Gottfried Pott – A Look into the World of Calligraphy

For some years now it has been possible to observe a trend in the production of type design which pays increased attention to the handwritten quality of lettering. With the advent of digitized type design the expense of time and money has been greatly reduced by comparison to the hot metal tradition. Today, thanks to modern software programs, the type designer can produce new fonts nearly independently. Digitizing by hand, scanning, and a combination of computer technologies with various specific programs are all at his command. We should not be deceived, though – the eye and the pencil have not become obsolete. Otl Aicher wrote the following in his book Typographie:
“During the development of the type face Rotis we had been working with a computer for several years and named it Fritz. It had performed numerous services for us until we discovered the pencil at long last. A vast new field opened up for us which we had not considered in this way until that time:
that off human decision-making.”

The buzzword in the computer industry is: everyone can be Gutenberg. An opportunity, to he sure, a dream come true for every type designer. But the dangers to the quality of typography cannot be overlooked. The copying craze has apparently no limits. The market is flooded with products of plagiarism. Lettering, however, is a cultural item with high standards. It should not only be created by clever but also by quality-conscious designers. The entire repertoire of lettering, even in the time before Gutenberg, along with recent developments come to mind. In this context I would like to mention the alphabet Lithos for Adobe by designer Carol Twombly. It harks back to the Greco-Roman Lapidar-Antiqua. Or let us look at the project Type before Gutenberg for the Linotype GmbH, which was conceived by Adrian Frutiger. In this project, for example, he designed the alphabet Herculanum (Roman Cursive Majuscules); Karlgeorg Hoefer contributed among others the fonts Omnia (Uncial) and San Marco (Rotunda); Herbert Maring the alphabet Clairvaux (Early Gothic Bookhand); and I created Carolina (Carolingian Minuscule) and Duc de Berry (French Batarde). Regarding the work of my colleagues and my own in this project I would like to say that these fonts were developed out of the process of lettering itself. In the course of many correction phases, we searched for an interpretation which was not content with copy but tried to meet today’s requirements. Technical means today greatly facilitate the process of creating an alphabet. Software programs offer undreamt-of possibilities, especially if the drawings have been produced already. It is even possible to design everything entirely on the computer although this requires an even greater knowledge of form on the part of the designer. The following contribution by my American colleague, Professor Larry Brady, Los Angeles, provides some insights from his point of view into the development and significance of the art of lettering in the various areas of graphic design.