TYPOGRAPHY - ASSIGNMENT 2

16/05/18 - 30/05/18 (Week 08 - 10)

Isaac Lee (0330747)

Typography
Assignment 2

LECTURE

05/06/2018 (Week 11)

Typography in different medium

Nowadays, not only does typography appear on paper but also on a multitude of screens. It is subject to many unknown and fluctuating parameters; such as operating systems, system fonts, and the device and screen itself, the view port and more. Today, our experiences of typography changes based on how the page is rendered because typesetting happens in the browser. The font size may be different based on whether if it’s used on a desktop, tablets, or phones.

Print vs Screen Type

Way before type was used on screen, it was originally used for reading on print.

Type for print:

• elegant and intellectual
• highly readable for small font size

1. Caslon
2. Garamond
3. Baskerville

Type for screen:

• taller x-height
• wider letterforms
• more open counters
• heavier thin strokes and serifs
• reduced stroke contrast

Hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. It has to be different than normal texts so people would know that it is a hyperlink; for example, different color, has an underline, etc.

Font size: 16 px text on a screen is equivalent to the size of text printed in a book or magazine. At a few inches away: 8-10 pts, and at arm’s length: 12-16 pts.

If a web designer decides to use a custom font or a downloaded font, and if the individual that accesses the website doesn’t have the similar font, the system will then try to look similar typeface families.

Open Sans, Lato, Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Times, Courier New, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, Palatino, Garamond.

Pixel differential between devices

Not only does the screen used by desktops, tablets fonts, and TVs have different sizes, but the text you see on the screen differs in proportion too, because they all have different sized pixels. 100 px on a laptop is different compared to 100 px on a HDTV.

For print, only use the CMYK color for body text.

Retina display compresses 2 px into 1 px by reducing the size of the pixel so it would look better and punchier.

Static vs Motion

Static has very minimal characteristics when it comes to expressing words. Traditional characteristics such as bold and italic offer only a fraction of the expressive potential of dynamic properties.

From billboards to posters, and magazines to fliers, we encounter all forms of static typography with extensive purposes. Whether it be informational, promotional, formal or aspirational.

Motion typography is mostly used in film title credits. Temporal media offer typographers to ‘dramatize’. They usually incorporate it in music videos and advertisements, and is often set in motion following the rhythm of the soundtrack.

INSTRUCTIONS






ASSIGNMENT

22/05/18 (Week 9)

We were assigned to redesign to logo, more specifically the font of the Taylor's University Logo.

1.1 I'm using Futura & Serifa, both in Bold, as a reference

Below here are the fonts I designed letter by letter.

1.2 My font designed for 'T'

1.3 My font designed for 'A' 

1.4 My font designed for 'Y'

1.5 My font designed for 'L'

1.6 My font designed for 'O'

1.7 My font design for 'R'

1.8 My font designed for aposthrophy

1.9 My font designed for 'S'

FEEDBACK

Week 10: Today is Wesak Day, and Mr. Vinod gave us a task via Facebook to write 150 word essay about what we like and dislike.



REFLECTIONS

Experience:

Week 09: We designed our fonts in Illustrator using very minimal tools. Overall it was okay.

Week 11: We learnt how to use FontLab, and it was easy to be honest.



Observations:

Week 09: As I almost finish designing my font, I finally come to a halt when I tried to design the letter 'R' and 'S'



Findings:

Week 09: It was very stressful not knowing how to design 'R' and 'S' in Illustrator. It would've been a lot easier if it had been Photoshop. I literally had to use some math formula, like Pythagoras Theorem, to make my 'R'.

Week 11: I found that there are a lot of minor issues with the fonts. Some of them are aren't aligned perfectly, some are thicker than the other, etc.


 FURTHER READING

16/05/18 (Week 8)

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles by Jan Tholenaar.

Type is a photographic odyssey through type specimens collected by the late Jan Tholenaar, a Dutch bibliophile who adored ornamental metal type. This book covers type in the period year of 1628 to 1900. About two-thirds of the content is based on the 19^th century, mostly focusing on the artistic printing movement.

There are not many important text faces from 1600 to 1900 in type. Baskerville’s work does not appear, and Bodoni is only see in Greek. The walbaum scotch, and scotch modern genres are ignored. And, wood type does not appear. Unadorned sans types appear when they are on a specimen page with ornamented types, but no effort is made to showcase them. While ornamented designs are certainly worth exploring, they are hardly the only type in that period.

CITATION

Tholenaar, J. (2009). Type: A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles. Germany: Taschen.