2018
fidm
Portfolio
Typography Spring
MARTHA
INTRO
CHARACTER STUDIES
TABLE OF
Martha
SKETCHES
MART TERMS
LOGO DEVELPMENT
NEVENS
M A R T H A
CONTENTS
N E V E N S
a Nevens
TYPOGRAHPER
MUSEUM REPORT
Martha Nevens TYPE LAYOUT
THA NEVENS POP!
FONTS
MARTHA NEVENS
M A R T H A
INTRO
L
orem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like). There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc
Character Studies
Ab ou t th is f on t, B
as
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o one knows why ‘A’ is the first letter of our alphabet. Some think it’s because this letter represents one of the most common vowel sounds in ancient languages of the western hemisphere. Other sources argue against this theory because there were no vowel sounds in the Phoenician language. (The Phoenician alphabet is generally thought to be the basis of the one we use today.) No one also knows why the ‘A’ looks the way it does, but we can construct a fairly logical chain of events. Some say the Phoenicians chose the head of an ox to represent the ‘A’ sound (for the Phoenicians, this was actually a glottal stop). The ox was a common, important animal to the Phoenicians. It was their main power source for heavy work. Oxen plowed the fields, harvested crops, and hauled food to market. Some sources also claim that the ox was often the main course at meals. A symbol for the ox would have been an important communication tool for the Phoenicians. It somewhat naturally follows that an ox symbol would be the first letter of the alphabet. It somewhat naturally follows that an ox symbol would be the first letter of the alphabet.
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Baskerville, designed in 1754, is
most known for its crisp edges, high contrast and generous proportions. The typeface was heavily influenced by the processes of the Birminghambred John Baskerville, a master type-founder and printer, who owed much of his career to his beginnings. As a servant in a clergyman’s house, it was his employer that discovered his penmanship talents and sent him to learn writing. Baskerville was illiterate but became very interested in calligraphy, and practised handwriting and inscription that was later echoed in strokes and embellishments in his printed typeface.
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Character Studies
T
urns out, no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point. But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.” Turns out, no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point. But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.” Turns out, no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point. It wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.”
!
!!! HISTORY OF THE EXCLAMATION POINT!
The exclamation mark was first introduced into English printing in the 15th century to show emphasis, and was called the “sign of admiration or exclamation” or the “note of admiration” until the mid-17th century; admiration referred to its Latin sense of wonderment.
An exclamation point is a form of punctuation that is used to add emphasis or express strong emotion (especially excitement). The role of the exclamation point does not change based on the given medium (it has the same effect in a book as it does in a text message).
Character Studies
The Origin of the Z
T
he letter z was part of the earliest form of the Latin alphabet, adopted from Etruscan. Because the sound /z/ in Latin changed to /r/ by rhotacism in the fifth century BC, z was dropped and its place given to the new letter g. In the 1st century BC, z was reintroduced at the end of the Latin alphabet to represent the sound of the Greek zeta /dz/, as the letter y was introduced to represent the sound of the Greek upsilon /y/. Before the reintroduction of z, the sound of zeta was written s at the beginning of words and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη “belt” and trapessita for τραπεζίτης “banker”. In some inscriptions, z represented a Vulgar Latin sound, likely an affricate, formed by the merging of the reflexes of Classical Latin /j/, /dj/ and /gj/:[example needed] for example, zanuariu for ianuariu “January”, ziaconus for diaconus “deacon”, and oze for hodie “today”. Likewise, /di/ sometimes replaced /z/ in words like baptidiare for baptizare “to baptize”. In modern Italian, z represents / ts/ or /dz/, whereas the reflexes of ianuarius and hodie are written with the letter g (representing /dʒ/ when before i and e): gennaio, oggi. In other languages, such as Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred.
Early English used S alone for both the unvoiced and the voiced sibilant. The Latin sound imported through French was new and was not written with Z but with G or I. The successive changes can be well seen in the double forms from the same original, jealous and zealous. Both of these come from a late Latin zelosus, derived from the imported Greek. The earlier form is jealous; its initial sound is the [dʒ], which developed to Modern French [ʒ]. John Wycliffe wrote the word as gelows or ielous. Z at the end of a word was pronounced ts, as in English assets, from Old French asez “enough” (Modern French assez), from Vulgar Latin ad satis (“to sufficiency”). In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols.[8] In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to Z being followed by & when her character Jacob Storey says, “He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish off th’ alphabet like; though ampusand would ha’ done as well, for what he could see.” Some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on the end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö, while it is Å for Danish and Norwegian. In the German alphabet, the umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü) and the letter ß (Eszett or scharfes S) are regarded respectively as modifications of the vowels a/o/u and as a (standardized) variant spelling of ss, not as independent letters, so they come after the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with z.
History of Athelas Font Inspired by Britain’s classic literature and created by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, Athelas prioritises the beauty of fine book printing and makes it available digitally and in printed form. It takes full advantage of typographic tranquility — the white space in the margins, between the columns, the lines, the words, and finally within the characters themselves. Athelas breathes peacefully on the page to usher the reader into the wordsmith’s art. Athelas is a typeface with open counters, elegant curves, and graceful serifs. Fluid shapes in the roman variants meet their counterpart in a more angular italic, but there are no sharp edges in the entire character set. Athelas also takes advantage of the technical developments made in offset printing. It shows its best side in finely crafted books and high quality printing conditions, or in digital works that place a premium on the tone and beauty of the piece.
Although inspired by British literature, Athelas respects the cultural needs of languages where diacritic marks play an indispensable role. It has a large character set covering most Latinbased languages, as well as monotonic Greek (designed by Irene Vlachou) and Cyrillic (designed by Tom Grace). As recognised by its use in Apple Inc.’s iBooks app and the desktop operating system Mavericks, the complete Athelas family has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses, along with our entire catalogue.
SKETCHES
BLACKLETTER The Blackletter typeface (also sometimes referred to as Gothic, Fraktur or Old English) was used in the Guthenburg Bible, one of the first books printed in Europe. This style of typeface is recognizable by its dramatic thin and thick strokes, and in some fonts, the elaborate swirls on the serifs. Blackletter typefaces are based on early manuscript lettering. They evolved in Western Europe from the mid twelfth century.
CURSIVE
TRACKING
SLAB SERIF
Cursive comes from the past participle of the Latin word currere, which means “to run.” In cursive handwriting, the letters all run into one another and the hand runs across the page, never lifting between letters. Every time a document asks for your signature at the bottom of a document, you are meant to use this flowing cursive writing style.
In typography, letter-spacing, also called tracking, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of text. Letter-spacing can be confused with kerning. Letter-spacing refers to the overall spacing of a word or block of text affecting its overall density and texture.
A small decorative line added as embellishment to the basic form of a character. Typefaces are often described as being serif or sans serif (without serifs). The most common serif typeface is Times Roman. A common sans serif typeface is Helvetica. 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 serifs. ... Slab serifs form a large and varied genre.
DINGBAT In general, a dingbat is a character, spacer, or ornament used in typesetting. ... In computing, dingbat is a term used to describe certain fonts that have shapes and symbols in place of what would normally be letters and numbers. One common example is the Zapf Dingbat.
HAIRLINE RULE And a hair line rule is: “The thinnest rule that can be printed, generally considered to be less than one point or 1/72” wide.” ... In your page-layout application a hairline is any line, frame or paragraph rule that has a line width less than 0.25 of one point.
DROP CAP A drop cap is the where the first character of the first paragraph is made larger, taking up several lines of text or the first few sentences. Drop caps are used in various media the used typed text including books, newspaper articles, documents, and webpages. Drop caps are used to add style or grab a reader’s attention.
CALLIGRAPHY
EGYPTIAN FONT
Calligraphy is more likely than lettering to be used in longer written pieces. Typography is a repeated system of letters. ... It’s not a specific style of writing or creating letters and words, but more the arrangement of how those letters appear together in a system.
Welcome to the early 1800s and the birth of the Slab Serif, otherwise known as Egyptian, Square Serif, Mechanical or Mécanes. What’s with the name Egyptian? Upon Napoleon’s return from a three year Egyptian expedition and publication in 1809 of Description de l’Égypt, Egypt was all the rage, and it appears that type founders simply used a term that was on everyone’s lips, a term that was in vogue. The nomenclature has absolutely nothing to do with Egyptian Hieroglyph Slab Serifs—because there’s no such thing.
DISPLAY TYPE A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text. Display typefaces will often have more eccentric and variable designs than the simple, relatively restrained typefaces generally used for body text.
TERMS ILLUSTRATED
FRACTION DECORATIVE
WOOD TYPE
REVERSED
Also referred to as display type, decorative fonts are typically used for titles and headlines and for small amounts of text in large sizes such as in greeting cards or posters. Some decorative type is hand drawn or may be created from digital type that has been manipulated in a font editor or graphics program to suit a specific purpose such as a newsletter nameplate or a logo.
In America, with the expansion of the commercial printing industry in the first years of the 19th century, it was inevitable that someone would perfect a process for cheaply producing the large letters so in demand for broadsides. Wood was the logical material because of its lightness, availability, and known printing qualities.
Reversing type – that is, placing light or white type against a darker background – is a useful way to add emphasis as well as to help develop a strong typographic hierarchy. A reverse headline can provide an inviting, eye-catching point of entry, signaling the viewer to “look here” before moving on to the other elements.
RAISED CAPS Raised initials are the easiest to set – just align the baseline of the initial with the first line of text copy. Sometimes the copy to the right of the initial letter needs to be kerned to the left to ensure that the first word is read properly. The initial letters to watch for are the same ones that would usually be kerned in normal text copy: T, W, V, Y. (Illustration 2)
AMPERSAND
DIDONE Didone typefaces (also referred to as Neoclassical and Modern) enjoyed great popularity from the late 18th through the 19th centuries. ... Didones are characterized by extreme weight contrast between thicks and thins, vertical stress, and serifs with little or no bracketing.
DISTRESSED Distressed typefaces cover a lot of ground. Some replicate the irregular contours of brush strokes and other writing implements. Others capture the organic texture of parchment and stone, or approximate the low-tech look of woodcuts, stencils and rubber stamps. Not every distressed face looks natural. Some are designed to look grungy and deconstructed, and some are positively spooky, with creepy, drippy letterforms.
Rooted in the Latin “et” (meaning “and”), the ampersand is a ligature composed from the letters “e” and “t”. The word “ampersand” itself is an alteration of “et per se and,” which became corrupted to “and per se and”, and finally “ampersand.” The history of the ampersand dates back to 63 B.C.E., and was a commonly used character during the Incunabula. For example, a single page from a book printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499, has over twentyfive ampersands!
The most common typographic treatment (unless otherwise requested) is the diagonal fraction. (Some clients and style manuals may prefer spelled-out fractions in running text, but guidelines for this are often inconsistent, and occasionally even contradictory.) Diagonal fractions can be categorized as prebuilt, automatic, or custommade. Prebuilt (also called precomposed) fractions are the most desirable, as they have been individually designed as part of a given typeface.
LIGATURE Two or more letters are joined together to form one glyph or character. Definition: Two or more letters combined into one character make a ligature. In typography some ligatures represent specific sounds or words such as the AE or æ diphthong ligature.
Martha Nevens
LOGO DEVELOPMENT
MARTHA NEVENS DIRECTOR/WRITER
M A R T H A
DIRECTOR/WRITER
N E V E N S
Martha Nevens DIRECTOR/WRITER
Martha Nevens DIRECTOR/WRITER
MARTHA NEVENS DIRECTOR/WRITER
TYPOGRAPHER REPORT
H V L
t
2
6
8 e 5 C Helvetica 7 i9 1 e 4
3
The origin of the worlds most commonly used font.
10
Ubiquitous Type
The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere.
T
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 hidden. This book has therefore grown into something more than a short manual of typographic 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,6 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, welltravelled 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 precisely the use of a road: to reach individually 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.
By: milton glaser
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 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.
“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.” But the underlying principles of typography 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 with an independent existence.” 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.
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FONTS Impact Helvetica Neu Helvetica Regular Baskerville Athelas