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1. Introduction
Legibility was considered to be untouchable for centuries. The approach to type design emphasized clarity over expression, and typographers were supposed to be invisible. Typography, often defined as a craft, a fine art, a science, and now also as a business, tries to deal with il-legibility, for which there is not any accurate definition. Throughout this book, I will be using the term legibility as a quality of reading in a piece of graphic design.
Gutenberg's invention of movable type printing technique sometime around 1440 had a great impact on the thinking of human beings. The enormous benefit of his discovery helped people to capture writing, a graphic record of speech, but what is more important; it made writing more affordable to masses. It has greatly reduced illiteracy, and from the age of darkness we came out to bright light, to the epoch of the modern history of mankind. The principles of Gutenberg's printing technique did not change until the 20th century.
The time between the most significant inventions in history is rapidly shortening. We had been printing books for about 500 years when the adaptation from hot-metal type to phototypesetting took place in the 1960s. Again, the process of manufacturing printed materials has become cheaper and easier; it has improved quality of print, and it has broadened the existing library of typefaces. In the last decade, technology has been changing increasingly quickly, with an immense effect upon our culture. In 1984, Apple Macintosh introduced their first personal computer that allowed the user to work with typography on screen. In 1985, Adobe Systems, Inc. introduced PostScript, a language that describes and offers to manipulate material on an electronic page - text, graphics, images, and other lay-out information, and eventually, in 1986, Altsys Fontographer presented the first software to enable users to create a typeface on the computer.
These changes are as critical as the invention of movable letters. Rapid advancement in computer graphic technology enabled designers to achieve unprecedented results. With improved technology, a typographer does not have to be concerned with the technical limitations of the printing process anymore. One can fully express one's ideas.
Probably we were not prepared for the age of computers; it came up too early, and people are still in shock. We do not have words for new technologies; we can not orient in an unfamiliar territory. It is a revolution with all aspects of it, old rules of typography do not apply anymore, and we have not established the new ones yet. We can not realize how much the computers have affected us because we are still in the age of the computer's infancy. Besides all that, we have to deal with typography that is not as legible as we were used to.
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