William Caslon

William Caslon is best known as a typeface designer, however was originally a gunsmith. He grew up in Worcestershire and died in Bethnal Green, London.  He first started his typography career as an apprentice engraver. After this he became a self-employed engraver which landed him jobs designing arabic letter forms for christian groups.

Throughout his career he designed a total of forty-seven typefaces which were displayed in a one page specimen sheet shown below.

Shown in the picture, he designed many different styles of typefaces for both roman and arabic alphabets, using both script and serif. His work was very precise, every letter designed perfectly to link to a previous or next letter in a word or sentence.

He inspired many of his future family members, who many were also called William Caslon, while the Caslon typefaces used today are different, they had still only evolved or developed from the engravers work. Caslon is now used as a standard typeface in a lot of published books, often novels, due to its legibility.

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