TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Tue May 14 17:50:59 EDT 2024
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Morris Fuller Benton: Type Designer Fact or Fiction?
Rick von Holdt's resentation at the Amalgamated Printers Association Wayzgoose, Phoenix, June 7, 2013, in PDF format. He concludes: Morris Fuller Benton was shy and retiring and his relationship with his father and his personal life don't even come close to being normal, but others have written about that and I have only been interested in finding out if he really was the pencil-to- paper typeface creator that people are now so readily willing to give him credit as being. I am obviously not neutral on this issue. I personally give M. F. Benton little, if any, credit as being a typeface designer. It is difficult to try to piece all of this together a century after the fact, but if Morris Fuller Benton received absolutely no recognition from his peers as a legitimate type designer, there was probably a very good reason for that. I too used to believe that M. F. Benton designed all the typefaces credited to him, simply because I was naive and that was the information being offered. The more I learn, the more skepticism I have. von Holdt explains in his essay the absence of credit by his perrs for his designs, a result perhaps of being more an art director and manager of type design at ATF than an actual creative artist. Follow-up discussion by the typophiles. Whatever one may say, MFB elevated type design to an industrial level, with focused projects and the development of large type families that hang together logically. For this, one needs to have a good nose and a synthetic view of things, something the creative artists of the time like Goudy and Dwiggins, probably lacked or were not interested in. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |