William Caslon I (1692/93 – 23 January 1766), also known as William Caslon the Elder, was an English typefounder. The distinction and legibility of his type secured him the patronage of the leading printers of the day in England and on the continent. His typefaces transformed English type design and first established an English national typographic style.
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👉 William Caslon in the context of Written language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing: the use of static visual symbols, called graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is not merely spoken or signed language written down, though it can approximate that. Instead, it is a separate system with its own norms, structures, and stylistic conventions, and it often evolves differently than its corresponding spoken or signed language.
Written languages serve as crucial tools for communication, enabling the recording, preservation, and transmission of information, ideas, and culture across time and space. The orthography of a written language comprises the norms by which it is expected to function, including rules regarding spelling and typography. A society's use of written language generally has a profound impact on its social organization, cultural identity, and technological profile.
In this Dossier
William Caslon in the context of Typeface
A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width (e.g., condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.
William Caslon in the context of Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical type (or sort) in mechanical systems or glyphs in digital systems representing characters (letters and other symbols). Stored types are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts (which are widely but erroneously confused with and substituted for typefaces).
One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission.
William Caslon in the context of Greek ligature
Greek ligatures are graphic combinations of the letters of the Greek alphabet that were used in medieval handwritten Greek and in early printing. Ligatures were used in the cursive writing style and very extensively in later minuscule writing. There were dozens of conventional ligatures. Some of them stood for frequent letter combinations, some for inflectional endings of words, and some were abbreviations of entire words.
William Caslon in the context of Baskerville
Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, intended as a refinement of what are now called old-style typefaces of the period, especially those of his most eminent contemporary, William Caslon.
Compared to earlier designs popular in Britain, Baskerville increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, making the serifs sharper and more tapered, and shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. The curved strokes are more circular in shape, and the characters became more regular. These changes created a greater consistency in size and form, influenced by the calligraphy Baskerville had learned and taught as a young man. Baskerville's typefaces remain very popular in book design and there are many modern revivals, which often add features such as bold type which did not exist in Baskerville's time.