Clemons sp

TYPOGRAPHIC P ORTF OL I O

An Exploration of the History, Usage and Terminology of Type as used in the Graphic Arts

Winter 2015 The Fashion Institute of Fashion & Design

MERCEDES CLEMONS

Fall 2015

“When typography is on point, words become images.” ― Shawn Lukas

FONTS

Helvetica Neue, Champaign & Limousines, Tall Films, Didot, Bodoni 72, Code Light, Bella, Anders, Majesti, Lavanderia, Franklin Gothic, Baskerville, Manhattan Darling.

M

ercedes Clemons is a West Coast based graphic designer with a focus on front end web development. Her work can be described as a daring clean approach with high attention to detail. She designs with simplicity and functionality while utilizing bold prints, colors, and textures.

CONTENTS 05

logo design

07

brand identity

09

character studies

13

calendar design

15

poster design

17

ubiquitous type

19

sketch book

23

pop!

33

typographical terms

logo design

5

Graphic Design

brand identity

7

character studies

9

Character Studies | The Letter A

T

he reason the letter “A” looks the way it does is a mystery to all, but a look into typographic history gives us a fairly logical chain of events.

Starting with the Phoenicians - it’s said that they chose an ox to represent the ‘A’ sound. For them the ox was a power source working as an important communication tool. They called this letter alef, and it was depicted with the ‘A’ as a ‘V’ with a crossbar to distinguish the horns from the face.

Character Studies | The Letter G

The Letter G Generally speaking, there are no launch dates for the letters of our al- phabet. For the most part they’ve come down to us through an evolutionary process, with shapes that developed slowly over a long period of time. The G, however, is an exception. In fact, our let- ter G made its official debut in 312 B.C. Of course, the story begins a bit ear- lier than that. The Phoenicians, and the other Semitic peoples of Syria, used a simple graphic form that looked roughly like an upside-down V to represent the consonant ‘g’ sound (as in “go”). They named the form gimel, which was the Phoenician word for camel. Some con- tend this was because the upside-down V looked like the hump of a camel.

Baskerville Baskerville, which is attributed to the Monotype Design studio as a whole, modeled its version on a quatro of Terrence’s Comoediae printed by Baskerville in 1772. It is a cleaner typeface than the original– the design studio seems to have streamlined much of the rougher characteristics in Baskerville’s work, giving Monotype Baskerville a finer, more modern edge.

Character Studies | The Letter Z

The twenty-sixth letter of our alphabet was the seventh letter in the Semitic alphabet. They called the letter “za” (pronounced “zag”) and drew it as a stylized dagger. The Phoenicians used roughly the same graphic sign, which they called “zayin” and which also meant a dagger or weapon. A similar symbol turns up in various other cultures,

all having the same meaning. Around 1000 B.C. the Phoenician zayin became the Greek “zeta.” The Greek character looked more like a dagger than the zayin did, but it didn’t bear much resemblance to the Z we currently use. In fact, it looked a lot like our present capital I (especially as set in ITC Lubalin Graph, or another slab serif typeface).

calendar design

13

2016 the year of the monkey

1

poster design

15

EXPLORATIONS OF TYPOGRAPHY WITH

RICK BANKS’

Bella Font design for the F37 Foundry and exclusively sold at Hype For Type. Designed in the classical French Didot style but with a contemporary

JAN3 MAR - 25 RD

221 S. Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90012 www. momt.com

TH

geometrical twist.

F37 Bella is based on letterforms of American typographers; John Pistilli and Herb Lubalin, and Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold.

T

The presence of typography both go o

ypography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual sense and historical sense.

The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its visual form are many and widespread. The history of letter- forms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions and old books, but from others it is largely hid- den.

This book has therefore grown into some-thing more than a short manual of typo-graphic etiquette.

It is the fruit of a lot of long walks in the wilderness of letters: in part a pocket field guide to the living wonders that are found there, and in part a meditation on the ecological principles, survival techniques, and ethics that apply. The principles of typography as I understand them are not a set of dead conventions but the tribal customs of the magic forest, where ancient voices speak

from all directions and new ones move to unremembered forms.

One question, nevertheless, has been often in my mind. When all right-thinking human beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exist for these commandments, suggestions, and instructions? Surely typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose.

Typography thrives as a shared concern - and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions.

A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travellers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject of this book is

not typographic solitude, but the old, well- travelled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose - if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead.That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown. If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is pre- cisely the use of a road: to reach individu- ally chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first books were printed in roman type.

o d and bad, can be seen everywhere.

Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens on papyrus in 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made.

anatomy of the human mind. I don’t like to call these principles universals, because they are largely unique to our species. Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography

with an independent existence.

Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of type.

It is true that typographer’s tools are presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium. I suppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and this with an independent existence.”

Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize, whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdom typographers set for themselves than with the mutable or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular - and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous

are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus

sketch book

19

pop!

23

vis

l ua

ne

e

ni

m

u ol

v

t

ec

oj pr

iss

ue in

e

on

is

th

e:

u iss

pop!

s

er

ry ar

riv

l

a

y nd

l

ho

r wa

k

n fra

a

ar

h o’

e sp

ja

y

ro

Week 1

s

hn

o rj

e

h lic

ia

g or

ge

n

ei

t ns

ef

o

e ’k

Week 2

andy warhol

larry rivers

georgia o’ keef

frank o’hara

roy lichenstein

jasper johns

in this issue:

pop!

visual project

issue one

volume nine

pop!

e

i ss ue on

e lum vo nine

visual project

jasper johns roy lichenstein frank o’hara georgia o’ keef larry rivers andy warhol

Week 3

pop!

issue one volume nine visual project

in this issue: jasper johns

roy lichenstein

frank o’hara

georgia o’ keef

larry rivers

andy warhol

Week 4

pop! visual project volume nine issue one in this issue:

larry rivers

georgia o’ keef

frank o’hara

roy lichenstein

jasper johns

andy warhol

Week 5

in this issue:

pop! jasper frank johns o’hara

georgia larry o’ keef rivers

andy warhol

issue one volume nine visual project

roy lichenstein

Week 6

jasper johns roy lichenstein frank o’hara georgia o’keef larry rivers andy warhol

pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! i s s u e o n e v o l u m e n i n e v i s u a l p ro j e c t

Week 7

pop! pop! pop! pop! in this issue:

jasper johns roy lichenstein frank o’hara georgia o’keef lary rivers andy warhol

Week 8

issue one volume nine visual project

pop!

issue one volume nine visual project

jasper johns frank o’hara

in this issue:

georgia o’keef larry rivers andy warhol

Week 9

typographical terms

33

Typographical Terms Illustrated Grotesque

A sans serif style with moderate stroke contrast and modern proportions particular to the U.K. Usually features a two-story lowercase g, closed strokes (usually curving in slightly) on C and S, and a sloped, non-cursive italic.

Carrois Gothic

Cursive

Cursive, also known as longhand, script, handwriting, looped writing, joined-up writing, joint writing, or running writing is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster.

Lobster

Wood Type In America, with the expansion of the commercial printing industry in the first ears of the 19th century, it was inevitable that someone would perfect a process of cheaply producing the large letters so in demand for broadsides. Wood was the logical material because of its lightness, availability, and known printing qualities.

Carnivalee Freakshow

Calligraphy

The visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a broad tip instrument or brush in one stroke (as opposed to built up lettering, in which the letters are drawn).

Birds O fParadise

Hairline Rule

“The thinnest possible line or space that is visible.” And a hair line rule is: “The thinnest rule that can be printed, generally considered to be less than one point or

Helvetica Neue Thin

black letter

The Blackletter typeface (also sometimes referred to as Gothic, Fraktur, or Old English) was used in the Gothenburg Bible, or one of the first books printed in Europe.

This type of typeface is recognizable by its dramatic thin and thick strokes, and in some fonts, the elaborate swirls on the

NewRocker

distressed

Distressed typefaces cover a lot of ground.

Some replicate the irregular contours of brush strokes and other writing implements.

Other capture the organic texture of parchment and stone, or approximate the low-tech look of woodcuts, stencils and

Shortcut

Display Type set in a larger point size than the text (commonly greater than 14-point) such as headlines.

Couture

●Bullet

A common type of pi character available in a variety of sizes, used for decorative or organizational purposes.

Champagne & Limousines

Kern ing

Transitional

Type styles with more refined serifs and clearly drawn thick and thin strokes; bridge between Old Styles and Modern

Baskerville

Handlettering

A typeface that appears or actually is printed by hand. The informal character of handwritten script not only attracts attention, but serves as a contrast to structured typography.

Evenfall

track-

Also called letter-spacing, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line of block

Lemon Milk

Manually adjusting the spacing between specific letters, often required and often considered evidence of a great designer.

1"#$l

Dingbats

Anders

Swash

A set of letters loosely based on italics, but with elaborate flourishes, tails, ascenders, and descenders.

A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a printer’s ornament or printer’s character.

Bodoni 72 Bookstyle / Ornaments

Oblique

Lavanderia

12 point rule The most common method used to measure type is the point system, 12 points make up one pica, a unit to measure column

Verdana

Ĝļŷρḧş The shape given in a particular typeface to a specific grapheme or symbol. Most commonly glyphs are letters and numerals, but punctuation marks and symbols and shapes (e.g. ITC Zapf Dingbats) are also

Times New Roman

reversed In printing refers to type that drops out of the background and assumes the color of the paper.

impact label

A roman typeface simply slanted to the right (or left).

Avenir Book Oblique

Ligature

fl

Manually adjusting the spacing between specific letters, often required and often considered evidence of a great designer.

Adobe Garamond Pro

Slab Serif In typography, a slab serif (also called mechanistic, square serif, antique or Egyptian) typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like

Zantroke

A

Dropcap

drop cap is the first letter of a paragraph that’s of a much bigger size than the rest that follow.

Adele