Portfolio The Art of Typography
Graphic Designer | Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising
T HE I N T RO D U C T I O N
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K
aitlin Kerns is a Graphic Design student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM). During her time at FIDM, she has learned the major importance
of typography and how it can be used as more than just words on a page. Typography is a powerful outlet of expression and design. Not only is typography used for writing titles or body copy, but it can be used for background designs and artistic statements. The choice of typeface can affect how a piece is understood. Picking the “right� font can bring the typography to a new level. The simple change of a typeface changes the overall feeling of a design from classic and elegant to sharp and masculine. Good typography should be consistent and allow the reader to focus on the content. In this portfolio, we will look at the various styles of typography and the key elements of layout formatting.
T A B L E OF CONTENTS
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USED
LOGO
FONTS
UBIQUITOUS
POSTER DESIGN
POP!
TYPE
DESIGN
SKETCHBOOK: LETTER J
SKETCHBOOK: LETTER A
3D TYPE TREATMENT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHARACTER STUDIES
TYPOGRAPHICAL TERMS
INTRODUCTION
TYPE REPORT ON
T YPOGR A PH I C A L T ER M S
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TYPOGRAPHICAL TERMS
a
GROTESQUE Grotesque is frequently used as a synonym with sans serif. At other times, it is used (along with “Neo-Grotesque”, “Humanist”, “Lineal”, and “Geometric”) to describe a particular style or subset of sansserif typefaces. The first sans-serif typeface called grotesque was also the first sans-serif typeface containing actual lowercase letters.
12 PT. RULE
A line that has a weight of 12 points.
A
A
SLAB SERIF A type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular, or rounded. Slab serif typefaces generally have no bracket. Some consider slab serifs to be a subset of modern serif typefaces.
HAIRLINE RULE
A line that has a weight of .25 points.
a
BULLET
A typographical symbol used to introduce items in a list. The bullet symbol or glyph may take any of a variety of shapes, such as circular, square, diamond or arrow.
Æ GLYPH
An elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, intended to represent a readable character for the purposes of writing.
A
Blackletter
The Blackletter typeface was used is in the Guthenburg also known as SERIF Bible, one of script or joint writing the first books Serif’s are and is a unique form of printed in Europe. semi-structural handwriting in which the This style of details on the language symbols are conjointly typeface is ends of some of written in a flowing style. The recognizable by the strokes that initial purpose of cursive writing its dramatic thin make up letters was to create a smoother, and thick strokes, and symbols. Serif faster way to write. and in some fonts, fonts are widely used the elaborate swirls on in traditional printed the serifs. Blackletter material such as books typefaces are based on and newspapers. early manuscript.
Cursive
A DISPLAY
Display typography is a potent element in graphic design, where there is less concern for readability and more potential for using type in an artistic manner. A display typeface is designed for the use of type at large sizes, perhaps 30 points or larger.
ab TRACKING
The process of adjusting the space between groups of letters. It affects the overall character density of the copy. Tracking will help to eliminate widows and orphans in paragraphs.
a/b KERNING
The process of adjusting the spacing between two individual characters in a font.
A
DINGBAT
Dingbat typefaces consist of symbols (such as decorative bullets, clock faces, railroad timetable symbols, CDindex, or TV-channel enclosed numbers) rather than normal text characters. It is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting.
A
HANDLETTERING
Handlettering is drawing letters by hand as opposed to writing them. They are often very decorative. Each letter is typically original and unique. You also often have more control over the letters with handlettering.
A
CALLIGRAPHY The design and execution of lettering with a broad tip instrument, brush, or other writing instruments.
A
A
WOOD TYPE
Distressed typefaces have irregular contours and weathered appearance. These designs are a great way to return a natural, handmade charm of typography. Some replicate the irregular contours of brush strokes and others capture the organic texture of stone.
a REVERSED
A
OBLIQUE
Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly Reversed type refers to text that has a light color to the right, used for the on a darker background. same purposes as italic type. It uses the same Reversed type is often used to emphasize text. glyphs as roman type, but slanted.
A
TRANSITIONAL Transitional typefaces are typefaces that are in transition from oldstyle to modern.
fl
LIGATURE
A ligature is a special character that combines two (or sometimes three) characters into a single character.
Wood has been used for letterforms and illustrations dating back to the first known Chinese wood block print from 868 CE. Wood type was half the cost of metal type, and when prepared by machine it had smooth, even surfaces, where the possibility of unequal cooling caused large lead type to distort.
A SWASH
Swash characters are decorative letters that have a flourish or an extended stroke, terminal, or serif, usually at the beginning or end of the character. They tend to be calligraphic in appearance, and they add an elegant touch to an otherwise straightforward letterform.
A
DROP CAP
drop cap is a large capital letter at the beginning of a text block that has the depth of two or more lines of regular text.
C H A R A C T ER STUDIES
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CHARACTER STUDIES
character studies
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. (The Phoenician alphabet is
generally thought to be the basis of the one we use today.) 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. 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. The Romans received the Greek alphabet by way of the Etruscan traders of what is now northern Italy. While the Romans kept the design, they again changed the name of the first letter–this time to “ah.” The sound “ay,” our
name for the ‘A,’ was not common to the Latin language.
DIDOT
The first Modern typeface is attributed to Frenchman Firmin Didot (son of Franรงois-Ambroise Didot), and first graced the printed page in 1784. His types were soon followed by the archetypal Didone from Bodoni. The Italian type designer, punchcutter and printer Giambattista Bodoni (what a great name!)
character studies
T
THE LETTER J
he letter J actually started out as the letter I, which is why they look so similar. Phoenician ancestor to our present I was a sign called “yodh,” meaning “hand.” The original Phoenician symbol evolved over time into a zigzag shape that was eventually adopted by the Greeks. The Greeks often simplified the symbols they borrowed, and the yodh
was no exception. As used by the Greeks, the zigzag became a simple vertical line. The Greeks also changed the name of the letter to “iota.” Iota was the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet and, as such, has come to mean “a very small amount.” The word “jot” also derives (via Latin) from the Greek iota, and usually refers to a small note or mark. The letter I took its time deciding which sound it represented. The Phoenicians used it as a semivowel, as the ‘y’ in toy. When the I was adopted by the Greeks around 900 B.C., they used the letter to represent the long ‘ee’ vowel sound. Then, in early Latin, the I represented both the vowel ‘i’ and the semivowel ‘y.’ Eventually, somebody must have grown tired of using one letter to represent two sounds, and so an attempt was made to differentiate them by lengthening the I slightly to represent the semivowel. In the 16th century, a lettering artist decided that merely lengthening the letter was too subtle a change, and added a hook to the bottom of the J. Both the lowercase I and J have a dot, but there are two competing theories as to which got its dot first. One theory maintains that the J was first, with the dot added during the 13th century in an attempt to further distinguish J from I. The other theory posits that the I was dotted first (also during the 13th century), and that the dot’s purpose was to help distinguish the I from straight-sided characters like the M, N and U when it appeared near these letters in blocks of text copy.
CHARACTER STUDIES
CLARENDON CONDENSED There were a few versions of the Clarendon typeface — a thick-faced condensed type with heavy serifs. The original Clarendon is an English slab-serif created in in the 1830s by Robert Besley for Fann and later Thorowgood and Co. type founders. A version was made into a wood typeface called Clarendon Condensed. It became one of the most popular wood typefaces of the 19th century and is still used today.
3 D T YPE T RE A T M E N T
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CHARACTER STUDIES
S K E T C H B OO K : L E T T ER A
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S K E T C H B OO K : L E T T ER J
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biquitous ype
The presence of typography, both good and bad, can be seen everywhere.
By Kaitlin Kerns
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 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
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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,6and 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 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.
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Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads. Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a when the first books were printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a known and used by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens on papyrus in “Typography is the craft of tiny stage. It is true that typographer’s tools are 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, endowing human language presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible with a durable visual use of any particular typesetting system thirty centuries after they were made. form, and thus with an or medium. I suppose that most readers Writing systems vary, but a good page independent existence.” of this book will set most of their type in is not hard to learn to recognize, whether digital form, using computers, but I have it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdom typographers set for themselves than with no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which the mutable or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular - and living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long anatomy of the human mind. I don’t like to call these principles as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true universals, because they are largely unique to our species. Dogs knowledge, true surprise.
L OGO DESIGN
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REPOR T O N T YPE
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CHARACTER STUDIES
The Typography of
Art Deco influenced the design of buildings, furntiure, jewelry, fashion, cards, movie theaters, trains and typography.
The History of
ool, jazzy, a little world-weary – that’s Art Deco, surely one of the most distinctive design movements of the last century. Although most commonly known for its influence on architecture, advertising, interior design and fashion, Art Deco cast its spell of sleek modernity over typography.
C
The strong and elegant style that was first coined as Art Deco in Paris back in 1925 derived from the Art Décoratifs, a French government sponsored international exhibition of decorative arts. Art Deco’s bold lines, geometric shapes, and modern aesthetic is a representational view into the vision of the future during the wartime era.
From its origins in Europe during the first decade of the 20th century, the Art Deco movement quickly spread to the United States, where it remained a popular and pervasive style through the mid-1930s. The Art Deco aesthetic is characterized by graceful, stylized and geometric shapes, often in symmetrical arrangements. If you’ve seen the Chrysler Building in New York City, you’ve seen one of the most spectacular examples of Art Deco architecture.
After WWI, Art Deco design started to shift from the Art Nouveau essence of design that consisted of flowing, floral illustration to bold, geometric graphic design. The aesthetics of Art Deco typography reflected much of the cultural transitions between the 1920’s and 1940’s, when metalworking machinery and freight trains started changing the world and how it worked and even physically looked. The strong vertical lines and aerodynamic forms in Art Deco typography mirrored the skyscrapers, cars, art, design, furniture, jewelry, fashion, and even the music at the time. Two of the most popular Art Deco typefaces are Cormier and Metropolis. Featuring the clean sans serif strokes seen on vintage movie posters, Cormier Typeface captures the look of Art Deco in Rough, Double and Regular Styles. Cormier Typeface includes a full set of English uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation, with an alternate letter set that can be toggled with the caps lock. Part of a larger Art Deco bundle of fonts and ornaments, Metropolis features a full set of uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation, with alternate characters available by toggling the caps lock. Metropolis also comes with more than 50 art deco-themed ornaments. These typefaces are still used today.
The Art Deco type styles range from uncomplicated, monostroke designs, such as ITC Anna, Bernhard Fashion and Busorama, to more intricate, decorative typestyles, such as Beverly Hills, Chic, Broadway Engraved, Gallia, ITC Mona Lisa Recut and Philco Deco The most ornate Deco designs feature double, triple or multi-lineal stroke details. Art Deco typestyles can be angular or curvy, elegant or playful, but all have the swank sophistication we associate with that period.
The Art Deco aesthetic is characterized by graceful, stylized and geometric shapes, often in symmetrical arrangements.
Many Art Deco type styles are all-cap fonts, and almost all are display designs due to their decorative nature. Consider using these stylish and unique typefaces for posters, advertisements, book covers, announcements – whenever you want to evoke the timeless glamour of the era.
The History of
A
Painter, poster artist and typeface designer.
student of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, Adolphe Mouron Cassandre was a painter, commercial poster artist and typeface designer. His inventive graphic techniques show influences of Surrealism and Cubism and became very popular in Europe and the US during the 1930s. He was a teacher as well as an artist and led courses at both the École des Arts Décoratifs and the École d’Art Graphique in 1934 and 1935. He and several other partners formed the advertising agency Alliance Graphiqe, which worked for a broad client base throughout the 1930s. One of his most well recognized posters was the Normandie Poster and while his primary success stemmed from designing posters he also designed magazine covers, advertisements, logos and typefaces. In 1937 he designed the typeface Peignot for the Deberny & Peignot type foundry in Paris, France. He joined the French army during the German invasion of World War II, after the devastating effects of the war he found work designing sets for ballet and theater production. In 1968, after a severe battle with depression, he ended his own life. French designer, painter and writer. His family settled in Paris in 1915. After very briefly attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1918, he studied in Lucien Simon’s studio, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Académie Julian. In 1922 he began designing posters, using the name ‘Cassandre’. His first notable success was The Woodcutter (1923), executed in clear, simplified forms, somewhat influenced by Cubism. In 1926 he published his first text on poster design in Revue de l’Union de l’Affiche Française, in which he emphasized the poster artist’s connection with the ancient and medieval traditions of communicating messages through pictures. He designed his first typeface, the advertising
Bifur face, in 1927 and in 1930 designed the sanserif Acier display face; these reflected his growing interest in the typographic elements of his posters. In the 1930s his output of posters for French and foreign firms was prolific. It included the popular triptych Dubo Dubon Dubonnet (1932; New York, MOMA), which illustrated the pleasure of drinking Dubonnet by increasing the coloured areas of the design. Others, such as Paris (1935), were influenced by Surrealism, in particular the empty, haunting spaces of De Chirico’s works. In 1935 a collection of Cassandre’s posters was published as Le Spectacle est dans la rue, with a preface by Blaise Cendrars. He spent the winters of 1936–7 and 1937–8 in New York, where he worked for Harper’s Bazaar, and in 1937 he designed his first all-purpose typeface, Peignot. After returning to Paris in 1938 he concentrated on painting until 1944, producing austere, realistic portraits such as that of Pierre Reverdy (1943), as well as landscapes. After earlier commissions in the 1930s, in the 1940s and 1950s Cassandre was much occupied with stage designs, such as those for the ballet Les Mirages. This was performed in 1947 and had a narrative written by Serge Lifar and Cassandre himself. He designed a few posters in the 1940s and 1950s and in 1958 designed a typeface for Olivetti. His productivity waned in the 1960s, but he did design the famous logo for Yves Saint Laurent and produced tempera paintings such as the bleak The Frontier (1962), as well as occasional posters, before his suicide. With typography an important part of poster design, the Cassandre company created several new typeface styles. Cassandre developed Bifur in 1929, the sans serif Acier Noir in 1935, and in 1937 an all-purpose font called Peignot. In 1936, his works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which led to commissions from Harper’s Bazaar to do cover designs.
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CHARACTER STUDIES
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PO S T ER DESIGN
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CHARACTER STUDIES
FO N T S
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CHARACTER STUDIES
BIFUR USED
T YPOGR A PHY Kaitlin Kerns Summer 2018