The impact of the new technologies is revolutionising typographic Essay

The impact of the new technologies is revolutionising typographic practice. How is typograhpy and the role of typographic designers changing to meet new challen - Essay Example drew Haslam (2005), in their book Type and Typography, referred to the term as that concerned with the creation of typefaces and their arrangement to convey a message. (introduction) There are various other versions of these definitions but it all boils down to one thing: Typography’s existence occurred sometime in the 15th century and is tied with the invention of the printing press because it was responsible for the mechanical notation and arrangement of language. To borrow the words of Philipp Meggs, Rob Carter and Ben Day (2002): â€Å"The development of printing technology so drastically changed the nature of written communication that the term typography was coined to describe the study, use, and design of sets of identical repeated letterforms. According to Meggs, Carter and Day, the invention of typography was, in fact, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, writing that the earliest mechanization of a handicraft is the hand-lettering of books. (p. 103) With the above information established, we underscore that typography evolves because of technology and thus, have had slightly differing meanings at different periods of history. In the age of the metal type, for instance, type and typeface were distinguished from each other, while in today’s digital age, they are used interchangeably. This will discussed, further later on. Peter Bil’ak offered us an interesting perspective when he said that typography should not be connected to any specific medium because it tends to change and evolve. The idea is that we continue to define and redefine the visual systems of visual language. We see this in the great leap we have achieved since the cave paintings to the synthesis of the digital pictographs. Tova Rabinowitz (2006) tells us that the widespread participation in typography’s recent evolution and its vibrant and experimental nature present an optimistic outlook for the continuation of type as a vehicle for expression and a democratizing cultural