These are my notes from this weeks design principles session.
'Type is speech made visible'
People learning to read made type have a purpose. Previously, we had word of mouth, poets, plays, storytellers, and town priors who once a week would go around the town telling people the weekly news.
People speak with accents, different tones, emotions etc, which is what type is and why there are different types.
Vocabularly
Tracking, kerning, weight, stroke, font family, font, typeface, lowercase/uppercase, serif, sans serif, script, blackletter, display, monotype, symbol.
Typeface
A collectioon of characters, letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation etc which have the same distinct design.
Font
The physical means used to describe a typeface, be it computer code, woodblock, lithographic film etc.
Typeface is the whole font family, but the font is the specific weight.
For the group exercise we had to categorise the fonts we had all bought in, into different categories:
Bold/Italic
Bold/Condensed
Light/Italic
Regular
We then had to categorise them into these categories, which made it a lot easier.
There are four ways in which we categorise fonts:
Roman
Gothic
Block
Script
Legibility/Readability
The counter is the biggest thing what helps us distinguish shapes because of the negative space. It helps us to recognise letterforms.
Legibility is the degree to which glyphs (individual characters) in text are understandable or recognisable based on appearance.
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 is space between each glyph.
Tracking is about increasing leading so there is a greater space between each letter.
Kerning is about decreasing the leading. When writing bodycopy, you should never using kerning as it decreases readability.
Rule - no more than 3 typefaces should be used at once.
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