Design Principles - An introduction to type 2.

Last week, at the end of Fred's design principles lesson, he gave us a task to find 6 of the best font examples that match the 6 production methods discussed in that lesson.

STONE / SABLE / BONE / WOOD / LEAD / SILICONE

Here are the fonts I have chosen.

Stone.

Sable.

Bone.

 Wood.

 Lead.

 Silicone.

Manipulating one of these typeface:

Today with the 6 origin examples we printed we had to choose 1 of them to manipulate that fitted in one of the four font categories:

BLOCK

GOTHIC

ROMAN

SCRIPT

I selected Times New Roman, which is a ROMAN font.

I took out the serifs on the upper and lowercases of Times New Roman.

After we had done the manipulations to the 6 letters of our chosen fonts, we were set a task to identify our fonts within a font family; Bold, Italic, Regular or Light. 

Once this had been established, I made the manipulated letter 'A' from Times New Roman to fit into both uppercase and lowercase.

Throughout the lesson we talked about the terminology of typography. 

We learned that the point sizes of fonts are measurements of pica.

1 point = 1/72

12 Points = 1 Pica

 Pica goes up in multiples of 12, because 12 points is equivalent to 1 pica. 

Font

Physical means used to create a typeface, be it computer code, lithographic, film, metal or woodcut.

Typeface

Letters, numbers and symbols which all share the same distinct features

Font Family

A typeface is the collection of faces; Regular, Bold Light, Italic, Condensed.

Can be applied to a font to create a 'family' of fonts.

Italics

An italic is a version of a typeface that slants to the right and is used when special emphasis is needed. A true italic font is drawn separate from the typeface and has unique features that aren't found on the standard typeface.

Italics are based around serif typefaces where as a sans serif

Characteristics of an italicised font are different to the original. 

Task

After the lesson we were given a task, which involved producing the bold, italic, regular & light versions of a letter within our chosen font, so it can be identified within a family.

My manipulated font is regular and has stayed the same weight, so I have manipulated the Bold and Italic versions of Times New Roman. However, Light is not part of the font family, so I had to create my own and reduce the line weights.

 (light, regular, italic, bold)