Comic book nerds, typography nerds, and all those in the middle will find kinship with this topic. Fonts for every purpose have undergone significant change due to digital technology. Lettering has moved into the digital realm, which has opened up new possibilities for subtle storytelling through typography. This interesting information came to us from The Scholarly Kitchen in their article, “The Comic Book Font, and How Digital Technologies are Changing Lettering.”
This video looks at the evolution of fonts used in comic books. For decades, those fonts were driven by the form’s physical limitations. Cheap paper and blotchy ink required adaptation in order to fit more dialogue into less space while still remaining readable.
Typography has experienced other changes. There was digital printing and publishing decades ago, but it was far from the current version. It was a grim world of cryptic codes embedded in text to produce visual results in print, but not on screen. Then came the personal computer, or more specifically, the Apple computer. The rest is as they say, history.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
