Didone (typography)

It amalgamates the surnames of the famous typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, whose efforts defined the style around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

[6]) These trends were also accompanied by changes to page layout conventions and the abolition of the long s.[7][8][9][10][11][12] Typefounder Talbot Baines Reed, speaking in 1890 called the new style of the early nineteenth century "trim, sleek, gentlemanly, somewhat dazzling".

[16] Didone typefaces came to dominate printing by the middle of the nineteenth century, although some "old style" faces continued to be sold and new ones developed by typefounders.

Nicolete Gray has described later Didone typefaces as depressing and unpleasant to read: "the first modern faces designed around 1800 and 1810 are charming; neat, rational and witty.

[23] Stanley Morison of the printing equipment company Monotype, a leading supporter of the revival of "old-style" and transitional typefaces, wrote in 1937 of the eighteen-fifties being a time of "batteries of bold, bad faces" and said that "the types cut between 1810 and 1850 represent the worst that have ever been.

The rise of the slab serif and sans-serif genres displaced fat faces from much display use, while the revival of interest in "old-style" designs reduced its use in body text.

I cannot recognise in my proofs the verses … our present day punches, which are so precise, so correct, so regularly aligned, so mathematically symmetrical ... no doubt have their merits, but I should prefer to see them kept for printing reports on the railway.

The adherents of the old irregular alphabets, which were made so because scarcely anyone was capable of making them better, might just as reasonably advocate a return to the rough and unplaned machinery of the first locomotive steam engines, taking as their model the old "Puffing Billy", now so carefully preserved in the Patent Museum at South Kensington.

[45]One influential example in the late nineteenth century was William Morris's Kelmscott Press, which commissioned new custom fonts such as his Golden Type on medieval and early Renaissance models.

While he mentioned Bodoni in his book Elements of Lettering, he wrote that it was a style "for which the writer cannot develop any enthusiasm", adding: "his pages [had] the brilliance of a fine engraving.

The writer dislikes Bodoni's types, because none of them seem free from a feeling of artificiality"[46] As an experiment in this period, Goudy attempted to 'redeem' Didone capitals for titling purposes by leaving a white line in the centre of the thick strokes.

[46][47] Nonetheless, Didone designs have remained in use, and the genre is recognised on the VOX-ATypI classification system of typefaces and by the Association Typographique Internationale (AtypI).

Fat face typefaces remained popular for display use in the mid-twentieth century with new designs such as Monotype's Falstaff and Morris Fuller Benton's Ultra Bodoni; Matthew Carter's Elephant is a more recent version.

[68] Many modern Didone digital revivals intended for professional printing, such as Parmagiano, ITC Bodoni and Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Didot and Surveyor, have a range of optical sizes, but this is less common on default computer fonts.

The shape of nineteenth-century Didone designs, with their narrow apertures, has been suggested as a major influence on many early sans-serif fonts such as Akzidenz-Grotesk and its derivatives such as Helvetica, developed in Europe some years after their introduction.

[79][80] Intended as attention-grabbing novelty display designs more than as serious choices for body text, within four years of their introduction the printer Thomas Curson Hansard had described them as 'typographic monstrosities'.

[81] Nonetheless, somewhat toned-down derivatives of this style persisted in popular use throughout the nineteenth century, and are commonly associated with 'wild west' printing on posters.

Didot's type in the Code civil des Français , printed by the company of Firmin Didot in 1804.
Two pages from Bodoni's Manuale Tipografico , a posthumous showcase of his work and engraving by his wife.
Types by the Amoretti Brothers .
The 1861 title page of Great Expectations in the sharp, high-contrast Didone type of the period. Popular at the time, the style had disappeared almost completely by the middle of the twentieth century.
Fat face type on a poster. London, c. 1840s
An ultra-bold Didone "fat face" from the A.W. Kinsley & Co. foundry, Albany , 1829. Similar designs, more or less inspired by typefaces, were used on gravestones in the northern USA. [ 26 ]
A bold inline modern face in a specimen issued by William Caslon IV. [ 27 ]
Custom typefaces of the Kelmscott Press. Its medievalist approach and custom typefaces were imitated by many printers, publishers and typefounders in the late nineteenth century.
In Elements of Lettering , Goudy comments on the work of Baskerville and Bodoni in a book typeset with his Kennerley Old Style . Kennerley is an example of the revival of 'old style' fonts that began to displace Didone type for much general use around the end of the nineteenth century. [ 46 ]
A mixture of regular-weight and bolder Didot-style types (proclamation of William III of the Netherlands , 1849)
A Didot-style font on the logo of Vogue UK
As "Didone" serif text faces were the norm throughout the nineteenth century, other fonts of the period and beyond were derived on them. In this picture, a Clarendon display typeface is shown, with the standard nineteenth-century 'R' and 'Q' but bulked-up letterforms and boosted x-height for display printing. [ b ]
A document printed in 1836, showing Didone (body text), 'Italian' (the word 'proceedings') and early sans-serif fonts.