http://www.counterspace.us/typography/timeline
I found this interactive website which is a timeline of everything involved in type, the interesting parts for me is that is has when all the major fonts were created and information about them, so with the other information i have i can create the timeline for the type.
http://www.rsub.com/typographic/
Another website i found which has lots of information on the creation of typography.
Firstly there is another interactive timeline which provides lots of information about font, designers and specific changes dated.
Designers
Francesco Griffo, an Italian punchcutter who worked for the book publisher Aldus Manutius, was born in 1450. He designed several Roman typefaces, the first of which was used in Pietro Bembo's "De Aetna". In 1501 Griffo designed and cut the first Italic typeface which was based on chancery style hand writing. All of Griffo's original punches are either lost or destroyed, however, some of his typefaces have been carefully reconstructed from the printed books in which they were used.
Claude Garamond was born in 1490. A French punchcutter working mainly in Paris , he authored many typefaces in renaissance Roman styles, as well as two italics. Many of his punches survive today and are kept at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and at the Imprimerie National in Paris. Though most of today's garamonds are actually based on the work of Jean Jannon, there are a few bearing Garamond's name that are based directly on his work, and countless others including Jan Tschichold's Sabon that owe large elements of their design to Garamond.
The French punchcutter and printer Jean Jannon was born in 1580. He authored a series of Baroque romans and italics. A good deal of Jannon's original material survives today at the Imprimierie Nationale in Paris, where his typefaces are known as the Caracteres de l'universite. Most of today's Garamond typefaces are based on the work of Jean Jannon rather than his Predecessor Claude Garamond.
Born in 1606, Christoffel Van Dijck was a Dutch punchcutter who authored several Baroque romans and italics. He set the standard for Dutch oldstyle typography, which greatly influenced William Caslon in his Oldstyle type designs. Most of Van Dijck's material has been destroyed. The remaining punches and matrices are at Johann Enschende en Zonen, in Haarlem, Netherlands.
William Caslon was born in 1692 in the village of Cradeley, in England. At thirteen he was apprenticed to an engraver in London, and by his twenty-fourth birthday he had become a successful independent engraver. Caslon began designing typefaces in 1720 when he was commissioned to create a typeface for the New Testament. The Roman Oldstyle typeface he created was wildly successful and became the model for many typefaces bearing his name even into the twentieth century. Building on this success William started the first large British type foundry in 1737, a business which remained in the family for several generations.
Born in 1706 in Worcestershire, England, John Baskerville began engraving tombstones and working as a calligrapher at an early age. By 1750 Baskerville had built up a reasonable personal fortune working outside the typographic fields. At this time he took up printing and typefounding as a hobby. In an effort to improve on the designs of William Caslon, Baskerville created transitional typefaces as he bridged between oldstyle typefaces and what would become modern typefaces.
In the year 1740 Giambattista Bodoni was born into a printing family in Saluzzo, Italy. At the tender age of 18, he was hired by the Vatican printing house, and in 1768 at the age of 28 he was appointed Director of the Press of Ferdinand, the duke of Parma. There he produced books for the wealthy aristocrats. While these books were greatly admired for their beauty and craftsmanship, the content was often inaccurate and difficult to read. His collection of typefaces was printed after his death in 1813 in a two volume set called Manuale Tipografico.
Paul Renner was born in Germany in 1878. His typeface futura, which captured the gestalt of the time in its design, has remained popular through the 1990's. His original drawings for this typeface are now in the Fundicion Tipografica Neufville, in Barcelona.
Eric Gill, born in 1882, was one of the master craftsmen of the twentieth century. Renowned as a sculptor and wood engraver, Gill spent most of his adult life working in various Catholic crafts communes. Though throughout his life he wrote many essays on such wide-ranging subjects as God, typography and the glory of the male sexual apparatus. Eric Gill also executed a large number of erotic drawings and prints. Oddly enough he did not see these as a contradiction to his Catholic belief system, but an extension of it. In 1928 Eric Gill designed Gill Sans, a sans serif typeface with a humanist feel. Allthough Eric Gill designed eleven typefaces of great beauty he did not consider himself to be primarily a typographer, but a craftsman.
In 1902 Jan Tschichold was born in Leipzig Germany. Though he was sent to school for letter painting, which had been his father's profession, he got a taste of typographic design and fell in love. His interest in avant-garde design started with his trip to the 1924 Bauhaus exhibition. In 1928 he published Die Neue Typographie (The New Typography) which advocated asymmetric layouts and sans serif typography. At the time these views were considered very controversial, particularly the advocacy of sans serif typography, which people thought to be illegible. In 1935, he published Typographische Gestaltung, in which he reversed on many of his positions, calling for a return to the traditions of formal typography and advocating the golden section. After World War Two, Tschichold moved to England, where he redesigned the entire Penguin paper back collection. In 1960, Tschichold was commissioned by a group of German printers who needed a typeface that would reproduce the same way using three disparate metal-casting. Tschichold named his new typeface after Jacques Sabon, a sixteenth century type founder.
Adrian Frutiger was born in 1928 in Switzerland. Frutiger has built a reputation for creating type for new technologies, including Univers, created for the Lumitype machine, and OCRB, which was designed to be read by computers. In addition to being one of the greatest type designers of the twentieth century, Adrian Frutiger is also a sculptor.
Mathew Carter was born in 1937. Carter is a type designer and scholar who works primarily in America. His text faces include Auriga, Charter, Galliard, and Bell Centennial. He designed the Snell Roundhand script based on the hand writing of Charles Snell, the English writing master and author of 'The Pen-man's Treasury Open'd'. Carter also designed the ground-breaking Walker type concept for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Typefaces
Old Style Typefaces - The typefaces we know today as Caslon are largely based on the work William Caslon did from 1720 to the time of his death in 1766. Though many of these typefaces have lost any trace of their historical roots, a few persist. These typefaces epitomize Old Style English typography, but the original designs were influenced by seventeenth century Dutch typefaces. Some of the original Caslon punches are kept in the Saint Bride Printing Library in London. 1716-1728
The transitional typefaces John Baskerville created were characterized by contrasts between thick and thin stroke widths and a greater overall delicacy in structure. The delicacy of his letterforms required an advancement in printing technology, a problem which he took on himself. This led to the development of hot press techniques. 1750
Bodoni pioneered the so-called modern typefaces. These typefaces are characterized by sharply contrasting thick-thin relationships, vertical rather than oblique structure, and unbracketed hairline serifs. 1791.
Gill Sans is a sans serif typeface designed by Eric Gill in 1928. Gill Sans' forms are simple and clean while paying homage to traditional typographic values. The design of the typeface is heavily influenced by the work of his teacher Edward Johnson. Eric Gill's work as a stone cutter also influenced the design, particularly the uppercase letters. The italic is a true sans serif as opposed to a sloped roman, and was a revolutionary achievement in its time. Gill Sans has been available from Monotype since 1928.
Futura was designed by Paul Renner, a designer based in Germany. Renner spent two years working out this subtly crafted geometric sans serif typeface. While the stroke appears to be unmodulated, it is in fact carefully shaped to provide optical balance. The extra bold weights and other less graceful designs were added later and were not part of Renner's design. 1930
Designed by Adrian Frutiger, Univers represented an attempt to improve upon nineteenth-century grotesques as well as the more geometrically designed sans serif faces produced in the early twentieth century. Though it was initially produced in Paris, Univers is considered to have its origins in Switzerland. Frutiger was Swiss born and educated. The most distinctive feature of Univers is that it is made up of a family of twenty one variants. All the variants have the same x-height, allowing them to be used in several different ways without conflict on a single page. 1961
The Walker type concept was initiated in 1996 as the Walker Art Center's identity. The idea behind the typeface was to create a family of letterforms with variant horizontal rules and "snap on" serifs. The typeface is capable of being sans serif or serif, offers five different types of serifs, and allows you to mix and match these options in any way. Walker has roman and italic variants. Walker speaks a single visual language through all its voices.
Development of type through the ages
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