User talk:Olivia Swaidner

Welcome!
Hello, Olivia Swaidner, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:37, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Wood type
Hi Ms. Swaidner!

I’m the person who wrote the wood type article and edit a lot of the typeface and typography articles on Wikipedia. I see you’re editing Wikipedia as part of a university course and I hope it’s going well. What you’ve added is a great source, on an interesting aspect of the topic I hadn't put in the article, definitely worth including. Editing Wikipedia is a lot of fun, and I hope you stick at it. The article was very interesting to research and source pictures for.

Few thoughts about your edits. Chronologically, I felt your addition maybe belongs more in the “legacy” section, about what happened after the period of wood type’s greatest popularity, because of you and the source talking about it being used in Western films and TV series, on twentieth-century bars and theme parks, modern perceptions of it. So I’ve moved it down to a new paragraph there.

Wood type didn't exactly originate in Europe. Many of the styles of typeface used in early wood type were indeed introduced in London: fat face, sans-serif, slab-serif, French Clarendon. The production of wood type itself as a technology was introduced in the U.S., though. Although many wood typefaces have similar designs (something I'm planning to expand on), it can't really be called "one of the most recognizable type faces"-it's not one typeface but many, many different designs; it's more an aesthetic and a genre than one typeface. (I'd say French Clarendons, Tuscans and slab serifs are probably the typefaces people most recognise as "Wild West", because unlike sans-serifs they don't have twentieth century connotations, but that's just my opinion.) Later on a lot of typeface styles were surely invented by the American manufacturers (or just maybe copied other local lettering art, like signpainters or lithographers or gravestone carvers).

Looking forward to seeing what else you add-please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or things you need help with. If you're looking for interesting things to add to the article, my main suggestion would be looking through Shields' big new book, which I haven't had much time to do anything with. Also, the University of Texas Austin in 2009 published a big new website on their wood type collections, which they since seem to have abandoned. Parts of the website are archived on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and there might be interesting things to add to the article there.

Blythwood (talk) 23:12, 3 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi!
 * Thank you so much for the feedback, clarification, and sources! I really appreciate you taking the time to help. Olivia Swaidner (talk) 17:54, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Blythwood (talk) 19:15, 16 November 2022 (UTC)