Graphic Design >> Design Fundamentals: Kerning and Tracking. Type History: What a Difference a Century Makes. A few months back, I took a stroll down memory lane to revisit some popular faces from the 1980s that have been neglected recently and deserve a better fate.
But now I'm reaching a bit farther back--a century back, in fact, to 1909--to see what Section 6, Part 2, of my revered Volume 204 of the International Correspondence School Reference Library calls "the best advertising, catalog, booklet, and folder types. " Even if I had revivals in mind, I'd be out of luck; most of these faces never made the transition from metal to digital. The turn of the 20th century was the beginning of a golden age for advertising types, and the demand for novel and distinctive faces was just as strong as it is today. But the idea of typeface families was new, and the idea of routinely creating bold and italic complements to roman faces was just beginning to take hold.
Most of the 30-odd types in the ICS book deserve the obscurity they now enjoy, as they look decidedly out of date.