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Hot type and phototypesetting in the 20th century. The 90 years between 1890 and 1980 coined typography until now. The craft of printing became an industry, and the typography became a part of it as well. Both stylistically and technologically this epoch was really tumultuous. The significant developments were the following:
The fabrication and application of typefaces more and more were affected by industrial manufacturing processes. Significant incidents were the invention of the hot type machine by Ottmar Mergenthaler (Linotype machine, 1886) and Tolbert Lanston (Monotype machine, 1887) and a few decades later the emergence of phototypesetting. The result: Compilation and typographical design of the text could be more and more controlled by keyboards in contrast to manual typesetting.
A result of the industrialisation process was the unimagined number and distribution of new typefaces. Whether digital variants of Garamond and Bodoni or new contemporary type designs like Futura, Times, and Helvetica: nearly all currently used typefaces have their origin either in the following and ongoing digital typesetting era or are based on designs of this epoch. The basis was the appearance of large type foundries and type manufacturers. The result: Successful typefaces could quickly gain the status of a trademark–and therefore were able to assign a unique “branding” to products or publications.
Besides the traditional typography of books graphic design became a more or less independent branch. The tensions between those two branches significantly determined the stylistic development of 20th century’s typography.