Reflections on the lecture

This week is all about typography. How can typographic conventions and design inform and imbue the meaning of a given text? I don’t know much about typography, apart from some of the terms I learnt while doing my Adobe Illustrator course, but it’s one of the areas that I’m excited to learn more about.

This weeks lecture was an introduction into typography. It is presented by Kristoffer Soelling (Regular Practice) and explores examples of type design, applications of type and history of typography.

13th century printing press

Printers cases

Brief History: Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg was a German craftsman and inventor who developed the world’s first mechanical moveable type printing press in 1440. Before the printing press everything was written by trained scribes, this meant it would take a long time to complete just one book. This made the books produced very expensive and only the very wealthy members of society could afford them. The printing press combined moveable pieces of metal type that that could be reused with a press that could produce sharp impressions on paper over and over again. Therefore the printing press revolutionised the printing industry; it paved the way for everything around us today from newspapers, magazines and books.

Gutenberg’s printing press worked by the moveable type being taken from the printers case and arranged into a sentence over a flat wooden plate called the ‘lower platen’. The ink was then applied to the type and a sheet of paper was laid over the top. The ‘upper platen’ was then lowered so the two plates would press the paper and type together, transferring the ink on the moveable type to the paper. This kind of printing press could print about 250 sheets per hour.

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus is a German artistic movement and design school which was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius. Many people have credited Bauhaus for the development of modern day and industrial graphic design. The Bauhaus school taught typography, they were strong advocates of sans-serif type, they believed that it’s simplified geometric form was more appealing and useful than the standard German blackletter typography.

Herbert Bayer was one of Bauhaus’ most influential students, teachers and advocate. Bayer is often credited with modernising typography in the Bauhaus with his creation of the ‘Universal Alphabet’. Bayer wanted to create a piece that didn’t use any upper-case, he argued that the distinction between the upper and lower cases is classist and there should only be one case. He also observed that we don’t use upper-case when speaking with one another so he believed it shouldn’t necessary for written communication either.

Anatomy of a Typeface

Something I really found interesting and will take away from this weeks lecture is this diagram the ‘anatomy of a typeface’. I’m a bit of a novice when it comes to typography so this will be a really useful diagram for me to refer to as I’m starting out. The anatomy of a typeface describes the visual elements that make up the letterforms within a typeface.

Universal Typeface - Herbert Bayer

Each letterform is made up of individual components that contribute to the overall appearance and legibility of a typeface:

• Aperture: the partially enclosed space of a letterform.

• Ascender: an upward vertical stroke that extends beyond the x-height.

• Baseline: the invisible line that all letters rest on.

• Cap height: the distance from the baseline to the top of the capital letter.

• Descender: a downward vertical stroke that extends beyond the baseline.

• Stem: a main stroke that is more more or less straight.

• Serif: a stroke added to the beginning or end of one of the main strokes of a letter.

• Stroke: a straight or curved line that creates the principal part of a letter.

• X-height: the distance between the baseline and the height of the lowercase letter ‘x’.

• Weight: the thickness of a font’s stroke.

• Kerning: this is the adjustment of space between two individual letters. Kerning has a huge impact on the way we interpret words on a page, we don’t read the individual characters but instead whole words or groups of words. An example of bad kerning is using a font where the letters are so close together that what you typed as ‘kerning’ actually shows up as ‘keming’, the words get mashed together. It is also important to remember if you are kerning make sure you are consistent.

• Leading: this refers to the vertical space between lines of text. While the default is typically fine, you can always adjust the leading to make it easier to read. Leading is a really important factor on the readability of a piece of text, if the leading is too small it can make it difficult to identify the start of the next line. If it is too big this destorys the unity of the type on the page and also makes it difficult to read.

• Legibility: this refers to how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another in a particular typeface. This is the most fundamental consideration because you should know at a glance if your text is legible.

• Readability: this is how comfortably users can read your text. Although they may be able to make out each letter, a poor choice of font or small caps use may slow them down or turn them off completely.

• Tracking: This is the adjustment of space between a whole group of letters (rather than each individual one, kerning.) Tracking can be used to fine-tune compacting or expanding the space to optimise your text.