Tuesday, December 13, 2011

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.