Today started with an introduction to typography, terms and tips. Typesetting is the composition of text and arranging the type in accordance to a languages orthography for visual display. Basically meaning, the body of a book would have easily readable type and not decorative, as perhaps a cafe logo may have on its front window to look attractive.
I was shown the four basic groups that typography can be placed into. Serif, Snas Serif, Script and Decorative. Serif and Sans serif are the most common of the groups and are seen and read everywhere. They are both easily readable, hence the vast use of their typography on all products in the world. Serif type contains flicks, called serifs, that ascend from the end of each letter. This makes the type appear more decorative and fluent. Whereas, Sans Serif there are no Serifs. Sans Serif appears more clean, smooth and refined, making it ideal for the modern world. Script type is based upon handwritten fluid letter strokes and is a decorative style and is often used to reflect a natural element of a product. Finally, there is Decorative type. This typesetting is extremely diverse and is continuously growing due to the ever growing advertisement of products. Industries will create new decorative type to create an identity to their product, illustrating its personality to the public.
After discussing our understanding of typography, we moved onto learn how we can manipulate type with InDesign. First of all, I was shown how to kern and track text. Kerning is a process of altering the space between each individual characters in a word and tracking is a process of altering the spacing of a whole word or line of text, it is almost like scaling the text larger and smaller.
Then I learnt leading and rag. This technique is most often see in news papers to fill and create blocks and bodys of text. That is why sometimes when reading a newspaper article you will see lines where words are largely spaced out to fill the dead space and create a block body of text. The technique leading, refers to the distance between successive lines or type and Rag is the irregular or uneven vertical margin of a block of type. Most often the right margin is ragged, because most people read and build bodies of text from the left hand margin.
Next, we learnt how to crop type. It was explained to us that type does not always have to be concerned with legibility and communication, you can use it for decoration, pattern, texture and many creative purposes. Basically to crop I created a shape and altered its colour to match the white of the background. This way you can bring the shape to the foreground and place it over parts of the type as a way to crop. We did this to discover how different type is put together to further our understanding.
As a group, we all took part in an fun task of what type suited a certain word. It was interesting to see what everyone decided about each word and listening to peoples opinions is something you can learn from. Below are examples of typefaces I matched with words.
Finally, we was put to the test with all that we had learnt in today process and production. I was provided with a series of words and was given the task to manipulate the type of the words to match what the word itself expresses. However we was not allowed to change the typeface to help illustrate the meaning of the word, only the techniques learnt. This was a fun way to engage with what we had learnt and to continuously use the skills so that it becomes familiar and easy to use. After the first few I was really getting the hand of the techniques and was having great fun with the challenge. I made some words split, bounce, raise, fall and more, by editing individual letters in words. Its safe to say, I will remember the type editing techniques I have learnt today and I will expand upon this in my own time, either in my project or as practice. Examples are below.
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