1. July 2024
Matthias Wagener
Vast Forward has been a 100% remote company since 2008 – but we still love to get together as a team as often as possible!
And while meeting in person and catching up is exciting in and of itself, we like to combine these events with some sort of training and challenge to playfully incorporate work into our get-togethers and make the most of our quality time.
This year we are meeting in Leipzig, Germany, and we are coming together with a pretty full agenda – but insights into that will have to wait. For now, let’s talk about last Monday’s kick-off event and the theme that runs through both the kick-off event and our upcoming get-together – typography!
An old friend of ours, Kay Stemmer, started his career as a trained print template manufacturer and is now an experienced communication designer with his company leitbild kommunikation in Bremen. He accepted the challenge and shared his version of a typographic journey from the beginnings of type to reproduction techniques to desktop publishing and the demands of typography in communication:
The oldest Western characters are estimated to have appeared more than 5000 years ago, and the first character to share characteristics with our Latin alphabet was the Capitalia Monumentalis. Carved in stone or slate, these characters were the basis for writing with ink and quill. Since copying texts took a long time, Johannes Gutenberg (whose name was actually Johannes Gensfleisch) changed the (Western) world in the mid-15th century when he invented the printing press with interchangeable letters. The next big step in printing came from Otto Mergenthaler, who invented the Linotype around 1886. His idea was to mechanize the process of setting type, making it possible to cast entire lines of type (line-o-type), which greatly accelerated the production of printed material.
Another hundred years later, in 1984, Apple set a standard in desktop publishing and, with Adobe, invented the PostScript format, which digitized characters and increased the number of possible characters to 256. Less than 20 years later, OpenType increased the number of possible characters to more than 65,000, opening up the possibilities for languages with different characters, ligatures, mathematical signs, and more.
Kay’s overview of typography sets the stage for this year’s event theme, “From early writing to prompting – text is alive and kicking”.
With upcoming virtual events, we’ll also explore how these technologies can help transform our workflows and creative processes. As always throughout the year, the team will have the opportunity to earn points through various challenges – because learning and development should be fun!
Picture 1 – OpenType Ligaturen1.png. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 30, 2024, from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:OpenType_Ligaturen1.png
Picture 2 – “OpenType sprachspezifische Varianten.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 21 September 2010, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:OpenType_sprachspezifische_Varianten.png. Accessed June 30 2024. Public Domain.
Picture 3 – Gojdo. (2018). Variants of some Cyrillic letters in cursive form [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_cursive.svg. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Picture 4 – Antonsusi. (2013, February 25). UCB Mathematical Operators.png [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UCB_Mathematical_Operators.png. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany (CC BY 3.0 DE) license. Here is the link to the license: CC BY 3.0 DE.
