Typography in Early 20th Century Package Design

A Short essay first published in "Packaged Toronto: A Collection Of The City's Historic Design" (Toronto, 2020). 

From etched and embossed glass, to illustrated tins and plastics, to printed paper and board, text is a prominent (and often dominant!) element of packaging design, integral to communicate its contents but also to capture our attention through design.

There are two main ways that such text is rendered in the production process: through the use of fonts as in TYPOGRAPHY, or as stylistic hand LETTERING, both of which require some defining for us to fully understand what we see in particular pieces of design.

Typography is the style, arrangement, or appearance of fonts, usually the inked impression created by a movable type system like a printing press. A font is a full character set of types: that is, the individual letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols that relate to each other as a harmonious and repeatable system. In simplest terms, a font is a prefabricated set of letters in a mechanical process. Today’s digital fonts have no real physical attributes, but the concept remains: it is instead a piece of software which contains a full set of characters and is utilized in a digital process of setting text in specialized programs.

Calligraphy and lettering on the other hand are not a typographic approach. Calligraphy is the art of WRITING letters using a specific brush, pen, or other tool. Lettering is more specifically the free form DRAWING or stylization of letterforms and allows for the freer movement and formation of letters, flourishes, and shapes on a surface that would be impossible to produce with a set of fonts on a printing press. Whereas the printing press operates within the basic linear spaces of a page, there is nearly limitless possibility for illustrated letterforms through the process of lithography.

Much of the advertising and packaging designed before the 1920s are likely to rely on ornate illustrative designs and expressive lettering, largely influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement and in particular the Art Nouveau style of 1890–1910, during which advertising and commercial design boomed alongside the new technology of colour lithography.

However, many examples in this book's collection of packaging employ a combination of typography, lettering, illustration, photography, and other graphic elements to great effect to produce a complete design aesthetic for their brand. Even though our hardware has mostly changed to software today, this culmination of elemental styles and production methods has persisted as the standard 'tool kit' for advertising and commercial design ever since.