Outraged, Manutius somehow convinced the Pope to decree that only the Manutius publishing house was permitted to use Italic type. Dissatisfied with his relative anonymity, Griffo left Manutius in 1503 and crafted a set of Italic type for another Venetian publisher. He called it Italic type, after the name of his homeland.ĭespite Griffo’s ingenuity, it was Manutius whose star continued to rise. A few years later, Griffo developed another innovation: a typeface fashioned after cursive handwriting.
Griffo solved the problem by inventing the first semicolon. While Griffo was carving the De Ætna type, Manutius asked him to devise a way to separate interdependent clauses. It was the De Ætna typeface that popularized the use of crisp and unornamented Roman characters in printing, replacing the archaic blackletter script introduced by Gutenberg. Griffo made a tremendous mark on the history of printing and punctuation. To do this, he hired a master typographer named Francesco Griffo.
#Who created the bembo typeface portable#
The story of the De Ætna type begins with Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius, who wanted to spread knowledge by printing portable and affordable versions of classical texts. The text’s inventive typography makes it one of the most important works in the history of the printed word. The Typeface is based heavily on the font used in Pietro Bembo’s De Æ tna, an esoteric Venetian manuscript printed in 1495. It aspires to resemble a centuries-old European artifact but is in fact relatively new-much like Yale’s neogothic architecture. In many ways, the Typeface fits right in amongst Yale’s icons.
But it wasn’t the experience of years or even decades, but rather centuries, that produced the Yale Typeface. Over the course of several years, Gambell oversaw the creation of the Yale Typeface and designed a new, consistent campus signage system in order to standardize the University’s brand. Instead, their publications had to use the eight-year-old typeface and the classic Yale Blue. He politely explained why the academic departments whose communications they designed were no longer allowed to have unique logos set in their favorite font. Last November, Yale University Printer John Gambell stood before a group of twenty-five employees, spreading the gospel of the Yale Typeface.