When was baskerville font invented

Adobe sells BaskervilleBE BaskervilleBT : Bitstream's version, Bitstream also offers Baskerville No. Comments here. Baskerville is a family published by Timberwolf Type. It was drawn by Lars Bergquist and is directly based on Baskerville's edition of Virgil. It comes with a wonderful Baskerville Caps font. Image Club Graphics has a set of NewBaskerville fonts. A classic typeface with a checkered past, what more could you want?

Baskerville was designed by John Baskerville in in England. Transitional typefaces tended to be disliked in their time, as people were so used to traditional type that the new changes seemed drastic to them, however today they are appreciated because they are one step down in contrast from the modern typefaces.

The style difference will be discussed below. When John Baskerville designed his namesake typeface, his goal was to perfect the styles of a much older typeface, Caslon.

The idea was to make it more legible, for the time period was experimenting with readability as well as paper and ink manufacturing. This made poor old Baskerville essentially obsolete until , when Bruce Rogers gave it life again for the Harvard University Press. After that, popularity increased dramatically, making Baskerville so well known today. Unfortunately John Baskerville passed in , so he never got any real fame or wealth for his now loved font. As I mentioned earlier, Baskerville was inspired from the idea of perfecting Caslon.

The only real flair he added was in the swash on the Q and in many of the uppercase letters in the italic version, which reflected his career as a professional writer. Other than that, John Baskerville focused on creating a higher contrast between thick and thin strokes, sharpening serifs, and shifting the axis of round letters to be more vertical.

This also made the round strokes more circular, which resulted in more regular and consistent letterforms. That being said, the difference between an old style typeface Caslon , a transitional typeface Baskerville , and a modern typeface Bodoni is mainly the contrast between thick and thin strokes.

In Wikipedia. Sarah, L. Baskerville Type Book. And here's my final project for the course, in which I try to take this text and turn it into a "typographic poster. I loved how the right side of the ampersand sort of looked like a hand holding a dinner platter and I wanted to try to play with this idea in the design.

I was also interested in trying to evoke Baskerville's middle place on a timeline, using the " The most challenging part of the design was to try to evoke this balance of classic and modern.

I didn't want to push the design too far, as I thought that getting too edgy would take away from Baskerville's connotations - but an exceedingly formal design wouldn't work either. I think the breakthrough came in choosing the color. I went with the primary color in Shepard Fairey's iconic "Hope" poster - trying to evoke a bit of nostalgia for more balanced times.

All in all, this was an amazing course, and I'm hoping to get a chance, at some point, to continue on with other courses in the series on image making and graphic design. Oh, and if you are looking for a version of Baskerville to use online, check out the google font Libre Baskerville.