alt Hacker NewsThis led me to look up the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I for this extraordinary thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_Arch_(woodcut)
Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.
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Considering how much more expensive woodcutting and printing were in the early 1500s… couldn’t he have just built an actual tirumphal arch (albeit simplified) with that money?
Seriously, wow.
> the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I
It’s interesting to learn that Fraktur itself only dates back to the 16th century — the broader blackletter family of scripts goes back 400 years earlier than that, and was once used across the whole of western Europe.
A pioneer in virtual reality technology, that Maximilian.