On the Origin of Patterning in Movable Latin Type (b/w trade edition)

October 2016 Dutch type designer, software developer, researcher, and Senior Lecturer Frank E. Blokland (1959) successfully defended his PhD dissertation at Leiden University. This revolutionary and controversial study is available now as print-on-demand book for graphic-design students, type designers, typographers, scholars, and everyone who loves type. Blokland’s research (http://www.lettermodel.org) was conducted to test the hypothesis that Gutenberg and his peers developed a standardised and unitised system for the production of textura type and that this system was extrapolated for roman type. Humanistic handwriting was simply moulded into a fixed system already developed for the production of gothic type. Renaissance typographic patterns were partly determined by requirements for the type production. Hence, today’s typographic conventions are not only the result of optical preferences predating movable type but at least as much the result of standardisation that eased the Renaissance type production.