Design Principles: 12/11/13

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. When talking about type we are talking about typefaces. Not just individual fonts but the whole font family. This includes glyphs, glyphs are made up of punctuation and letterforms. 

Typography has rules which cannot be broken for example and 'a' must symbolise an 'a' or else it is no longer resembles an alphabet that we know. With our alphabet modifications it is exploring and looking at the implications of what happens when we manipulate type.

For todays session we needed to have printed the four best examples of Roman, Script, Gothic and Block type in both upper and lower case. The fonts I chose for this was Times New Roman, Monotype Corsiva, Futura and Impact. The first thing done was to organise this in a list from easiest to hardest to read. Afterwards in groups we had to distinguish a list of criteria which we subconsciously used to determine what was easier compared to harder. 

• Letters which are wider and have more space between them are easier to read.
• Bigger bowls and counters make it easier to read as the shapes are bigger and more recognisable.
• Tracking
• Contrast in letterforms
• Kerning
• X height
• the distance of the line spacing made an impact. The more space between lines the easier it is to read

Other things that were noticed were:

• If it was a smaller point size then serif would be easier to read as it guides your eye
• Serif is better in lower case
• San serif is better in upper case
• the  Pt size and distance away from the thing affects legibility  
• The distinction on lower case makes it easier to read from a longer distance and easily recognisable, for example motorway signs. 
• Gothic and Roman are almost always used as body copy.

Counters relate to negative space around and between letters. When reading we read more from the negative space than the letters themselves. Letters are recognisable by their negative space.

Being able to use negative space works well in advertising for example FedEx logo where the arrow is created between the E and the x. Or the F1 logo where the one is negative space. They are both subliminal and use the concept of type and image working together to create the brands identity.

Interestingly if the counters and negative space is smaller then we begin to read the letters together and not be able to differentiate. 

Kerning is the space between two letters. It affects the legibility of individual letter forms. When types are designed they are designed with the perfect spacing. All letterforms exist within a frame - kerning affects this, it fundamentally affects its reading ability.