The first Modern typeface is attributed to French man Firmin Didot (son of François-Ambroise Didot), and first graced the printed page in 1784. His types were soon followed by the archetypal Didone from Bodoni. The first of the Didot types appeared in 1781, at the end of a long typographic continuum which, to modern eyes at least, seems relatively unvaried. Between Nicolas Jenson’s seminal humanism and the typeface of 1470 and the old styles of the early eighteenth century, there is a 250-year period marked less by innovation than by a steady improvement in the design of letters.As the center of European

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printing moved north, fifteenth century Venetia types gave way to sixteenth century French models, which were in turn assimilated into the Dutch and English old styles of the centuries to follow. Taken together, these types describe a slow progression away from the alphabet’s calligraphic origins — stress angles shifting from generally diagonal to horizontal, bracketed serifs beginning to suggest the graver more than the pen — and by the end of the seventeenth century, printing types began to evidence a distinct and autonomous visual vocabulary.