“
NO OTHER DESIGN DISCIPLINE
requires so much learning and training as fontography, and by no other aspect can amateurs be so easily distinguished from professionals.
“
To be font literate, a designer has to study the history and the principles of font design.
Dmitry Kirsanov
2 typographic portfolio
Jennifer Oukh Spring Graphic Design 2015
Goals For graphic design
M
y goals for graphic design as a career are endless. Graphic design can be used for absolutely anything and I still want to explore everything there is to explore. Designing layouts and branding out items are probably my favorite to do. Eventually, I want to design great logos as well.
4 typographic portfolio
Table
of
contents
6
logo design
8
character studies
14
poster design
16
identity
18
ubiquitous type
20
sketchbook/ doodles
24
newsletter
26
pop project
36
typographical terms illustrated
logo
design
6 typographic portfolio
GRAPHIC DESIGN
OUKH GRAPHIC DESIGN
character studies
8 typographic portfolio
A CHARACTER STUDIES
CURIOUS ABOUT COURIER
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter. The typeface was designed by Howard “Bud” Kettler in 1955, and it was later redrawn by Adrian Frutiger for the IBM Selectric Composer series of electric typewriters. Although the design of the original Courier typeface was commissioned by IBM, the company deliberately chose not to secure legal exclusivity to the typeface and it soon became a standard font used throughout the typewriter industry. Each font contains 374 glyphs.
THE LETTER A
No 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 Roman capital letters have endured as the standard of proportion and dignity for almost 2,000 years. They’re also the basis of many of the lowercase designs. ‘A’ is the first letter. There are 25 more stories.
Jennife r
Oukh
graphic design
G CHARACTER STUDIES
THE LETTER G
Generally 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 upsidedown 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 that it did for 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.’ The G took its position as the seventh letter of our alphabet, replacing the letter Z, which was considered superfluous for the writing of Latin. The ousted Z took its place at the end of the line.
10 typographic portfolio
Jennife r
Oukh
graphic design
Z CHARACTER STUDIES
W
hat letter is used most rarely in English? Poor lonely z finishes up the alphabet at number 26. The final letter, z’s history includes a time when it was so infrequently used that it was removed altogether. The Greek zeta is the origin of the humble z. The Phoenician glyph zayin, meaning “weapon,” had a long vertical line capped at both ends with shorter horizontal lines and looked very much like a modern capital I. By the time it evolved into the Greek zeta the top and bottom lines had become elongated and the vertical line slanted, connecting to the horizontal lines at the top right and the bottom left. Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed z from the alphabet. His justification was that z had become archaic: the pronunciation of /z/ had become /r/ by a process called rhotacism, rendering the letter z useless. At the same time that z was removed, g was added, but that’s another story.
THE LETTER Z
Bree Serif
This friendly upright italic is the serif cousin of TypeTogether’s award winning font Bree. Designed by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, Bree was originally released in 2008 and it became an immediate success because of its originality, charming appearance and versatility. The new serif style adds some extra flavour to this tasty font.
Two hundred years later, z was reintroduced to the Latin alphabet but used only in words taken from Greek. Because of its absence and reintroduction, zeta is one of the only two letters to enter the Latin alphabet directly from Greek and not Etruscan. Z was not always the final letter of the modern English alphabet, although it has always been in the 26th position. For years the &symbol (now known as the ampersand) was the final, pronounced “and” but recited with the Latin “per se,” meaning “by itself.” The position and pronunciation eventually ran together, with “X, Y, Z, and per se and” becoming “X, Y, Z, ampersand.” Z is the most rarely used letter in the alphabet; however, American English uses it more often than British English. Early English did not have a z but used s for both voiced and unvoiced sibilants. Words in English that originated as loan words from French and Latin are more likely to be spelled with a z than an s. Also, American standardization modified /z/ suffixes to more accurately reflect their pronunciation, changing –ise and –isation to –ize and –ization.
continued
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CHARACTER STUDIES
THE LETTER M
Jennife r
Oukh
graphic design
poster design
14 typographic portfolio
identity
16 typographic portfolio
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 hid- den. 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 ďŹ eld 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,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 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 ďŹ fteenth century, when the ďŹ rst books were printed in roman
Ubiquitous Type: A report on public typography The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere. By Milton Glaser
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These pictures of type were taken mainly indoors and one outdoor. All of the type are very attention grabbing with hints of contrast.
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 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. 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
“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.”
human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of 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.
sketchbook/ doodles
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Exploring variations of the letter G
Hand-lettering of my last name, Oukh
22 typographic portfolio
I love Corgis
Newsletter
24 typographic portfolio
POP!
project
26 typographic portfolio
pop! the visual project zine in this issue: issue one volume eight
david carson alex truchut andy warhol chip kidd herb lubalin paula scher
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the visual project zine in this issue: issue one volume eight
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Week Three
pop! volume eight
issue one in this issue: david carson alex truchut andy warhol chip kidd herb lubalin paula scher
the visual project zine
Week Four
30 typographic portfolio
chip kidd
paula scher in this issue:
issue one
herb lubalin
pop!
the visual project zine
alex truchut
volume eight david carson
andy warhol
Week Five
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volume eight
issue one
andy warhol
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alex truchut
her b lubalin
paula scher
david carson
issue volume eight herb lubalin
chip kidd
the visual project zine issue one
chip kidd
herb lubalin
andy warhol
chip kidd
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Typographical Terms
Illustrated
s w a sh
c u rsive
B
Jennifer Oukh
fancy shmancy
The hairline rule is a fine line of 1/4 in thickness. A hairline is also a type of serif, the minimum thickness for a serif.
Cursive is an early Italic typeface that resembles handwriting but with the letters disconnected.
Swash is a capital letter with an ornamental flourish. Goudy Initalen
c a l l i g r aphy
h ai r li n e r u l e
Calligraphy is elegant handwriting, or the producing of such handwriting. Eutemia I
Apple Chancery
12 pt . r u le g rotes que
A grotesque is a sans serif typeface that was once considered “ugly”. Their shapes and proportions are fairly uniform, with low stroke contrast. Gill Sans Futura
UGLY UGLY UGLY UGLY UGLY UGLY
Am I in two thirds of a hospital room? I’ve made a huge tiny mistake. I’m not a prostitute. This is body copy at 12 pt.
d i st re ss e d
Jeans
12 points equal 1 pica. 12 pt. font is also the most easily legible on the eyes for reading body copy.
Distressed fonts look grungy or having an eroded look to the type. Tiza
Adobe Gurmukhi
t r ansit i on al
Wood type is type made from wood. Formerly used for the larger display sizes more than 1 inch.
Transitional is a typestyle that combines both Old Style and Modern. Cochin
Blackoak std
Oh Yeah
Reversed type is placing light or white type against a darker background. It is also a useful way to add emphasis or develop a strong typographic hierarchy.
d rop cap
ke r ning
N
ow that I’ve got your attention, blah blah blah. Where did you look first?
Kerning is the adjustment of space between pairs of letters either closer to each other or further apart. Menlo
A drop cap is a large initial letter that drops below the first line of a paragraph.
A glyph is a graphic symbol that provides the appearance or form for a character . It can be an alphabetic or numeric font or some other symbol that pictures an encoded character. Andale Mono
t ra cking space between all letters Tracking is the adjustment of space for groups of letters and entire blocks of text. Minion Pro
36 typographic portfolio
Mechanic
l i g atu re
fake
fake
Oblique contains Roman characters that slant to the right, wanting to be Italic but not Italic. Tekton Pro
fl
st
ffi
ffl
Ligature is when two or three characters are joined as a single character. Palatino
Arial
bl a ck l e tt e r Black letter is an early, ornate, bold style of type, typically resembling Gothic with thin and thick strokes. Old London
Blackletters ABCDE
Big Caslon
g lyph
abcdefghijkl mnopqrstuvwx yz123456789 ?@£¥ËØ
Egyptian
obliqu e
Inner City
Sample Ê Sample
PT Serif Caption
➷
re vers ed typ e
A slab serif (also called mechanistic, square serif or Egyptian) typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs.
serif
In addition, However, Then,
Gold Rush
slab serif square
wo o d typ e
s er i f ROMAN
↑
(with little feet)
Serifs are the opening and closing cross-strokes in the letterforms of some typefaces. Times New Roman
bu ll et
d i ng bat
✳✔✗☞❁➠➷↕
A bullet is a small symbol/character, such as a solid circle, printed just before a line of type, such as an item in a list, to emphasize it. Wingdings 2
h an d l ett er ing
what is type Handlettering is to print/ draw letters and words by hand. Chalkduster
A dingbat is a typographical device other than a letter or numeral used in typesetting. Zapf Dingbat
d i spl ay
What the FONT
Display type is used to attract attention, usually above 14 pt. font Impact