OUGD404 - Design Principles

In todays design principles session, Phil told us things he wanted for submission, and some things to find out.

He wants:
Blog with workshop tasks
Thumbnail layouts
Enlarged and scaled thumbnails with rough measurements
Traditional mark up with margins, guides, grids, size, etc
Digitised mark up

10 double page spreads (10 things you should know about graphic design)
- design and layout
- printing method
- format
- final outcome
- time

There are some things that we should know about design, and each table got one question to answer each, and ours is:

What are points, picas and pixels?
We decided to split the question up, and I am going to look at Pica.

A pica is a measuring unit used in typography, and 12 points make up 1 pica, and makes up 1/6 of an inch.
The pica originated when Francois-Ambroise Didot, a printer, adapted the point system so that typefaces could be measured by width using a point which is 1/72 of an inch, and a pica is 12 points. It was later renamed Didot after him.

There are three types of picas used in printing:
French Pica: 12 didot points - 4.512mm
American Pica: 0.166044in (4.2175mm)
Computer Pica: Is 1/72 of 4.233mm

There are also different ways of representing pica, for example:
In Adobe software, the pica is shown as '4p6' - so this means '4 and a half picas', as the p is shown after pica unit, but before the point. 
Cascading Style Sheets abbreviate pica to 'pc', so an example would be 5pc, meaning five picas.
The most common way of writing pica, is to use a capital letter P and a slash following it: P/. So an example would be 3P/ means 3 picas, and 3P/2 means 3 picas and 2 points.

He also showed us some examples of editorial design:

Nozine

Newwork magazine

I love both of these examples, and I think they will heavily influence my own designs.