A response to Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography
Jackie Barnes
I found this essay difficult to start; the beginning was very dry and uninteresting. The section on Lettering began to suck me into the essay. The examples and history piqued my interest. I found the most interesting fact to be the history of the lowercase letter, as the written letter got lazier and lazier, the letterform changed into what we know today. Gill also felt that making the correct letter form has as much to do with tuition as to do with knowledge of letterforms, and I really think that is true.
For much of the essay Gill seems to discuss the workings of the process of design and printing as well as the integrity of the position. There is a lot of honor in selecting the materials and using them correctly. He talked about the selection of paper and how it is something intuitive in a designer and I really believe that is true. Even today, interaction with the printer has been reduced to a minimum and in most cases, where jobs are done on printers that don’t need a press operator, I still choose the higher grade paper. For a designer, aesthetic of a product is just as important as the function. I feel in many ways this makes us a combination of an engineer and an artist, and the combination of these two trades come from our history, where pressmen were more engineer, and the people doing the designing were more artists.
I think in many ways, Gill’s thinking was British design thinking of his time. Print in craftsmanship and really living up to the honor of their work. This is well after the arts and crafts movement, but I feel he is inspired by it, even if he wasn’t primarily a printer, and history will remember him as a type designer, printing was and is a crafter, and it is an art.
British culture today really values the well designed and well considered. Of course, I have yet to get there, but from this, it is obvious; more time is spent concerned with the making of something that Americans would consider adding to a process. Even selecting the correct serifs in a typeface is a meticulous and exact process. Gill considers every angle of the design process, from the exact placement of type to the precise printing process it will go through, including the way it will be punch cut, either by hand or machine would ultimately make a very small difference in the design, but a difference is still there, he considers it all.
I find this dedication very interesting and I do with it would be more of a common norm in America. I feel we are more obsessed in the outcome to consider the smaller, very important details of process. From this essay I have gained a much bigger sense of the importance of process and a better appreciation for the exactitude of its execution.
