nerd.
winter 2017
nerd.
by Tim Haffner
winter 2017
introduction. This is my journal for Typography II at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I have titled it “nerd� as it chronicles part of my journey to becoming a more complete type nerd. I have compiled this journal both as a validation of the things I have learned in this course, and as a reference to refer back to in the future. This class certainly taught me a ton, and I had to truly learn by doing. I have included a number of resources that I gathered during this course including notes from lectures, readings, process, and critiques. In the future I hope I can look back and remember the knowledge I gained, through hard work, good advice, failure, and success. I hope you my reader will find a wealth of helpful information and insight into the importance and function of typography.
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without further ado‌
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readings
and what I wrote abou
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s.
ut them.
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Butterick’s Practical Typography (Totally bookmarked this page for reference).
Typography in 10 minutes. • • • • •
Body text Point size Line spacing Line length Font choice
Summary of Key Rules
• Again, everything comes down to body text. • Avoid goofy fonts/system fonts. • One space between sentences. • Don’t use fake smart quotes. • Use ampersands sparingly. • Type an actual ellipsis… 8
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Foreword “Good typography is measured by how well it reinforces the meaning of the text, not by some abstract scale of merit.”
Text Formatting • Good reminder to never underline. • Clarification on use of bold and italics.
Text Composition
• Interrobangs are super cool. • Good reference on where to find glyphs like paragraph markers, etc.
Page Layout
“Page layout is about the positioning and relationship of text and other elements on the page.” • Space between paragraphs is 50–100% of pt size.
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Why Typography Matters • To avoid the “butterfly ballot”. • Typography is for the reader.
Typotheque My Type Design Philosophy • You must be a book typographer to be a good type designer.
Typographica Mea Culpa, Unethical Downloading
• Typefaces are licensed for a limited number of CPUs. • Ignorance is no exuse. Read the license.
Family Planning, or How Type Families Work • Bodoni is optically adjusted. 10
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• Most fonts designed between 1960–1990 are not.
A View of Latin Typography in Relationship to the World
• Non-latin typography is on the rise. • Non-latin typography can also give inspiration to type designers dealing only in latin type.
Lava—Voice of a Magazine
• Designed for both web and print.
Beauty and Ugliness in Type Design • Italian type is ugly. • Conceptual type is fascinating.
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lectures one day at a time.
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typographic refinement: the details. This lecture was a great refresher, especially since it had been a year since I had taken Type I. This lecture is definitely a good resource to keep around for all of the details. Here are some good reminders and new things I learned. • Leading should be 125%–140% of the type size. • A good gauge for line length is 8–13 words. (As opposed to 145–175 characters, which is way more tedious). • Factors to look at when deciding on a typeface. • Auto leading is never to be trusted. • A hyphen “-” is used to break a word over a column. • An en dash “–” is used to indicate a duration or range. 14
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• An em dash “—” is used to break up the flow of a sentence. • Customize hyphenation as opposed to eliminating it altogether. • Smart quotes are the only quotes.
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choosing typefaces and understanding fonts. Consider: • • • • •
Content Audience Context Full character set? Cross platform font?
Other resources: • Google fonts has some really nice clean stuff for free. • Lost Type • League of Moveable Type • Font Squirrel
Note:
This lecture inspired me to purge a bunch of junky fonts off of my computer, and group the ones I still have. 16
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typesetting in InDesign: tools and techniques. Paragraph styles changed my life. Especially for the third and fourth projects in this class. I knew that they existed, but I had never had a project that really demanded them, nor had I bothered to figure out how they worked. But they make everything infinitely easier in the long run. There are so many ways to customize, and this also frees you from having to create text in several different text boxes on the same page just to easily do different sizes and indentations.
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project 1
typesetting: rules and principles of typograp
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d phy.
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process. This seemed like it would be an easy project. I went into it thinking that we just needed to set five quotes on a page. How hard could that be? I didn’t give myself enough time for the research and had to throw something together super quick. I had been working on a project for work with Century, so I threw that in, thinking that it would look classic and minimal.
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“Each letter is a shape unto itself, a shape that may serve as an illustration, as an icon, as a vessel, or as a graphic focal point, apart from its meaning as an alphabetic unit.” Saltz, Ina; Typography Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Working with Type; p.6; 2009
“I learn about whites space from Americans. And I learn about witty solutions from the English. Then I learn about typographic discipline from the Swiss, then Germans. Then from the Swiss about typography, from the Germans about strength, and depth and timelessness.” Vignelli, Massimo; An Interview with Massimo Vignelli (1931– 2014), p.113; 2014
“In order to improve the target audience’s understanding of the design and facilitate their interaction with it, the designer needs to step into their shoes and interpret the hierarchy that they’re given, perhaps augmenting it or suggesting alternatives.” Glaser, Jessica and Knight, Carolyn; Typography: Practical Considerations And Design Patterns; 2015
“The shapes of letter forms are largely controlled by convention (the need, usually, to be legible), and also affected by practice and fashion.” Sassoon, Rosemary; Computers and Typography; p.91; 2002
Quoth the Typographer type nerd.
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“Each letter is a shape unto itself, a shape that may serve as an illustration, as an icon, as a vessel, or as a graphic focal point, apart from its meaning as an alphabetic unit.” Saltz, Ina; Typography Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Working with Type; p.6; 2009
“I learn about whites space from Americans. And I learn about witty solutions from the English. Then I learn about typographic discipline from the Swiss, then Germans. Then from the Swiss about typography, from the Germans about strength, and depth and timelessness.” Vignelli, Massimo; An Interview with Massimo Vignelli (1931– 2014), p.113; 2014
“In order to improve the target audience’s understanding of the design and facilitate their interaction with it, the designer needs to step into their shoes and interpret the hierarchy that they’re given, perhaps augmenting it or suggesting alternatives.”
“ ““ ““ “ ““ ““ “ ““ ““ “ ““ ““ “ ““ ““ “ ““ ““ “ ““ ““ “ ““ “
Glaser, Jessica and Knight, Carolyn; Typography: Practical Considerations And Design Patterns; 2015
“The shapes of letter forms are largely controlled by convention (the need, usually, to be legible), and also affected by practice and fashion.” Sassoon, Rosemary; Computers and Typography; p.91; 2002
“Attempts to rationalze and standardize the alpha-
bet are a recurring theme throughout the history of lettering and typography. Countless artists, designers, scientists, and even governments have developed model letterforms that embody their philosophy or ideals of beauty and reflect the social and technological context of their eras.”
Willen, Bruce, and Strals, Nolen; Lettering and Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces; p.21; 2009
Quoth the Typographer 22
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My second version wasn’t much of an improvement. It was hasty, and the background and “graphic element” hurt the piece even more than helping it. I still wasn’t giving it enough time. The only thing slightly better was that I had five quotes this time around.
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final. Inspired by some of the experimentation that I had seen, I changed up my typefaces. I combined Helvetica and Bebas Neue to try to highlight interesting portions of my quotes. I arranged the quotes in an arrow formation to try to create a little bit more interest. Then I changed up the title as well, so that I could play off of the arrow having a point. I did not align the bars of color with the title because I thought it was edgy, but it just looks messy in the end.
So what did I learn? • Type needs time. Don’t rush it. Give yourself time to play with it. • Working with two different typefaces in the same paragraph can be very testing, and should not be done lightly. • Text in multiple text boxes on the same page is hard to set nicely. 24
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“In order to improve the target audience’s understanding
of the design and facilitate their interaction with it, the designer needs to step into their shoes and interpret the hierarchy that they’re given, perhaps augmenting it or suggesting alternatives.”
Jessica Glaser and Carolyn Knight Typography: Practical Considerations And Design Patterns 2015
“I learn about white space from Americans. And I learn
about witty solutions from the English…Then from the Swiss about typography, from the Germans about
strength, and depth and timelessness.”
Massimo Vignelli An Interview with Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014) p.113; 2014
“Each letter is a shape unto itself, a shape that may serve
as an illustration, as an icon, as a vessel, or as a graphic focal point, apart from its meaning as an alphabetic unit.”
Ina Saltz Typography Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Working with Type p.6; 2009
“Attempts to rationalize and standardize the alphabet
are a recurring theme throughout the history of lettering
and typography.”
Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals Lettering and Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces p.21; 2009
“The shapes of letter forms are largely controlled by
convention (the need, usually, to be legible), and also affected by practice and fashion.”
Rosemary Sassoon Computers and Typography p.91; 2002
what’s the point of type? type nerd.
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project 2 a dialogue.
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process. This was a fun project. There were a ton of different ways that people chose to approach it. It was also a fascinating interview, so that was a plus. I wanted to emphasize the concept of the Ariadne thread, and therefore in a lot of my sketches, that was how I showed it. It was very important for me to figure out what combination of typefaces I wanted to use in order to gauge how much space I would need for text. Thus, in addition to my hand sketches. I also did some type studies.
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An Ariadne Thread Moyers Campbell If the work that you're doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that's it. But if you think, "Oh, no! I couldn't do that!" that's the dragon locking you in. "No, no, I couldn't be a writer," or "No, no, I couldn't possibly do what So-and-so is doing."
An Ariadne Thread Moyers Campbell If the work that you're doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that's it. But if you think, "Oh, no! I couldn't do that!" that's the dragon locking you in. "No, no, I couldn't be a writer," or "No, no, I couldn't possibly do what So-and-so is doing."
An Ariadne Thread Moyers Campbell
If the work that you're doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that's it. But if you think, "Oh, no! I couldn't do that!" that's the dragon locking you in. "No, no, I couldn't be a writer," or "No, no, I couldn't possibly do what So-and-so is doing."
An Ariadne Thread Moyers Campbell If the work that you're doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that's it. But if you think, "Oh, no! I couldn't do that!" that's the dragon locking you in. "No, no, I couldn't be a writer," or "No, no, I couldn't possibly do what So-and-so is doing." 30
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Moyers Why are there so many stories of the hero in
mythology?
Campbell Because that’s what’s worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. M So in all of these cultures, whatever the local costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed? C Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message. M Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now? C There’s a certain type of myth which one might call the
vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again.
M How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”? C My general formula for my students is “Follow your
bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.
M Is it my work or my life? C If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.” M When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone? C If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too.
But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon,
break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.
M I like what you say about the old myth of Theseus and Ariadne. Theseus says to Ariadne, “I’ll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the labyrinth.” So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. You say, “All he had was the string. That’s all you need.”
C That’s all you need— an Ariadne thread.
M Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string. C That’s not always easy to find. But it’s nice to have someone who can give you a clue. That’s the teacher’s job, to help you find your Ariadne thread. M Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn’t show you the truth itself, he shows you the way to truth.
C But it’s got to be your way, not his. The Buddha can’t tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears, for example. Different teachers may suggest exercises, but they may not be the ones to work for you. All a teacher can do is suggest. He is like a lighthouse that says, “There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there”. M In all of these journeys of mythology, there’s a place everyone wishes to find. The Buddhists talk of Nirvana, and Jesus talks of peace, of the mansion with many rooms. Is that typical of the hero’s journey - that there’s a place to find? C The place to find is within yourself. I learned a little about this in athletics. The athlete who is in top form has a quiet place within himself, and it’s around this, somehow, that his action occurs…. There’s a center of quietness within, which has to be known and held. If you lose that center, you are in tension and begin to fall apart.
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final.
So what did I learn? The thread motif was not quite resolved, the light green got lost in the white background, and the leading on the pull quote was way too much. I hope to tighten up this project and prepare it to be a very nice portfolio piece.
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bill Moyers and joseph Campbell
A COMMON
I decided to go for a more whimsical color scheme for my final with the light pink, green, and blue. I knew after my conservative first project that I wanted to push myself to do a huge title.
THREAD
Moyers Why are there so many stories of the hero in mythology?
Campbell Because that’s what’s worth writing
about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
M So in all of these cultures, whatever the local costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed? C Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical
deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message.
M Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn’t show you the truth itself, he shows you the way to truth.
M Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now?
C But it’s got to be your way, not his. The Buddha can’t tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears, for example. Different teachers may suggest exercises, but they may not be the ones to work for you. All a teacher can do is suggest. He is like a lighthouse that says, “There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there”.
C There’s a certain type of myth which one might call the
vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again.
M In all of these journeys of mythology, there’s a place everyone wishes to find. The Buddhists talk of Nirvana, and Jesus talks of peace, of the mansion with many rooms. Is that typical of the hero’s journey - that there’s a place to find? C The place to find is within yourself. I learned a little about this in athletics. The athlete who is in top form has a quiet place within himself, and it’s around this, somehow, that his action occurs…. There’s a center of quietness within, which has to be known and held. If you lose that center, you are in tension and begin to fall apart.
M How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”? C My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.
M Is it my work or my life? C If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose
to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”
M When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?
C If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down. M I like what you say about the old myth of Theseus and Ariadne. Theseus says to Ariadne, “I’ll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the labyrinth.” So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. You say, “All he had was the string. That’s all you need.”
C That’s all you need— an Ariadne thread.
M Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string. C That’s not always easy to find. But it’s nice to have someone who can give you a clue. That’s the teacher’s job, to help you find your Ariadne thread.
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project 3
Elements of Style pamp
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3
phlet.
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process. The sheer scale of this project was harrowing. I had never really worked on anything over four pages, and even then, the content had not been one continuous document that I needed to typeset. This was a big confidence booster for me, helping me realize that I could tackle a project of this scale. While it still took a ton of time (and was a doozy to print), I am no longer afraid to approach a project of such scale. A lot of my process was spent just on getting all the text in the document, and refining all of my styles so that everything fit on the page. It was also really helpful, once I got to talk with my group. They had a lot of 36
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great feedback for me. At first, it was hard to admit that they were a lot better at what they did, but it was overall a good and humbling experience for me. Together we created a solution that was very better than any of ours individually.
final. So what did I learn? • Getting feedback from your peers is totally worth it. • Multi-page documents are not as intimidating as they may seem. • Paragraph and character styles are the bomb. • Just keep everything in one text box. Seriously.
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Elementary Rules of Usage
1 Section
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1
the elements of
style new york 1918
section 1: elementary rules of usage 1
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project 4 the zine.
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process. I thought the project before this was huge. This project was truly a test of everything we had learned in the rest of the class. We needed to make sure all of our text was set flawlessly, and in a way that communicated engagingly, and we needed to incorporate that into a multipage document including images and other graphic elements. I went through about eight different versions of my first article before deciding on the overall feel of my magazine.
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Wh Wo ar Wo
by C
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hat omen re orth
Cheryl Heller
I
tation levels are set and the responsibility we share in setting those expectations. The time has come for this issue of men versus women to end. Too much has been said and written and too much money has been made by those to stand to profit from analyzing the gender gap. The most honest and useful bewas asked to lief we can hold is that the battle we speak at the conference in Chicago have to fight is an individual battle about the fact that women make having nothing to do with gender. less money than men. It’s an endless emotional subject colored by cen- It’s undeniably true that womturies of opinions. Following, nev- en make less money than men, ertheless, is one more point of view. and money is the sign of equality. Women earn less money than I believe that money and power men at every level of education. will not come through legislation, The gap is as large for college gradalthough that may give women uates as for workers who have the confidence to act. It will come not finished high school. Both through an understanding of how men and women employers pay our behavior has been conditioned their female subordinates roughly by stereotypes and how our expec- $12,000 less than their male subor-
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final. I finally finished the first issue of Werd Magazine. I felt like I had moved a mountain. There were still definitely things to improve, but I had done a massive amount of work and legitimately had a magazine that I could flip through. There were a few articles that I did not finish that I want to go back and polish up. Also, there were some places where I was too attached to my baseline grid, and therefore had some improper leading/space between paragraphs. I also did not show as many images as I wanted to and those that I did, not as effectively as I could have.
So what did I learn? • Again, that this scale of a project is doable, and while it takes a ton of time, it is very rewarding. • Reading the content that you are designing for is extremely important. 46
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• Do not be afraid of large images. (I am a little bit too comfortable with white space. • DO NOT PUT ASSIGNMENTS OFF! • SEE ABOVE!
march 2017 volume 01 issue 01
werd.
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colophon. This journal was designed by Tim Haffner for Typography II at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA. The fonts he used are Helvetica, and Cooper Black Std. Tim enjoys short walks on the beach and good keming.
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