Typography;
noun
The style and appearance of printed matter.The art or procedure of arranging type or processing data and printing from it
Short History on Typography:
Typography first started as cave paintings and drawings on the walls of caves and other surfaces such as bark. These were called pictograms and told a story as you looked along them. From pictograms came Ideographs which substituted common symbols and abstractions for pictures of events. For example, a star in an ideograph resembled the heavens or a peace pipe which resembles peace. From here on a system developed from the egyptians, this was called Hieroglyphics, these were the first drawings used to represent not just objects or idea's but also sounds too.
Since then we have come a long way with how we communicate and our ways of doing so, since 1200 BC we have used an Alphabet first developed by the Phoenicians which was completely composed of letters instead of the less independant and simple hieroglyphics. The greeks then adopted the language created by Phoenicians adding the first 5 vowels which is also the beginning of the modern alphabet we use today. To keep the rest short, the Romans developed the alphabet further by using 23 letters and introducing serifs which are the small flourishes/finishing strokes at the end of letters. We get our mass printed and published materials from the 1400's where Guttenberg invented a system of movable type that revolutionized and changed the world forever, allowing this mass printing of materials.
Kerning -
Kerning is the space between two characters in a word or sentence. Whilst kerning generally implies a reduction of space between both the letters, it can also mean the addition of space between lettering too, and well-kerned fonts and lettering have a visually similar area of two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of characters as well.Good Kerning and Bad Kerning:
Why the kerning on the left is better than the right?
Using what we said above, the kerning featured on the left is better than the kerning on the right because of the spacing. You can see the difference visually and how more visually pleasing and correct it looks, there is not too much space between both letters which shows they both belong to each other but also, the spacing on the right looks a bit excessive and unneeded when you could just tie the lettering closer together and make your font look neater and tidier as a whole.
Serif and Sans-Serif
A Serif and Sans-serif is a different kind of typeface in typography, both are different because of the qualities they possess, for instance, a serif has small flourish on the end of its characters and was first invented by the Romans. A Sans-serif on the other hand doesn't have small flourishes or small strokes at the end of its characters and is used more informally when typing whereas fonts such as Time New Roman are used to formally type up letters and emails to people.
Serif and Sans-Serif fonts:
All these different fonts are Serif fonts and as you can see, they notably have flourishes at the end of each character. Below is an example of the different Sans-Serif fonts available.
Parts of a letter:
Type Anatomy -
Characters - A symbol which represents a number or letter
Characters are what make up the the letters of our alphabet and the numbers we use in mathematics and create words in our language.
Special Characters - These are characters such as %, $ and &. Note, they are non-alphabetic nor are they non-numeric.
Ligatures - Ligatures are where two or more letters are joined together as one glyph, this means that they replace characters which share common components and are part of a general class of glyphs called "Contextual forms".
Character Components -
Ascender - A part of a letter which extends above the level of the top of an 'x', letters like this include the letters such as a 'b' or an 'f'.
Bar - A horizontal stroke in characters, letters such as A, e and R have a bar.
Baseline - Non-existant straight line across the feet of most letters in a line of type
Bowl - The curved stroke that creates an enclosed space within a character, an example would be at the letter B
Bracket - A curved connection between the stem and serif on some fonts, this can be seen on letters like 'u' but is dependent on the font used.
Contrast - Contrast is the difference between a number of things, including scale, weight, classification, case and colour.
Counter - The partially or fully enclosed space within a character.
Descender - The part of a character such as g or j which descends below the baseline.
Loop - The lower end of a lowercase g.
Sans Serif - A style of type which doesn't contain flourishes at the end of its lettering.
Shoulder - A curved stroke in the letters h, m and n.
Stem - Straight vertical stroke, or the main straight diagonal stroke in a letter which has no verticals at all.
Stress - The direction of thickening in a curved stroke.
Terminal - The end of a stroke not terminated with a serif.
X-height - The height of lowercase letters, specifically the lowercase x, not including ascenders and descenders.
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