Jenniecho single

An exploration of the history, usage and terminology used in the graphic arts.

jcho + designs

Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising

Summer

jcho + designs

ABOUT JCHO Hello!

My name is Jennie Cho (hence the Jcho) and I am studying Graphic Design at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. I’ve always been attracted to the creative aspect of life and am way too intrigued by how art is seen everywhere you look and is part of everyday life. I want to contribute to this world by creating art that visually stimulates the minds of my viewers/clients. I am always looking to challenge myself to always strive for improvement and I am ready to further expand my education and knowledge in graphic design.

“In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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FONTS USED

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Typographical T e r m s

Blackletter

Swash

Grotesque

Display typefaces are used to entice the viewer in an artistic manner, to create a response of a mood or feeling

Cursive Handwriting written in a conjoined and flowing matter for the purpose of improved writing speed and infrequent pen lifting

Hairline rule Thin stroke usually common to serif typefaces, Thinnest stroke found in a specific typeface

Typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, or stroke on a glyph

Dingbat

Influenced by Didone serif fonts, both are marked by simpler letterforms with relatively uniform stroke weight

Display

This style of typeface is recognizable by its dramatic thin and thick strokes; sometimes referred to as Gothic or Old English

Ornament, character, or spacer used in typesetting, often employed for the creation of box frames

Egyptian Serif typeface characterized by thick and block-like serifs

Slab serif

Type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular, or rounded

Distressed

Purposely blemished or marred so as to give an antique appearance, and to expose feelings of negativity, anxiety, stress, etc.

Ligature (fi)

K erning

A ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph

Oblique

Form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purpose as italic type

D

rop cap

A large initial letter that drops below the first line of a paragraph, usually used at the beginning of a section or chapter of a book

Tracking Tracking involves adjusting the space throughout the entire word

Reversed A lighter typeface on a darker background, such as a white text on a black background

Wood type Wood type fonts are large letters used in printing, carved out of wood

Kerning adjusts space between two letters, not the entire word

Serif

Small line attached to the end of a stroke in a letter or symbol

Calligraphy

Visual art related to writing; It is the design and execution of lettering with a broad tip instrument, dip pen, or brush

Geometric

Constructed of straight, mono-linear lines and circular or square shapes

Didone Genre of serif typeface characterized by narrow and unbracketed serifs, vertical orientation of weight axes, and a strong contrast between thick and thin lines

Decorative Artistic and eye-catching style of type and lettering, used extensively on posters and advertisements

Character Study - The Letter O

S

ome believe that our present O evolved from a Phoenician symbol; others vote for an even more ancient Egyptian heiroglyph as the source. The most fanciful explanation, though, is offered

by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories. “How the Alphabet was Made” recounts how a Neolithic tribesman and his precocious daughter invent the alphabet by drawing pictures to represent sounds. After finishing the A and Y (inspired by the mouth and tail of a carp), the child, Taffy, asks her father to make another sound that she can translate into a picture.

The father’s sketch of the first O would serve perfectly well today, since round remains the defining property of the letter. Actually, the O did start out as a drawing of something, but not an egg or a stone, or even a mouth. The true ancestor of our O was probably the symbol for an eye, complete with a center dot for the pupil. The symbol for eye, “ayin” (pronounced “eye-in”) appears among the Phoenician and other Semitic languages around 1000 B.C. The Greeks adapted the ayin to their communication system and used it to represent the short vowel sound of ‘o.’ The Greeks also changed the name of the letter to Omicron. (The Omega is another Greek O, which they invented to represent the long ‘o’ sound.)

While the Phoenicians and the Greeks drew the letter as a true, nearly perfect circle, the Romans condensed the shape slightly to be more in keeping with their other monumental capitals.

Evolution of an o ➟

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Times New Roman is a serif typeface

commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and created by Victor Lardent in collaboration with the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype. Although no longer used by The Times, Times New Roman is still very common in book and general printing. Through distribution with Microsoft products and as a standard computer font, it has become one of the most widely used typefaces in history.

Times New Roman’s creation took place through the influence of Stanley Morison of Monotype. Morison was an artistic director at Monotype, historian of printing and informal adviser to the Times, who recommended thoat they change typeface from the spindly and somewhat dated nineteenth-century Didone typeface previously used to a more robust, solid design, returning to traditions of printing from the eighteenth century and before.

Times New Roman became extremely successful, becoming Monotype’s best-selling typeface of all in metal type.

In Times New Roman’s name, Roman is a reference to the regular style of a conventional serif font, or what is called its roman, the first part of the Times New Roman family to be designed.

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Character Study - The Letter g

Evolution of a G

G

enerally speaking, there are no launch dates for the letters of our alphabet. 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 letter G made its official debut in 312 B.C. Of course, the story begins a bit earlier 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 contend this was because the upside-down V looked like the hump of a camel.

The Greeks borrowed the basic Phoenician form and changed its name to gamma. They also made some dramatic changes to the letter’s appearance. At various times in ancient Greek history, the gamma looked like a one-sided arrow pointing up, an upside-down L, or a crescent moon. Throughout this time, however, the gamma always represented the same hard ‘g’ sound as the Phoenicians.

The Greek form was adopted by the Etruscans and then by the Romans, where for many years it represented both the hard ‘k’ and ‘g’ sounds. This brings us to 312 B.C., when our modern G was formally introduced into the reformed Latin alphabet. The G was created to eliminate the confusion caused by one letter representing two sounds. The basic shape, which now looked like our C, was used to represent the palatalized sounds ‘s’ and ‘c,’ and a little bar was added to create the letter G, which denoted the guttural stop ‘g.’

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Hellenic is the first typeface from the upcoming Mid-Century Modern Collection--a set of vintage American typefaces rescued from the dustbin of history and rendered for digital use.

MCM Hellenic Wide is an extended slab-serif typeface that was painted on railroad cars and stamped on posters; it was found in textbooks and once proudly graced letterheads.

MCM Hellenic Wide lacks frills and flourishes. Its trademark single-thickness alphabet features broad and squared-off serifs.

This digital revival of a once pervasive unappreciated typeface was rendered from scans of primary source material. MCM Hellenic Wide will add a bit of classy Americana to your next design.

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Character Study - The Letter A

N

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. 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.

Evolution of an a

The Phoenicians first drew the ox head ‘A’ as a ‘V’ with a crossbar to distinguish the horns from the face. They called this letter “alef,” the Phoenician word for ox. Through centuries of writing (most of it quickly, with little care for maintaining detail) the alef evolved into a form that looked very different from the original ox head symbol.

In fact, by the time it reached the Greeks in about 400 BC, it looked more like our modern ‘k’ than an ‘A’.

The Greeks further changed the alef. First, they rotated it 90° so that it pointed up; then they made the crossbar a sloping stroke. The Greeks also changed the letter name from alef to alpha. Finally, they made the crossbar a horizontal stroke and the letter looked almost as it does today.

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Bodoni is the

name given to the serif typefaces first designed

by Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) in the late eighteenth century and frequently revived since.

Bodoni’s typefaces are classified as Didone or modern. Bodoni followed the ideas of John Baskerville, as found in the printing type Baskerville—increased stroke contrast reflecting developing printing technology and a more vertical axis—but he took them to a more extreme conclusion.

Bodoni had a long career and his designs changed and varied, ending with a typeface of a slightly condensed underlying structure with flat, unbracketed serifs, extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes, and an overall geometric construction.

Character Study - The Letter Q

F

or as long as there have been Qs, designers have been having fun with the letter’s tail. This opportunity for typographic playfulness may even date back to the Phoenicians: the original ancestor of our Q was called “ooph,” the Phoenician word for monkey. The ooph represented an emphatic guttural sound not found in English or any Indo-European language.

Evolution of a Q

Most historians believe that the ooph, which also went by the name “gogh,” originated in the Phoenician language, with no lineage to previous written forms. Historians also believe that the character’s shape depicted the back view of a person’s head, with the tail representing the neck or throat. It’s possible, but if you consider that the letter’s name meant monkey, then perhaps the round part of the symbol represents another kind of backside, and the tail of what became our Q may have started out as, well, a tail.

The Greeks adopted the ooph, but found it difficult to pronounce, and changed it slightly to “koppa.” The Greeks also modified the design by stopping the vertical stroke, or tail, at the outside of the circle. The koppa, however, represented virtually the same sound as “kappa,” another Greek letter. One of them had to go, and koppa was ultimately the loser, perhaps because it had begun to look much like another Greek letter, the P. Unlike the Greeks, the Etruscans could live with the somewhat redundant nature of the koppa, and continued to use the letter. In fact, they had two other k-sound letters to contend with. The Romans elected to use all three signs when they adopted much of the Etruscan alphabet.

The first Roman Q had the Etruscan vertical tail, but over time it evolved into the graceful curved shape that cradles the U which usually follows it.

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Didot

is a group of typefaces named after the famous French printing and type producing Didot family. The classification is known as modern, or Didone.

The most famous Didot typefaces were developed in the period 1784–1811.

Firmin Didot (1764–1836) cut the letters, and cast them as type in Paris.

His brother, Pierre Didot (1760–1853) used the types in printing. His edition of La Henriade by Voltaire in 1818 is considered his masterwork. The typeface takes inspira tion from John Baskerville’s experimentation with increasing stroke contrast and a more condensed armature. The Didot family’s development of a high contrast typeface with an increased stress is contemporary to similar faces developed by Giambattista Bodoni in Italy.

Didot is described as neoclassical, and evocative of the Age of Enlightenment.

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Character Study -

T

he ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature. In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common. During the following development of the Latin script that led up to the Carolingian minuscule (9th century) the use of ligatures in general diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin.

The modern italic type ampersand is a kind of “et” ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance. After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands.

Since the ampersand’s roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it.

The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð’s list of letters from 1011. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as used by children (in the US). An example may be seen in M. B. Moore’s 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to this when she makes Jacob Storey say: “He thought it had only been put to finish off th’ alphabet like; though ampusand would ha’ done as well, for what he could see.” The popular Apple Pie ABC finishes with the lines “X, Y, Z, and ampersand, All wished for a piece in hand”.

The ampersand should not be confused with the Tironian, which is a symbol similar to the numeral 7. Both symbols have their roots in the classical antiquity, and both signs were used up through the Middle Ages as a representation for the Latin word “et”. However, while the ampersand was in origin a common ligature in the everyday script, the Tironian “et” was part of a highly specialised stenographic shorthand.

Evolution of an Ampersand ➟

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- The ampersand Bauhaus

ITC was designed by Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso in 1975. Inheriting the simple geometric shapes and monotone stroke weights of Herbert Bayer’s universal, it includes separate upper and lower case characters.

Five weights of Roman fonts were made for this family. Unlike the earlier ITC Ronda, it includes open end stroke at places where counters would be created.

Bauhaus Heavy was originally intended to be a display-only design and was accompanied

by Bauhaus Outline. With the advent of digital technology, the Outline version was dropped from the family, while the Bauhaus Heavy was made part of the now text/display offering.

LOGO DESIGN

MO T

M MT

Museum of Modern Typography

Museum of

Museum of

modern typography

modern typography

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U B I Q U I T O U S type

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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, 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 precisely the use of a road: to

century, when the first books were printed in roman type.

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.

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 demand-

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

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

ing, 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. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads.

The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere.

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SKETCHBOOK

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LYRIC POSTER

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Wale ft. Miguel - Lotus Flower Bomb

MUSEUM POSTER

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The Museum of Modern typography presents the art of

TYPEFACE DESIGNED BY RICK BANKS

Bella is a classical Didot-inspired beauty suggesting the best of Paris and New York

June 7, 2017 - Sept 27, 2017

Museum of

modern typography

221 S. Grand Ave Los Angeles CA 90012 www.momt.com

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