Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, clerical workers, and anyone else who arranges type for a product. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users. According to David Jury, "Typography is now something everybody does."
History
Typography traces its origins to the first punches and dies used to make seals and currency in ancient times. The typographical principle, that is the creation of a complete text by reusing identical characters, was first realized in the Phaistos Disc, an enigmatic Minoan print item from Crete, Greece, which dates between 1850 and 1600 BC. It has been put forward that Roman lead pipe inscriptions were created by movable type printing,but this view has been recently dismissed by the German typographer Herbert Brekle.
The essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119 that was created by the same technique as the Phaistos disc.In the northern Italian town of Cividale, there is a Venetian silver retable from ca. 1200, which was printed with individual letter punches.The same printing technique can apparently be found in 10th to 12th century Byzantine staurotheca and lipsanotheca.Individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order were reasonably widespread in medieval Northern Europe.
Modern movable type, along with the mechanical printing press, was invented in mid-15th century Europe by the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg.His type pieces from a lead-based alloy suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today.Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts. This technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution.
Typography with movable type was separately invented in 11th-century China. Metal type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty around 1230. Both hand printing systems, however, were only sporadically used and discontinued after the introduction of Western lead type and the printing press.
this is for examples
