Bembo typeface history movie#

The Bembo typeface is inherently easy to read and therefore is an excellent book font and has proved itself time and time again.

Bembo typeface history movie#

In more modern settings it has a place in movie and book titling, as well as representational texts. The Bembo font family lives on as tribute to the superlative typographical efforts of Stanley Morison.īiblical scholars, linguists, medievalists and classicists have all found use for the Bembo font family.

Morison was influential in a number of areas of typography, pioneering the creation of a large number of typefaces for Monotype. He also consulted for the London Times newspaper, creating the typeface Times New Roman® in a successful effort to improve the paper’s readability. Morison, a well-respected English typographer, was a typographic consultant to the Monotype Corporation. Morison’s Bembo design was released for typesetting in 1929, whose redesign was the result of adapting the Bembo typeface to the machine composition and typesetting requirements of the day. Notably, the ascenders of the lowercase lettering are taller than the uppercase also the c is slanted forwards and there is a returned curve on the final stem of the m, n and h. The calligraphic style that the serifs pronounce imparts a warm human feel to the typeface. In fact, the characteristics of many other well known typefaces such as Garamond® and Times® Roman can be traced back to the Bembo typeface. The resulting typeface which was a departure from the common pen-drawn calligraphy of the day, and looked more similar to the style of the roman typefaces we are familiar with today. In the case of the Bembo typeface, Griffo could not have known how important in the history of typeface design his new cut would be. A punchcutter was a very skilled job and the their interpretation of a typeface design would be what was eventually printed typeface designers had little input into the punchcutter’s work once their design had passed out of their hands.

The Bembo typeface was cut by Francesco Griffo, a Venetian goldsmith who had become a punchcutter and worked for revered printer Aldus Manutius.īeing a punchcutter meant that Griffo spent his days punching out the shape of a typeface into steel. The typeface originally used to publish Pietro Bembo’s book “De Aetna”, a book about Bembo’s visit to Mount Etna. The Bembo design was named after notable the Venetian poet, Cardinal and literary theorist of the 16th century Pietro Bembo. The original Morison typeface contained only four weights and no italics. Aspects of the drawing and “color” of the well-known typeface Galliard, an earlier Carter design, are also evident in the Yale face.įirst developed for use in Yale’s current signage initiative, the Yale typeface was extended to include bold roman and bold italic fonts suitable for print and Web work and as of August 2014 it is provided in the OpenType file format which is cross-compatible with Macintosh, Windows, and Unix operating systems.The Bembo® design is an old-style humanist serif typeface originally cut by Francesco Griffo in 1495 and revived by Stanley Morison in 1929. Matthew Carter’s “Yale” recovers the strength of the Aldine original and updates it by sensitively simplifying the essential letterforms and their details. Unfortunately, digital versions of Bembo lack the vigor and weight of either the De Aetna face or the original Monotype version of Bembo. It appeared regularly in Yale publications of all kinds. The resulting typeface, Bembo, proved to be one of the most widely used and highly regarded book faces of the twentieth century. In 1929, Stanley Morison of the Monotype Corporation in England led a project to revive Aldus’s De Aetna face. Arguably, it has had the greatest influence upon subsequent type design of any Renaissance typeface. A copy of this book may be found in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.Īldus Manutius was among the most prolific and successful publishers of printed books in his day, and the De Aetna face was used to set a number of his scholarly publications which were widely distributed and admired in Renaissance Europe. “Yale” is inspired by the late-fifteenth-century Venetian typeface that first appeared in Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, published by Aldus Manutius in 1495.