For the first part of today's exercise we got in the same groups as last week and shared what we had found about the font we chose to research.
"Type is speech made visible"
Print changed type - The biggest shift
Industrialisation of communication
Type started to spread when people learnt to read
Before we had type we had town criers
The oral tradition changed to the written
It makes sense that we would start to look at different typefaces because it is becoming more and more popular
A letterform is an illustration of a symbol
Association develops a character within typefaces. Sometimes it is really obvious and clear but this is not always the case.
Colour can define type and there are gender differences - eg. The colour red
Vocabulary
Font
Typeface
Font family
Weight
Stroke
Uppercase
Lowercase
Tracking
Kerning
Are font and typeface the same?
Typeface - a collection of characters, letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation etc. which have the same distinct design
Font - the physical means used to create a typeface, be it computer code, lithographic film, metal or woodcut
Glyphs - individual elements
Fonts fall into a range of categories -
Block - headlines/display fonts/header fonts
Gothic - sans-serif
Roman - serif
Script- brush
The difference between a font and typeface is that the font itself is the same weight.
Four fonts make the same typeface.
Gill sans
Light/italic
Regular/italic
Bold/italic
Ultrabold condensed
7 fonts to make up a typeface
Exist as variations of font within a typeface.
+ - glyphs - can have fundamentally different punctuation.
Only way to tell difference between serial and Helvetica is that the full stop in Helvetica is square.
Exercise - categorise fonts into...
- Light/italic
- Regular/italic
- Bold/italic
- Ultrabold condensed
and regular...
Then categorise them into...
- Gothic
- Block
- Roman
- Script
What defines gothic, bold, roman, script?
Script - Change of weight
Serif - Roman
Sans-serif - Gothic
Heavy - Block
However... you can have block gothic, block roman and block script.
Legibility and readability
Understanding of spatial quality
The counter defines whether something is legible/readable
Negative space and ability to recognise it
The spaces we are leaving can define the letter
Fed Ex uses the counter to create an arrow
OGC - horizontally it is fine however not vertically
We don't always see what we are reading, the brain takes over
Because of the counters we read it as making perfect sense
Some people find serif clearer than sans serif, this links to nature/nurture
Whenever you make something bold it also extends it
Legibility
Legibility is the degree to which glyphs (individual characters) in text are understandable or recognizable based on appearance.
Readability
Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood. It is influenced by line length, primary and secondary leading, justification, typestyle, kerning, tracking, point size etc.
Leading
Leading is the space between each glyph
Primary leading
Primary leading is the space between the glyphs
Secondary leading
Secondary leading is thin pieces of lead to spread them out more
Tracking
Tracking is increasing the leading, there is a danger or breaking the structure of font
Kerning
Decreasing the leading
Track but do not kern with body copy as it is less legible
1 typeface - 9 fonts
No more than 3 fonts from no more than 3 typefaces
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