I am ready for Thanksgiving Break

Typographic Rules and Terms

-- Parts of the grid: what are the following: margin, column, alley, module, gutter, folio.

Margain: Margain is the white space around the outside of the grid.

Column: vertical alignment of each column of the grid.

Alley: all of the spaces between the characters of text.

Module: The spaces between the paragraphs.

-- What are the advantages of a multiple column grid.? A multiple column grid accessible and comfortable for the viewer.

-- Why is there only one space after a period? You use to have to put 2 spaces after a period to separate the sentences because all letters were monospaced on the typewriter. Yet, now characters are proportional so i only takes up 1/5 of the letter m.

-- What is a character (in typography)? A sign, symbol, or mark that does include letterforms and numbers.

-- How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line? 60

-- Why is the baseline grid used in design? Bottoms of the baseline are more appealing by designers.

-- What is a typographic river? A type river is when the spaces between the letters are noticeably lined up.

-- What does clothes lining or flow line or hang line mean? A division of the page by a horizontal line. This aligns for great placement of different visual elements.

-- How can you incorporate white space into your designs? Space is just as important as text. Adding color is always fun. You can divide text easily and color text for visual effects.

-- What is type color/texture mean? The weight of a character.

-- What is x-height, how does it affect type color? The x-height is the ascender of a letter height. Type color is affected by the thickness of the line and readability.

-- Define Tracking: letterspacing

-- Define Kerning. Why do characters need to be kerned? What are the most common characters that need to be kerned (kerning pairs)?

Kerning is the process of removing small units of space between letters in order to create visually consistent letter spacing. The larger the letters, the more critical it is to adjust their spacing.

Characters needed to be kerned because it makes the letters look so much better and not awkward. You want it to appear like there is the same amount of space between the letters. 

-- In justification or H&J terms what do the numbers: minimum, optimum, maximum mean? The amount of words on the line.

-- What is the optimum space between words? En space.

-- What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph? Are there any rules?An indent or space with no text.

-- What are the rules associated with hyphenation? Do NOT hyphenate a headline!!!!!!!!!!!!

-- What is a ligurature? Something connecting two letters.

-- What does CMYK and RGB mean? RGB (red blue green) cmyk (cyan magenta yellow and black.

-- What does hanging punctuation mean? A hanging punctuation is the way  some quotes and hyphens are programmed to align in a body of text.

 

-- What is a widow and an orphan?

 

When a paragraph ends and leaves fewer than seven characters on the last line. That is called a WIDOW.

 

When the last line of a paragraph is long and wont fit at the bottom of a column and must end itself at the top of the next column is an ORPHAN.

Helvetica

  Helvetica is everywhere. I never realized how universal the font actually is. After watching the movie I realized that this font was created by a man that used straight clean edges on this sans serif font. The name originally was really long for Helvetica but after much discussion they changed the name to Helvetica (they had to pronounce the word differently because they way they initially said the word sounded just like the country Sweden). 

  I thought it was really neat to see my typographer Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler talk during the movie. I found out that Tobias is engaged and he said during an outing with his woman she couldn't remember the name of the place they were going to go eat and simply said, "Its the place down from Scotch Cleaners." Tobias replied with, "I remember it as the place next to the building with awful typeface." 

 I thought it was an interesting movie and now I am constantly looking at font and trying to discover what typeface it is.

why does it change my font and make some font bigger and other smaller after i publish my post?

it is driving me batty. 

Tobias Frere-Jones

A designer has made it big when becoming the first American to receive the Gerrit Noordzij Award. In 2006, Tobias Frere-Jones was presented this award by the Royal Academy of The Hague in honor of his unique contributions to type design, typography, and type.

Tobias Frere-Jones was born August 28, 1970 in New York. At age 14, he started exhibiting paintings, sculptures, and photographs in New York galleries. His family had various talents from writing to printing, which allowed Tobias to know the power of written text. Letterforms became appealing to him and started his infatuation with design. Tobias went to Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in 1992 with a Graphic Design degree. His first job out of school was working for Font Bureau as a Senior Designer. In addition to his numerous contributions to the Font Bureau library, he made three fonts, Reactor, Fibonacci, and Microphone for Fuse, a journal of experimental type design. “The day we stop needing new type will be the same day that we stop needing new stories and new songs,” Tobias Frere-Jones.

In 1996, Tobias joined the Yale School of Art faculty as a critic and shortly after in 1999 left Font Bureau where he began working with Jonathan Hoefler at the Hoefler Type Foundry, Inc. Since working together, the two have worked on projects for Barack Obama, Nike, Gucci, The Walt Disney Company, Martha Stewart (in several areas) Visa, and McGraw Hill. With clients such as Wired magazine, Hoefler and Frere-Jones custom-designed the magazine with a redesign using Vitesse and Vitesse Sans font. Not to mention the thousands of organizations that have chosen Hoefler and Tobias-Jones’ typefaces makes these two an outstanding duo. Tobias has designed over five hundred typefaces for retail publication, custom clients, and experimental research. Their work together has been featured in Print, How, ID, and Page. Tobias has also lectured throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.

When Hoefler and Frere-Jones began their collaboration, it was reported by The New York Times that the two had been profiled all over and thought the design press on five continents. They made radio, television, and even motion picture appearances. Both men have earned a permanent spot for their collections in the Smithsonian and the V&A. Also, the Hoefler and Frere-Jones have earned the Prix Charles Peignot award.

“Hoefler and Frere-Jones create fonts that stand out with the clarity, elegance, and durability of a well-cut diamond.... An Hoefler and Frere-Jones typeface is always exquisitely legible without sacrificing high style.” Time Magazine.

“Their fonts lend a sense of history and place to the pages where they are displayed, which may explain why, in this age of standardization, their work is so damn popular.” Esquire.

            “One of the defining factors of a typeface designed by the dup is the rigor of their reasearch and development process. Hoefler and Frere-Jones have designed very visible typrfaces that have had lasting cultural impact.” Eye Magazine.

 

Tobias Frere-Jones has spent two and half years gainging research and exploring New York City and their endangered art. Unique pieces of lettering have been destroyed which is erasing the literal handwriting of New York City.  Through the AIGA he guides tours through Manhattan’s alphabets, uncovering hidden and rare surviors of artwork. New York has such an overall feel that is different from everyother place in the world; the streets have a definitive signature that has been captured in visual mediums. The grand inscriptions and signage are vanishing from the wrecking balls of the building boom.

An interview with Tobias Frere-Jones was done in August of 2002 by Dmitri Siegel and was featured on The Morning News. Below is a section from the interview with Tobias Frere-Jones.

What piece of music most closely resembles the process of type design?
Yow. Hm. While I’m not sure I could pick out a single piece, I think most anything by Autechre would come pretty close, as those guys seem to work on very large and very small scales simultaneously. And even their most startling and disorienting pieces sound deliberate and carefully planned. I could also have an unfair bias, as I listen to them quite often while drawing.
How would you approach creating a typeface based on typography and graphic design of the recent past – say the mid-1990’s?
Given how quickly Interstate gained currency with designers, I’m really not sure how I’d handle that. My first thought is that it would be like trying to call myself on the telephone: ‘What? How come I always get a busy signal? Who could I possibly be talking to?’
What sort of creative or research projects do you work on outside of type design?
Music (or sound, generally) is definitely the largest activity aside from design. It gets sidelined by work now and then, but I like to stay close to that way of thinking.
How does designing a typeface that is self-initiated differ from designing one that is commissioned?
                                                Two of the designs that I’m most pleased with – Whitney and Gotham – wouldn’t have happened if somebody hadn’t asked for them. Those parts of the spectrum – the humanist and the geometric – had already been thoroughly staked out and developed by past designers. I didn’t think that anything new could have been found there, but luckily for me (and the client), I was mistaken. The best custom jobs will push me to take on a problem that I hadn’t considered before, or to reexamine what I had regarded as the final word for a given motif.                                                

How would you approach creating a typeface based on typography and graphic design of the recent past – say the mid-1990’s?

        Given how quickly Interstate gained currency with designers, I’m really not sure how I’d handle that. My first thought is that it would be like trying to call myself on the telephone: ‘What? How come I always get a busy signal? Who could I possibly be talking to?’

Fonts that Tobias has designed

Armada 1987-94

Dolores 1990

Hightower 1990-94

Nobel 1991-93

Garage Gothic 1992

Archipelago 1992-98

Cafeteria 193

Epitaph 1993

Reactor 1993

Reiner Script 1993

Stereo 1993

Interstate 1993-99

Fibonacci 1994

Niagrar 1994

Asphalt 1995

MSL Gothic (Benton Sans) 1995

Citadel 1995

Microphone 1995

Plsner 1995

Poynter Oldstyle 1996-97

Griffith Gothic 1997

Whitney 1996-2004

Phemister 1997

Grand Central 1998

Welo Script 1998

Retina 2000

Nitro 2001

Idlewild 2002

Exchange 2002

Monarch 2003

Dulcet 2003

Tungsten 2004

Argosy 2004

 

Fonts created with partner Jonathan Hoefler

Numbers 1997-2006

Mercury Text 1999

Vitesse 2000

Lever Sans 2000

Evolution 2000

Survevor 2001

Archer 2001

Gontham 2001 (Jesse Ragan included)

Interstate is a sans serif typeface with industrial roots. It was released in 1994 and was based loosely on the font family Highway Gothic, used by the United States Federal Highway Administration for road signs. Interstate was embraced universally by graphic designers and has been used on most everything, despite the specificity of its origins. Here is an example of this bold modern type.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

1234567890

 

Facts about Interstate font

Interstate is Bold Modern

Serif Sans

This font family has 40 fonts in three widths and seven weights.

The ascending and descending strokes are cut at an angle to see the stroke.

Ex. t and l

Curved strokes

Ex. e and s

Counters are open

Even condensed weights and style allow legibility

Simple and AMAZING

Helvetica, which is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design, and global visual culture looks at the typeface Helvetica in 2007. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a has a fluid discussion with reowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthitcs behind their use of type. Interviews in Helvetica inluded some of the most illustrious and innovative names in the design world inlcuding both Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler.

 

Other happenings in 1994 (aside from Interstate)

March 4^th marked the day when four terrorists were convicted for their roles in the World Trade Center bombing. The bombing killed six people and injured over a 1,000.

March 14^th was when Apple Computer, INC. releases their first Macintosh computers to use the new PowerPC Microprocessors. This is considered to be a major leap in the personal computer, as well as Macintosh history.

June 12^th is the date when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are murdered outside the Simpson home in Los Angeles, California. O.J. Simpson is later acquitted of the killings, but is held liable in a civil suit.

Tobias Frere-Jones is a fantastic designer that has been blessed with amazing talent. Not only is he a driven designer but he has made something out of himself by getting out and doing what he loves and that is designing. How incredible is it that he designed Interstate font? By looking at his website, he has tons of questions from various students around the world writing papers and doing presentations on his workd. I hope someday I can say those words.

Sources:

 

Use and abuse of fonts in signage, Berry, John D. Eye, vol. 17, no 67, Spring 2008 pp.25

 

Space and rhythm, Middendorp, Jan. Eye, vol. 15, no. 59, Spring 2006, pp. 42-47

 

http://www.typography.com/about/index.php

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_(typeface)

 

http://www.typography.com/about/index.php

 

http://www.aigany.org/events/details/08AC/

 

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2007/05/postopolis_tobi.html

 

http://www.myfonts.com/person/frere-jones/tobias/

 

Inspiration for Tobias and design not only came from his family but everyday experiences like seeinga  row of shopping cars have made his design style wider.

 

 

Fun Fact: Sasha Frere-Jones is Tobias brother and a music critic. (talented family)

Walking Tours of NYC with Tobias

http://thoughtandtheory.com/blog/2008/04/28/tobias-frere-jones-nyc-typographic-walking-tours-pics/

Tobias Frere-Jones more pictures of work

Tobias Frere-Jones aka stud

Random Pictures

Tobias on the left. (Jonathan Hoefler on right)

Tobias Frere-Jones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow6ajKO0XsM

Tobias Frere-Jones

Tobias Frere-Jones

·Born in New York August 28, 1970

·At age 14, he started exhibiting paintings, sculptures, and photographs in New York galleries.

·His family was writers and printers, which allowed him to know the power of written text and that made letterforms appealing.

·Went to Rhode Island School of Design.

·He graduated in 1992 with a Graphic Design degree

·First job out of school: Font Bureau, Senior Designer

·Typefaces created at Font Bureau were Interstate, Gothic, and Poynter Oldstyle.

·In addition to his numerous contributions to the Font Bureau library, he made three fonts, Reactor, Fibonacci, and Microphone for Fuse, a journal of experimental type design.

·1996 he taught a type design course at Yale School of Design and continues to teach at a graduate level.

·Tobias left Font Bureau in 1999 where he began working with Jonathan Hoefler at the Hoefler Type Foundary, Inc.

·Since working together, the two have worked on projects for The Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Nike, Pentagram, GQ, Esquire, The New Times, Business 2.0, and The New York Times Magazine.

·Tobias has designed over five hundred typefaces for retail publication, custom clients, and experimental research.

·His work has been featured in Print, How, ID, and Page.

·In 2006, Tobaias Frere-Jones became the first American to receive the Gerrit Noordzij Award, presented by the Royal Academy of The Hague in honor of his unique contributions to type design, typography, and type.



·Quote: “The day we stop needing new type will be the same day that we stop needing new stories and new songs.” ·Tobias Frere-Jones

http://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Frere-Jones

http://www.fontbureau.com/people/TobiasFrere-Jones

readability vs legibility

Readability vs Legibility

Readability is the interaction between type and the person reading it. There are many factors that play into readability such as background, spacing, typeface, line length, justification, paragraph density, grammar, and color of the text. If the text is not well prepared or written, then the reader will not have a comfortable read. Readability refers to the impression a piece of text creates. Readability is not about appearance but the difficulty of the language.

Examples:

http://www.formulartest.de/cmsmadesimple/images/cms/readability%20bad%20magic%20menue.JPG

http://www.mattmontag.com/images/readability.gif

Legibility is having the ability to distinguish between one character from the other by turning letters into words and so forth. It is how easily a typeset can be read. Legibility does not have anything to do with content of language but size and appearance of text.

Examples:

http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/servicefirst/2001/joinedup/accessible/typefaces.gif

Sept 16, 2008

Absolute Measurement: Absolute measurements are measurements of fixed values. Points and picas, which are the basic typographic measurements, are all equally fixed values. The absolute measurements are expressed in restricted terms that can’t be altered.

 

Relative Measurement: Relative measurement is linked to type size. This defines the relationship between spacing and type size. An example would be Ems and ens. They are prime examples of relative measurements that have no prescribed, absolute size. The size is the size of type that is being set.

 

Points: Points are measurements that are used to measure the type size of a font. (Ex. 7 pt Times New Roman.) The measurement refers to the height of the type block, not that letter itself.  Basic typographical measurement is an absolute measurement equivalent to 1/72 of an inch.

 

Picas:  A unite of measurement that is equal to 12 points that is commonly used for measuring lines of type. There are six picas (72 points) in an inch which equals 25.4 millimeters.

 

x-height: x-height is the height of the main body of the lowercase letter. (height of lowercase letter).

 

The Em: The em is a relative unit of measurement used in typesetting to define basic spacing functions and is linked to the size of the type. IT is a relative measurement that is the type size increases, so does the size of the em. If it decreases, so does the em.

 

The en: The en is a unit of relative measurement that is equal to half of one em. In 72pt type, an en would be 36 points. An en rule is used to denote nested clauses, but it can also be used to mean “to” in phrases such as 10-11 and 1975-1981.

 

Dashes: Type uses various dashes, short horizontal rules that serve carious specific functions such as em rules, en rules, and hyphens.

 

Em Dash: An Em dash is used to form lines and house nested clauses. A standard joining em dash can cause spacing issues as it has no side-bearings and fills its bounding box so that it touches the surrounding characters. A row of em dashes would form a solid line. Punctuating em dashes are shorter and provide space for characters allowing them space. A row of punctuating em dashes forms a punctuated line.

 

En Dash: An en dash is half of an em rule and is used to separate page numbers, dates, and to replace the word “to” in constructions implying movement.

 

Hyphens: A hyphen is one third of an em rule and is used to link words. It serves as a compound modifier where two words become one, such as an x-height. It breaks syllables of words in text blocks like geo-graphy and serves to provide clarity such as re-serve rather than reserve.

 

Alignment: Alignment refers to the position of type within a text block, in both the vertical and horizontal planes.

 

Justification: Justification used three values for type settings: minimum, maximum, and optimum values.

 

Flush Left: A flush left if an alignment that follows handwriting, with text tight and aligned to the left margin and ending ragged on the right.

 

Flush Right: Right aligning text isn’t as common as others because it is harder to read. It is used for picture captions or other accompanying texts as it is clearly distinct from body copy.

 

Letter Spacing: Space between words making an open pathway for letterforms.

 

Kerning: Kerning is the removal of space between characters.. This and letterspacing can be done manually or automatically.

 

Tracking: Adjusting the tracking affects the amount of spacing between characters.

 

Word Spacing: Word Spacing adjusts the amount of space between words.

 

Widow:  A single word at the end of a paragraph.

 

Orphan:  An orphan is something that should be avoided.  It is one or two lines of a paragraph that separate the main body to form a new column.

 

Leading: Leading is a hot metal. The term came from lead strips that were inserted between text measures in order to space evenly. Ex. Type was specified as 36 pt type with 4 pt leading. Now, leading refers to the space between the lines of text in a text block.

 

Indent: Indentation gives the reader an easy access point to a paragraph. The length of the indent can be related o the point size of the type such as a one em indent. The grid, such as a basic grid from a golden section, can determine the points.

 

First Line Indent:  The text in a first line indent comes from the left margarine in the first line of the second and subsequent paragraphs. The first paragraph in a document following a heading, subhead, or crosshead is not normally indented, as this is an awkward space.

 

Hanging indent: A hanging indent is like a running indent except the first line of the text is not indented. 

Source: Fundamentals of Typography

Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger was born in 1928. He was a very active child that experimented with scripts and stylized handwriting. He had a very early interest in sculpture and was discouraged by his father and secondary teachers. They encouraged him to work in print, yet his true interest was sculpture. He studied under Walter Kach and Alfred Willimann in the Kunstgewerbeschule School of applied arts between the years of 1949 and 1951. He later grew up to be a Swiss typographer, which he accepted a position at Deberny and Peignot. He began work and immediately started on a number of new typefaces, which included Univers. Univers was released in 1957; Frutiger attempted to categorize type. He saw a common problem that bold, extended, and etc. type that never meant the same thing from typographer to typographer. So that’s when Frutiger released Univers. In the pursuit of a new more logical system, Adrian used a color-coded diagram that displayed numbered weights on the vertical axis and had different widths. This design was used as a visual tool that illustrated the different variants in relationship to each other.

Sources:

Graphic Design: A New History Stephen Eskilson pg 207

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Frutiger

http://typophile.com/node/12118

John Baskerville

John Baskerville was born in 1706 in England and was a type designer, writing master and a printer all in his lifetime. He was said by many to be one of the greatest type designers of the 18th century in England. He worked as a printer and publisher in 1757 and the year after became printer to the University of Cambridge. John’s typefaces introduced a modern style with serifs and an emphasis on the contrast of light and heavy lines. The books that have been printed by Baskerville are usually large with great paper and ink and have wide set margins. He is known for his masterpiece, which was the folio Bible, published in 1763. His wife actually operated the press after John died in 1775 until 1777. It was claimed by many that the stark contrasts in Baskerville’s printing damaged his eyes. Most of his types were purchased by Beaumarchais and were used in his seventy-volume edition of Voltaire. Ben Franklin was a huge fan of John after their meeting in 1758. Baskerville's typeface is classified as transitional. The lower-case serifs that are almost horizontal in Baskerville’s work mark the difference between the fine and bold strokes. 

What makes John Baskerville unique is the fact that most of his designs were condemned for what was perceived as stark, abstract qualities and an extreme contrast in the width of his strokes. He used a technique called "hot pressing" which heated pages between copper plates that would set the ink efficiently.  

Sources:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Baskervi.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baskerville

http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/23/baskerville-john/

Graphic Design: A New History by Stephen Eskilson page 21

Grids

Designers use grids so they will have control over all visual elements that are composed on a surface. A pathway is created throughout the design that relays information to the viewers. The horizontal and vertical divisions of space allow the designer to create an organized template. The benefits of using a grid are that they vary in size and shape. They have modeled after structures and systems found everywhere including art, music, and nature. As stated in the layout workbook, a grid is used by a designer to adapt, break, and abandon for the benefit of design.



This website below shows 65 resources for grid-based design. wow.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000877.html


http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000877.html

http://www.ideabook.com/tutorials/page_layout/the_grid_an_invisible_framewor.html

Paul Rand

Paul Rand was born August 15, 1914 and died in November of 1996. Paul was an American Graphic Designer who was a legend for his corporate designs that include ABC, UPS, and IBM. He attended the Pratt Institute, the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League for school. He was a painter, industrial designer, lecturer, and an advertising artist. Paul was a realist and an idealist that thought in terms of function and need. At the age of 23, Paul tackled his first career at Esquire. He also created materials quarterly for Apparel Arts which is was in conjunction with Esquire. Being mostly known for his corporate logos in the late 1950s and 1960s, Paul’s work with page design contributed to his highly revered reputation. The cover art for Direction magazine was a major step for Paul because he was known for the “Paul Rand look” following the design. Paul taught design at Yale and was one of the creators of the Swiss style of graphic design. Prior to Paul’s death, Steve Jobs, a former client, said Paul Rand was the greatest living graphic designer. In the words of Paul Rand, “Don’t try to be original just try to be good."

Video’s and Pictures of Paul Rand’s Work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOB4FaAtPtg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yOjts0tpco

paul rand picture

paul rand on google

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20745656@N00/296543280/

http://www.paul-rand.com/timeline.shtml

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Rand&oldid=121940590

http://www.paul-rand.com/

http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/rand.htm