Matthew Aebersold

One of my favorite classes this quarter is Type & Letterform Design. I’m learning quite a lot of interesting information about typography, and I’ve decided to write a blog post from each lecture. I’m doing this for a couple reasons, because it helps me process the information and notes I’m taking, and I want to share what I’m learning.

Research & Reason

Every project has to have a reason, which includes every design decision involved in the process of that project. There’s associations all over the place, and much of this depends on the culture in which you are designing for. These issues need to be addressed when designing, because improper associations can lead to devastating results. These can be issues related to colors, words, characters, and meanings from culture to culture. Designing with type is especially important to consider, because there is so much meaning in the words we use, and the context in which we use them.

Type has an incredible power attached to it, since it’s a universal concept. The typeface that you choose can create completely different meanings. Consider the example below, where two identical words can create completely different meanings Everything about these words is the same (size, color, and letters) with the exception of the typeface.

Creating emotion in typography can be a simple task. Altering the properties of the type can achieve this effect, like manipulating the color, size, weight, location and typeface. The major point here is to research the project before choosing typefaces, and to really know the audience you are speaking to. This will make the designs appeal to the right people. Excluding certain people could be a good thing, as long as it’s a conscious design decision rather than a mistake.

Type History

This next section is a basic history and classification of type. I will cover the 5 categories of type, and give examples of each.

This category of type was conceived during the 1400′s. The capital letters were influenced by carved Roman capital letters, and the lowercase alphabet was inspired by the 15th century humanistic writing styles. All of the stylistic attributes of this type came out of necessity and technological limitations. For example, all the serifs are curved and set at angles. This is because most of the type was hand-written or carved in stone. This made it very difficult to achieve sharp angles and thin lines. Because of these limitations, the letterforms had thicker lines, and wider serifs. Much of the overall influence of this style of type came from handwriting, because this was one of the only ways to communicate before the invention of the printing press.

This technique came after the old style fonts, and was originally created in order to fit more letters into a line of type. The letterforms are at an angle, and therefore take up less overall space. This was necessary because of the cost and rarity of paper. In today’s time, italicized text is meant for emphasis rather than to optimize space. This style first appeared in the early 1500s.

Around the 1700s, Type evolved from Old Style into Modern. The transitional phase is a category unto itself because of the unique traits specifically to this generation of type. Because technological capabilities were increasing, type designers could produce more intricate typefaces. There became a greater contrast between the thick and thin strokes, and serifs began to be sharper and more defined. Now that the printing press was introduced into the world, many of the type issues surrounded typesetting practices. The calculations were difficult to measure, in terms of how much text would fit on a line of copy. This is because of the different widths of each individual character. Because these calculations were so difficult, designers began creating letters that had similar widths, thus you begin to see wider lowercase letters, and narrower capital letters.

In the late 1700s, modern type emerged from the transitional phase. There was a further continuation in the widening of the letterforms, in an effort to make the letters more unified in width. For example, the capital M and W were pushed in, and the capital P and T were widened to make them similar. On a quick web design note, it is not a good idea to use Modern type on the web, because these techniques for the capital letters make them harder to read on the screen. Additionally, there is an even greater contrast between the thick and thin strokes, thus making the thin strokes hard to read on the screen unless they are extremely large.

Contrary to the name, these typefaces have no history in ancient Egypt. Also called slab-serif, these typefaces were originally created by an Egyptian artifact collector, and used them in poster design. This is because they were bolder and stronger fonts, which are more easily readable from a distance. This is the original typeface choice for many early advertisers, because the copy stands out much better in larger formats. These typefaces are designed to be more functional than beautiful.

A continuation from the ideas of the Egyptian type became the inception of the Sans-Serif. If the serifs are removed, the type is even more readable and recognizable from a distance, especially in large formats. Sans-Serif typefaces are more geometrical in their construction, and usually have a unified width of the letter strokes. As with the Egyptian typefaces, these were designed more as a utility than to be beautiful. Today, people are combining the techniques of sans-serif typefaces with other categories to create some very interesting custom type.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.