Writing went through many iterations before it became what is today. Times New Roman wasn’t the default script for ancient Egyptians, in fact, paper didn’t even exist when the first words were written.

写作经历了许多迭代，才变成今天。 Times New Roman并不是古埃及人的默认文字，实际上，写第一个单词时甚至根本没有纸。

This article interview with Vicky Gerchinhoren will take you on a journey through the evolution of fonts and explain some of the “how’s” and “why’s” the fonts we use today came about over thousands of years.

本文对Vicky Gerchinhoren的采访将带您了解字体的演变，并解释我们今天使用的某些“如何”和“为什么”字体已有数千年的历史了。

物理限制使字体不断演变 (Physical constraints made fonts evolve)

Different scripts come from different times in history and their shapes have a relationship with a particular historical moment. For example, Italic calligraphy arose from a period of high paper and bureaucratic work in the Italian chancery during the Renaissance period. The number of documents needed to be written made the humanist minuscule script be deformed — transformed. It was so much work that the amount of traces was naturally reduced and the letters were naturally skewed by the speed of their writing. As a result, the letters were skewed and a predecessor of the modern Italic script was born.

不同的脚本来自历史的不同时期，它们的形状与特定的历史时刻有关系。 例如，在意大利文艺复兴时期，意大利书法界的高级文书和官僚工作时期就产生了斜体书法。 需要写的文件数量使人文主义的小脚本变成了变形。 这项工作非常繁琐，以致自然减少了痕迹的数量，并且字母的书写速度自然使其倾斜。 结果，这些字母歪斜，诞生了现代斜体文字的前身。

So Italic came from people writing faster, reducing the number of strokes, and creating less formal calligraphy.

因此，斜体来自人们的书写速度更快，减少了笔画数量并减少了正式书法的产生。

Each script communicates a feeling with their shapes, we perceive different things from content written in different letter styles. Both typeface -mechanical- or calligraphic -manual- have a trace of cultural heritage that -I believe- is amazing.

每个脚本都以其形状传达一种感觉，我们从以不同字母样式编写的内容中得到的感受是不同的。 机械的或书法的两种字体都有一定的文化传承，我相信这是惊人的。

In modern times, we associate Blackletter with dark non-ecclesiastic purposes because they are bold, obscure, and also difficult to read.

在现代，我们将Blackletter与黑暗的非教会目的联系在一起，因为它们大胆，晦涩且难以阅读。

Blackletter, for instance, comes from the times of the middle ages when they didn’t have access to the same resources as we do today. Instead of writing on paper, they used animal skins, which were harder to get and expensive.

例如，Blackletter来自中世纪的时代，那时他们无法获得与我们今天相同的资源。 他们使用动物皮代替纸上书写，这种皮较难获得且价格昂贵。

Due to the lack of resources, high costs, and sacred content, the writing was reserved for important people like monks and priests. It also required scribes to fit a lot of text per page, hence the small inner space and between the letters, the result is a very condensed letter shape, obscure, and dark-bodied.

由于缺乏资源，高昂的成本和神圣的内容，这些文字被保留给僧侣和牧师等重要人物。 它也要求抄写员每页适合很多文本，因此内部空间很小，字母之间也很狭窄，结果是字母的形状非常凝结，晦涩难懂。

Back then, Blackletter was used in caves and monasteries for sacred books, today it has been adopted and used by Metal bands! You would not see a dark font like Blackletter used for something like a kid’s birthday party… and that’s because there is a very close relationship between text and visual design.

当时，Blackletter被用于洞穴和修道院中的神圣书籍，如今，它已被Metal乐队采用并使用！ 您不会看到像Blackletter这样的深色字体用于孩子的生日聚会……这是因为文本和视觉设计之间存在非常密切的关系。

从纸到电脑 (From paper to computers)

Calligraphy is the hand script and typography is the design of the letters and text for mechanical writing. From manual writing to mechanical or automatic writing, you have the Industrial Revolution and a guy called Gutenberg.

书法是手写体，而排版是机械书写的字母和文字的设计。 从手动书写到机械或自动书写，您都有工业革命和一个叫做Gutenberg的家伙。

Gutenberg designed the way to reproduce text by breaking it down into little mobile pieces allowing you to compose words and columns of text, effectively creating print and making books available to everyone in the world.

古腾堡(Gutenberg)设计了一种将文本分解成多个小块的可移动文本的方式，使您可以撰写文本的单词和列，有效地创建印刷品并将书籍提供给全世界的所有人。

“书法是手写文字，而排版是文本的机械设计” (“Calligraphy is the hand script and typography is the mechanical design of the text”)

Fonts are important not just because we read through them, but because there is style and meaning in their shapes. Throughout history, we have had different needs and these needs can be seen through the transformation of fonts from the Stone Ages and Ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance and on through the 21st century.

字体之所以重要，不仅因为我们通读了它们，还因为它们的形状具有风格和含义。 纵观整个历史，我们一直有不同的需求，这些需求可以通过从石器时代和古埃及人到文艺复兴乃至21世纪的字体转换来看出。

Needs that we have now were not covered back then, like computer screens or even the tiny print that you can find in a phonebook. In fact, the Bell Centennial font was specifically designed for the Bell phone books so the letters would hold the ink in ink traps and would look sharp after it spread on the paper. This was a big design challenge since the font size had to be extremely small and legible.

那时，我们现在没有满足的需求，例如计算机屏幕或什至可以在电话簿中找到的微小字体。 实际上， Bell Centennial字体是专门为Bell电话簿设计的，因此字母可以将墨水保留在墨水收集器中，并且在墨水散布在纸张上后看起来会更加清晰。 这是一个很大的设计挑战，因为字体大小必须非常小且清晰易读。

Matthew Carter, the designer who created the Bell Centennial font is also responsible for one of the first fonts to be used on-screen: Verdana. Carter is a very purpose-driven designer, and he created Verdana with functionality and technical issues in mind at the same time to assess perfectly how the font would be rendered in its environment. To improve legibility for the screen, he increased the x-height (which is the lower case letter height) in order to give more room to the portion of the letter that has the larger amount of visual information, which our brain uses to process the text and read the words. This enhancement is especially useful for reading faster on screens and was imperative in the early days of digital text when displays were extra pixelated and blurry.

创建Bell Centennial字体的设计师Matthew Carter也是负责在屏幕上使用的首批字体之一： Verdana 。 Carter是位目标明确的设计师，他在创建Verdana时就同时考虑了功能和技术问题，以完美评估字体在其环境中的呈现方式。 为了提高屏幕的清晰度，他增加了x高度(即小写字母的高度)，以便为具有较大视觉信息的字母部分留出更多空间，我们的大脑将这些信息用于处理文字并阅读单词。 此增强功能对于在屏幕上更快地阅读尤其有用，并且在数字文本出现的早期，当显示器出现额外的像素化和模糊时，这势在必行。

字体如何适应我们的现代使用 (How fonts adapted to our modern use)

Due to the pixelation of screens, letters in certain fonts and sizes will not render properly and will actually blend together and blur. The way typeface designers managed to fix this is by meticulously altering the letter’s position and shape to feed the pixel grid proportionally, which they call hinting.

由于屏幕像素化，某些字体和大小的字母将无法正确呈现，并且实际上会融合在一起并模糊。 字体设计人员设法解决此问题的方法是通过精心更改字母的位置和形状，以按比例输入像素网格，他们称之为提示 。

Hinting takes a lot of engineering work and is not mathematical as most engineering jobs, but actually requires years of a trained eye to visually map out the text.

提示需要大量的工程工作，并且不像大多数工程工作那样算术，但是实际上需要多年的训练有素的眼睛才能直观地绘制出文本。

An example of hinting in action is when you might have noticed the “x”,“e” or “z” often shift slightly right or left as you type or change font sizes, so it does not appear attached to the adjacent letters. It’s notable that some fonts don’t have hinting work done at all and these are often the cheap or free fonts, which you wouldn’t want to use in a professional setting.

例如，当您可能注意到“ x”，“ e”或“ z”在键入或更改字体大小时经常向右或向左移动时，它不会出现在相邻字母上，这是一个提示作用的示例。 值得注意的是，某些字体根本没有完成提示工作，而这些字体通常是廉价字体或免费字体，您不希望在专业环境中使用它们。

See How do fonts influence the way you type to learn more about the use of fonts in everyday life and branding.

请参阅字体如何影响您的键入方式，以了解有关在日常生活和品牌中使用字体的更多信息。