Unit 14 – Initial Points of Interest

For a while now I've been interested in 'lost' or 'forgotten' typographic conventions, and am considering basing my Unit 14 project around them. One example of a lost convention that has caught my eye recently is 'escalated indents', which is where colums are set so that the text is justified, but line lengths decrease towards the end of a paragraph and are centred, so that they end in a 'point'. These seem to have been really popular in 16th century Venitian printing, and an example from 1545 by the printer Antonio Manuzio can be seen below:

Another lovely lost convention is that seen in the printing and mixing of typefaces in Victorian playbill adverts like this one:



It's my guess most of these excessive conventions were effectively killed off by modernism. As much as I love aspects of modernism, I am getting rather bored of it, which is possibly what drew me to these typographic conventions in the first place...you just don't see them any more (unless it's a deliberate historical reference or pastiche). I also want to make use of the CSM letterpress studio before I graduate, seeing as I've kind of neglected it so far, and basing a project that uses a historical process on historical practices seems fair enough.

I've always been interested in where styles come from and the ideology behind them, and not just limited to design. For example...apparently baggy clothes became popular in hip-hop culture because people were skinnier when they left jail. Part of my dissertation looked at the ideology behind modernism and post-modernism, which I really enjoyed researching, so I may start by researching the reasons for these typographic conventions.