosophy of this century. Each style is a reflection of a particular philosophy; each has its own structure and its own set of procedures, priorities and rules. Each section of the book is a model of the style it presents and includes numerous examples, old and new. The book comes with two supplemental materials - a 48-page workbook provides exercises, samples, and specifications for reproducing page samples, grids, and layouts; an 800K disk contains layout templates for traditional and modern formats.

In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.

A visual guide to the best in contemporary typographic design, this book features examples and usages of modern typography from around the world.