Lewis F. Day's Summary

Carl Shank • October 5, 2024

Lewis F. Day's Alphabetic Summary. This is the last post of Day's Alphabets Old and New (London, 1910), highlighting a summary picture of his alphabetic font offerings in the book. Other Blogs investigate the font backgrounds and development of Day's fonts. CARE Typography has meticulously digitized many of Day's typographic offerings. They are available, either individually, or as a set for a modest cost. Contact cshanktype@gmail.com for prices and ordering. Additionally, CARE Typography is offering a beautifully crafted printed summary in a font binder, along with their newest book, Typography Through the Years: A Selected History. This selection gives a carefully researched history of typography and an extensive sampling of historic faces, both old and new.


Lewis Foreman Day (1845-1910) was an influential English designer, author, and lecturer who played a significant role in the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became a prolific designer, working across various mediums including wallpaper, textiles, stained glass, pottery, and metalwork. Day advocated for the integration of form and function, emphasizing the importance of practicality in design alongside aesthetic considerations. His work and writings contributed significantly to the development of British design education and theory in the late Victorian era.


His book, Alphabets Old and New, published in London, in 1910 gives sterling examples of his typography work. Day's approach to design, blending traditional craftsmanship with modern industrial techniques, helped shape the transition from Victorian aesthetics to more modern design principles. CARE Typography has digitized a number of the font faces in the book for modern use and aesthetic appeal. The typefaces below illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship of Day which can contribute to modern typography.


These mostly pen drawn typefaces have been digitized by CARE Typography using Fontographer to make them available as usable fonts. Caps or Unicals are often used in display faces and advertising. Some of these classic faces can enliven your printing and advertising projects. 


Successful Layout & Design

Calligraphy & Typography

By Carl Shank • September 29, 2025
Calligraphy & Typography. Calligraphy, the art of beautiful handwriting, has a long and rich history that spans cultures, religions, and centuries. It developed not only as a means of communication but also as a form of artistic expression, religious devotion, and cultural preservation. While typography is not calligraphy, with much of type carefully structured, straight-backed and neatly drawn and focused on lettering for printing readability, both art forms involve visual expression of language. Both focus on the shape, proportion and beauty of letters. Both reflect religious, historical and cultural influences on writing styles. Both are used for artistic and decorative purposes in design, and much of type has been greatly influenced by calligraphic styles. Yet, they differ significantly in their methods, purposes and tools. Calligraphy is the art of hand drawn, beautiful writing, while typography focuses on the design and arrangement of type letters for print or digital use. Calligraphy is created manually with pens, brushes, or quills, while type is created digitally or mechanically using typefaces. Traditional tools used in calligraphy include dip pens, brushes and ink, while type is formed with digital or physical lettering. Calligraphy is highly expressive and free flowing, while type is usually uniform and consistent across all characters. Calligraphy is usually done for decorative and personal use, while typography is often constructed and used for mass communication in books, websites and signage. Mediums for calligraphy include paper, parchment, walls, while typography focuses on print and digital media. Yet, the roots of much of type comes from the wealth of history and styling offered by calligraphy. CARE Typography has been able with Font Lab's tools like Fontographer, to translate fine calligraphy into usable typefaces, even for the modern market tastes. The fine art of calligraphy is highlighted in the background to this post in the 2018 calligraphic rendering of the Scripture, "Well done, good and faithful servant" (Matthew 25:25a) by Calligraphy for Christ ( https://www.calligraphyforchrist.com/ ). Such beautiful religious typographic pieces actually begin not with the Gutenberg era in 1450 but with the ancient Chinese.

Early German Typography (Part 2)

By Carl Shank • September 22, 2025
Herbert Hoffmann, Albert Bruckner, Max Hertwig, and Rudolf Koch collaborated on a typographic “atlas” or specimen book titled Hoffmanns Schriftatlas: Das Schriftschaffen der Gegenwart in Alphabeten und Anwendungen (1930) ( Hoffmann’s Type Atlas: Contemporary Type Creation in Alphabets and Applications ) Also distributed in France under the title Alphabets by Herbert Hoffman and other collaborators by Arts et Métiers Graphiques magazine, it is a specimen of alphabets, initials, monograms, logos and other typographic forms from early German typography. The atlas captures typographic modernism in Germany around that time, including influences of the Bauhaus and the modernist movement. It is considered a rich visual record of type and lettering design in that period, showing both experimental and traditional forms. In Part One of this series, we investigated the typography of early Germany through the lens of Rudolf Koch, Louis Oppenheim, E.R. Weiss, Lucian Bernhard, Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens, and Bernard Naudin. In this Part Two we revisit the typography of Ernst Deutsch, Friedrich Heinrichsen, Benjamin Krebs Nachfolger, Maria Ballé, Margarete Leins, Anna Simons and take a brief visit to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers in Stuttgart.
Show More