TIMELINE

30,000 BC - Pictographs

10,000 BC - Ideographs

3,000 BC - Cuneiforms (Mesopotamians)

2,500 BC - Hieroglyphics
(highly sophisticated drawings)

1500BC - Phoenicians developed first formal alphabet and used it extensively for keeping trade records

403 B.C. - Greeks standardize alphabet of 24 letters - suitable for all the Indo-European languages. Alpha and Beta, the first two words of the alphabet show the source of the word alphabet.

100 B.C. approximately - Romans develop capital type.

1041 A.D. - Pi-Sheng, developed type characters.

11th Century - first moveable type used in China and Korea.

11^th and 12^th century - Gothic type developed.

1397A.D. - Type was cast from metal in Korea and used in China and Japan. In Korea the oldest text printed from bronze cast moveable type.

1455A.D. - Johan Gutenberg invented the punch and matrix system to make molds for lead type thus allowing for moveable type.

1490 A.D. - Nicolas Jenson develops Venitian type faces and designing the standard lower and uppercase Roman typeface.
Common typefaces are imitations of early hand-writing. Also Aldus Manitus Romanis designed the first iltalic and roman fonts and the first miniscule books.

15th-16th Century (Renaissance) - Old Style Typefaces Centaur, Bembo, Jenson, Garamond, Caslon; italics come into vogue.

1815-1817 - Sans serif and slab serif

18^th century - Transitional Type Baskerville, Fournier

Late 1700s and early 1800s - Modern type – Didot, Bodoni, Walbaum

1973-83 - Digital type