| Date: 1930 Designer:
Eric Gill Foundry:
Hague and Gill / Monotype Location:
England Current equivalent:
MT Joanna See also:
Aires and Linotype Pilgrim by the same designer
Technologies:
Metal (foundry)
Metal (machine)
Postscript | | Famous for:
Economical text typeface designed by a sculptor. Applications: Book Publishing & General Purpose Text Setting Ubiquity:
Not widely used. Category:
20th century Serif Roman
Stress: Vertical
Serifs: Slab | | Design history:
A light roman text face noted for the small size of its capitals and an almost vertical, highly condensed italic. In the original type there were no italic capitals, meaning the italic lowercase was to be used with the roman capitals; a practice defined by Aldus Manutius in the early 1500s. Joanna was named for Eric Gill's daughter, and was created expressly for printing by hand at the private press Gill ran with his son in law, Rene Hague. Gill's seminal tract, the 'Essay on Typography', was printed using Joanna in 1931, and displays a number of this designer's idiosyncrasies in the layout of the pages. Monotype made a machine composition version of this type in 1937, but Joanna was not generally available until 1958. | |  |
