Blog Posts for Type---Reading and Questions

Who is Herb Lubalin?

He was a logo designer who injected visual metaphors into typography and denied traditional letter spacing.

Why was Esguire important?

 He published respected writers such as hemingway, but the pinup girls brought on bad publicity. 

Who is Alexey Broadavich? 

Worked on harpers bazaar, freed the page to take pleasure in white space and the finely tuned pacing of text and image.

What did Hoefler-Jones do for Harper's? 

Didot type family.

Who is Gail Anderson? 

Art director of rolling stone.

Who is David Carson?

Art director of Ray Gun, put together first issue.

Who is Tibor?

Designer of Color, lack of decorative elements and visual devices and limited use of sans-serif typefaces allowed the photography and content to speak more loudly than the design.

Who is Neville Brody? 

Art director of The Face and introduced first custom typeface with issue number 50.

What is Speak?

A magazine that was writing on culture, music, fashion, literature, and art. And had a low budget, so they were resourceful when creating key imagery. 

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1. What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph.

A new paragraph begins after an indentation, or tab. A new paragraph can also be shown by leaving a blank line between the two paragraphs. Symbols, text size, color and line spacing can also be used. 

2. What are some things to look out for when hyphenating text.

Try to leave at least 2 characters on the line and 3 following, avoid hyphenating proper nouns.

3. Define font hinting. Why is it necessary?

Font hinting is using a rasterized grid to display letter forms that look right to the human eye. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing legible text.

4. What is letter spacing/tracking? How do you track in Illustrator or InDesign

Letter spacing is the space between letters and can be called functional white. The white is essential to font legibility and the desired visual impression of the text. The picture illustrates how to track in InDesign or Illustrator. 

5. Define Kerning? Name 8 kerning pairs. How do you kern in InDesign or Illustrator?

Kerning is the process of adding or subtracting space between pairs of characters. You can automatically kern type using metrics kerning or optical kerning. Metrics kerning uses kern pairs, which are included with most fonts. Kern pairs contain information about the spacing of specific pairs of letters. To kern in Illustrator or InDesign, type or select a numeric value for kerning in the Character panel.

6. What is word spacing?

Word spacing refers to the size of the space between words.

7. Explain DIN. 

DIN A sizes are usually the starting point for paper sizes for printed mater. DIN sizes use a 1: Square Root of 2 ratio. Besides the well-known A sizes, B and C sizes are also used. The B sizes are so-called uncut sizes so the page can be printed with bleed after which the sheet can be cut to a size A. The C sizes are mainly used for envelopes, which can then hold an A size. The American version of the A4 size is 8.5 x 11 inches and is therefore considerable shorter than an A4. 

8. What is a baseline grid?

A baseline grid is an imaginary grid upon which type sits. The baseline pf a piece of type can be forced to 'snap' to this grid to maintain continuity across the pages of a design.  The grid in Baseline is composed of 4 basic columns, for more flexibility each column can be divided in 2 units.

9. How many characters per line is optimal? Is there a range?

The optimal line length for your body text is usually considered to be within the 50-60 characters per line. At most up to 75 characters is acceptable. 

10. Define aesthetic text alignment.

Hanging punctuation controls the alignment of punctuation marks for a specific paragraph. Paragraph alignment determines the margin from which the punctuation hangs. 

11. What is a window?

A paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page/column, thus separated from the rest of the text

 

12. What is a typographic river?

A typographic river occurs in justified text blocks when the separation of the words leaves gaps of white space in several lines.  

13. What is an orphan?

An orphan is the final one or two lines of a paragraph separated from the main paragraph to form a new column and should be avoided.

Dorthea Lange

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld, (b. June 30 1944, New York City), is a fine-art color photographer noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York City and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He has influenced a generation of color photographers, including Andreas Gursky, who borrows many of Sternfeld's techniques and approaches.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. In 1974, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California. Afterward, Sugimoto settled in New York City. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.

Lewis Baltz

His entire work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz images describe the architecture of the human landscape, offices, factories, and parking lots. His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings. His minimalistic photographs in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria, picture the void of the other.^[vague] In 1974 he captured the anonymity and the relationships between inhabitation, settlement, and anonymity in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974).

Walker Evans

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".^[1] Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.^[2]

Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf or Josuf (his given Armenian name was Hovsep) Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). ^[3] He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, "I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village."^[3] At the age of 14, he fled with his family to Syria to escape persecution.^[4] Two years later, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer famous for the image of logs floating down the river on the Canadian one dollar bill.^[5]

Karsh returned to Canada four years later, eager to make his mark. He established a studio in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, Ontario, close to Canada’s seat of government. Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King discovered Karsh and arranged introductions with visiting dignitaries for portrait sittings. Karsh's work attracted the attention of varied celebrities, but his place in history was sealed on 30 December 1941 when he photographed Winston Churchill, after Churchill gave a speech to Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa.^[6]

INFOGRAPHICS. Alcohol Abuse

Tim Walker

Tim Walker’s photographs have appeared in Vogue, month by month, for over a decade.Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterise his style. After concentrating on the photographic still for 15 years, Tim Walker is now making film. On graduation in 1994, Walker worked as a freelance photography assistant in London before moving to New York City as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon. On returning to England, he initially concentrated on portrait and documentary work for UK newspapers. At the age of 25, he shot his first fashion story for Vogue, and has photographed for the British, Italian, and American editions ever since. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London include the photographs of Tim Walker in their permanent collections. He staged his first major exhibition at the Design Museum in London in the spring of 2008, coinciding with the publication of his book ‘Pictures’. In November 2008, Walker received the ‘Isabella Blow award for Fashion Creator’ by The British Fashion Council and, in May 2009, he received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York for his work as a fashion photographer.

Irving Penn

Irving Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) from which he was graduated in 1938. Penn's drawings were published by Harper's Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography. Penn worked for many years doing fashion photography for Vogue magazine, founding his own studio in 1953. He was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky.

Letter Fountain pages 37 - 51

What are small capitals? How are they different than something set in ALL CAPS?
Does your font have small caps? If not name a font that does.

Small capitals are are smaller versions of capital letters. Small capitals are generally a little taller than  the x height and they are more successful in situations when a person is using a word that they want to be highlighted but not over baring, like it would be if they used all caps. Clarendon does have small capitals.

What are ligatures? why are they used? when are they not used? what are common ligatures?

Does your font have ligatures? If not name a font that does.

Ligatures are combinations of characters that were designed to prevent ascenders from hitting descenders in a body of text.  Ligatures are only used when it is necessary, most of the time the problem does not occur. No my font does not have ligatures, but Bembo does.

What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe?

A foot mark does not has a cone shape while the a quote mark has a 9 or 6 shape to it. 

What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)?

 The inch mark is a straight shape while the quote mark has a curl to it.

What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used.

hyphen - is used as a symbol to break words.
en dash–is used to indicate a sudden change of direction.
em dash—is used to demarcate parenthetical thought.

INFOGRAPHIC STUDY

Font Study

Serif

 Old Style
-Axis of thick and thin slopes left
-Contrast is greater
-Cross bar of the lower-case e is horizontal
Bembo, Plantin, Garamond, Sabon, Albertina, Palatino

Transitional
-Axis between thick and thin slopes are vertical or slopes left
-Base serifs are little and not rounded
-The top serifs of lower case are roof shaped
Baskerville, Concorde, Fournier, Perptua, Calson Old Face

Modern
-Strong emphasis on vertical stroke
-Sharp contrasts
-Symmetry
Didot, Bodoni, Walbaum, Linotype, Fila Sophia

Slab Serif
-Little thick and thin contrasts
-Heavy rectangular serifs
-Serifs are defining characteristics
Antigue, Clarendon, Beton, Memphis, PMN Caecilia, Serifa

San Serif

Humanist
-No serifs
-Line widths are equal
-Shows some contrasts in line width
Gill Sans, Profile, Frutiger, Scala Sans, Myrid

Grotesk/Gothic
-Angular
-Calligraphic
Cloister Black, Grotesk, Bell Gothic, Benton Sans, News Gothic

Geometric
-No serifs
-Line thickness is same
-Axis of roundings is vertical
Futura, Avant Garde, Eurostile, Erbar, Bank Gothic

Clarendon

It is a serif. Clarendon was created in England by Robert Besley for the Fann Street Foundry in the year of 1845. The classification is a 'slab-serif'. There will be lots more information about Clarendon soon!

 

Behance!

I created a behance!! And I posted my first typography project. Here is the link! http://www.behance.net/gallery/Weather-with-Grid/2167803

Taco.

Firts 5 Pigs!!!!

Font Designers

Living
Erik Spiekermann- He was born in 1947 and was a graphic designer. In present time he is the directer of Fontshop, the type company he created. Meta was the first typeface that he designed. He is a fantastic speaker and writer when it comes to creating typeface.

Hermann Zapf- He was born in 1918 and has create many outstanding typefaces in his career. He is best known as a calligrapher; therefore, in his typefaces the value of handwriting is present,  in other words---the type is not perfect. The most popular of his designs is Optima.

Hans Eduard Meier- He was born in 1922 and his inspiration was Renaissance humanists. Syntax is the font that put him on the board with the great Swiss typeface designers. Syntax has its own unique impression with the harsh diagonals.

Max Miedinger- Made a modern version of Haas Grotesk and named id Neue Haas Grotesk. This name for the reborn typeface didn't stick though. The new name was Helvetica, which is the best selling typeface in san-serif.


Gunter Gerhard Lange- He works for the type foundry Berthold and he was been one of the best, most productive typographers from Germany. The typeface that he designed was Berthold Script which is usually named in the top five typefaces by graphic designers.

Dead

Morris Fuller Benton- He was born in 1872 and died 1948. His father was a typeface designer too, so it ran in the family. Morris's success was the typeface Franklin Gothic.  He is considered to one of the best type designers of all time.

Paul Renner- He was born in 1878 and died 1956. He based his typeface on geometry. In other words, means that he used only geometric figure to create the typeface Futura. There are many series that are in Futura's typeface family. This typeface put Paul Renner on the map in the type world.

Stanley Morison- He influences typographers even today with e amazing feats in design English typography. The type face that he created was Times New Roman. To make his career in short, he made modern influential versions of classic typefaces.

Frank  Hinman Pierpont- He was born in 1860 and dies in the year of 1937.  He designed the typeface Rockwell. He uses geometric construction in this typeface and has, also, improved many out of date typefaces--such as Plantin.

Eric Gill- He was born in 1882 and died in the year of 1940. This man was a Catholic and a Socialist which made him very controversial. He has worked on many popular type faces including Joanna. He has worked in many colaborations but he got all of the ownership on the Joanna typeface.

Definitions

_ define weight- the heaviness and mass of the type.
_ define width- extent from side to side.
_ define style-the form of the type.
_ define font- assortment of type of one style and size.
_ define typeface- the design and style of the font.
_ define x-height- how high the lowercase x is.
_ define cap height- how tall your capital letters are.
_ define leading-
_ define letterspacing (tracking)- the space in between letters.

in regards to measuring type...
_ How is type measured in inches, mm, points or picas- points
_ define point- the unit of measurement for type, basically a pen point.
_ define pica- equal to one sixth of an inch.
_ How many points in an inch? 72
_ If a letter is set in 36 pts about how many inches tall is it? 1 in
_ How many picas in an inch? 1
_ How many points in a pica? 12

Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger is best known a type designer. His early work was disregarded by the masses. He also, creates the type font 'Univers' which is the type we are using right now in class. 1928 is when his life began. He, of course, is from Switzerland. He has created many type fonts but he came from a humble beginning working as an apprentice for a printer. Soon after that he went to school in Zurich at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. He moved pretty quickly through out his career. Therefore, he sprinted to Paris shortly after school where he worked with traditional typefaces at a type foundry. Moving forward in his career he had started making all sorts of books; such as, Type, Sign, Symbol (1980) was his first.  He has created multiple typefaces they are found in many foundries where people are using and appreciating his work. 

Like I mentioned before his most common type used is 'Univers'. It is his type that we are studying and working with. It is unbelievable how much work his has put in this one typeface. There are many categories within ‘Univers’ and to think that he has made many more typefaces is unbelievable. The weights and variations are what make the Univers grid different when compared to others. The other variations that are in the other type families are sorted by the use of numbers rather then names. Yet, the unique Univers family uses both letter suffixes and numbers. It is these differences that make Univers unique when compared with other typefaces and type families.

looking for KICKASS design tips on computer progams?

noupe is a REALLY cool website with some design tips and tutorials. Visit www.noupe.com!! Anyways I really hate cutting out little words--very meticulous homework for the new typography project. But in the end I shall have a fantastic design and that is, also, structured with INTENTIONAL marks. 

This image is from diviantart which is another really great site to get inspiration. OK, that's all for this post I have mumbled long enough!

HEY ALL

So I was browsing through the internet looking for designers that use simple shapes and have an over all clean look about his/her design and I came across Jeff Kern. This is his website if you would like to check him out! http://www.jeffkerndesign.com/#PortfolioAnchor

Homework VISC 202

1) Define the word 'grid'?
       - A network of vertical and horizontal lines that are used to create alined design plans.
2) Why do we (designers) use a grid?What are the benefits or functions?
       - The grid is used to guide the designer. It guides by alining and organizing the separate images and texts in a design. The benefits would be---an easy way to line up the separate pieces in the design and it acts as a perimeter so the design is organized and clean.
3) What is a modular grid?
       - Modular Grids are consistent horizontal divisions throughout the page with vertical divisions cutting through the horizontal from left to right.
4)-->see next post.
5) Define Hierarchy
       - Hierarchy is a series of ordered groupings within a system.
6) What is Typographic Color?
       - Typographic Color is  apparent blackness of a block of text resulting from the combined effect of the relative thickness of the strokes of individual characters, their width and point size and the leading (line spacing) used in setting the text as stated on dictionary.com.
7)  What are ways to achieve a clear hierarchy?
      - Use bigs and smalls. Changing color, size, and opacity can also set a clear hierarchy.
8) Define White Space
       - White space is the space on the page that is not being used by the type or images.
9) Define Contrast
       - Contrast is an exhibition of differing objects, color, and size.

VISC 204 piggy!

 

I chose my animal to draw a zillion times to be a pig. I picked a pig out of all animals because I thought a pig would be fun and humorous to draw. Therefore, I feel like I will not get bored with drawing and recreating a pig. SO PIG IT IS!

 

This is the November 1962 Vogue issue. The editor was Alysa Garland and the cover was done by Gladys Perrint. I like this cover because it is something completely different than normal fashion magazines; but I believe that this cover is more high fashion than 60 percent of the covers with living models on them.