Design Principles - OUGD404

For todays lesson with Fred we were told to bring in 8 pieces of paper with the words "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" printed on them. They had to be printed with the 4 categories script, wood block, gothic and roman in uppercase and lowercase.

At the start of the lesson we were asked to pick out what we thought were the easiest ones to read and then in groups we had to all decide out of everyones what we thought were the most readable and the least.

We then started to create a criteria for our decision making process when choosing the most and least readable fonts. Everyone agreed that the lowercase versions were easier to read than the capitals. The counters in the lowercase can be distinguished easily, they make it more readable due to the negative space within them.

The negative spaces with the fedex and F1 logos make them recognisable. The arrow is the fedex is clever because of it symbolising movement and delivery as it's a logistics organisation.

Kerning

Fonts are set with a kern; space between letters.

Tracking

Spacing letters out and distancing them.

Leading

Distances between baselines of successive lines of type.

Readability

ease with text, which can be read and understood.

With the pieces of paper we had brought in for this lesson. We were then told to cut the words, "The quick brown fox" from all upper or lowercase words. We had to arrange each of the different fonts into their own sentences. We discussed how that the wood block words attract the viewers eye straight away and that they don't work when used midway in the sentence. This is because people would read the last words and then the first words afterwards.