Typographical Terminology Lecture

In todays first typography terminology lecture, I was introduced to a range of new skills and key words used in typography. We began by looking at a few professionals who use type heavily in there work or who have been commissioned to create a type for a specific purpose. We looked at director Wes Anderson, who uses type within his movies and through the promotion of his movies (posters, adverts, film covers). Anderson usually uses the typeface Futura, yet we looked at one case which he asked illustrator and type designer Jessica Hische to design him a typeface for his film 'Moonrise Kingdom' Where Hirsche started with Edwardian script typeface, but she aimed to make it more 'hand-hewn looking' as she put it. The film is set in 1960's New England, America, Hirsche wanted the type to represent the setting so wanted to have a casual look while keeping the type rather old fashioned for the times, as she saw the New England area to be behind the current growing times of the mid sixties. Another example was the Stan Jonze move 'her' where Geoff Mcfetridge did the typography for the movie, he used the San Seriff type Helvetica, which he manipulated so it was very close together for the title 'her' on the movie posters and film cover.

We moved on to look at specific typographical terminology and the anatomy of type.
Key words in letterform -

Ascender height - The height of an ascender on a letter ( h, d, b)
Cap height - The height of a capital letter above the baseline of a particular typeface.
X height - Height of the lower case letter.
Baseline - The imaginary line which letters in a font appear to rest upon.
Descender- Portion of the letter which descends below the baseline.

Key words in typography-

Seriff - Little extra stroke found at the end of main vertical and horizontal strokes on a font.
Bracket - Curved or wedge like connection between the stem and seriff.
San Seriff - Type face with no seriffs.
Terminal - The end of any stroke with no seriff.
Italic - Mostly slanted type with a different design to its original or 'Roman' design.
Oblique - Slanted type of the original design.
Diacritic - Symbols or marks which would change the sound or pronunciation of a word.
Super script - Letter figure or symbol plated above the normal line of type.
Sub script - Below the line of type.
Strike through - A horizontal line through the type, normally signifies a mistake but is used a lot in modern design.
Counter - Negative space in a letter. (o).
Bowl - Curved section of a letter.
Aperture - Partially enclosed, round negative space ( a, c, s).
Cross bar - Line in an upper case letter ( A, H).
Kerning - Refers to adding or subtracting space between specific characters.

TEDxUCLA Videos-

Before the briefing on the first study task, we were shown a short clip of a lecture given by John Maeda, a designer dedicated to linking design and technology. Maeda spoke of how the look of typography directly changes the word that you are putting across, firstly focussing on the word 'Fear' and that just by changing its size and also playing with kerning you could give a different feeling to the word, for example Maeda changed the letters to a bold font, made the letters tall and then subtracted the space between each character so that they were crowded together to make it feel more scary than it would normally, like a loud in your face kind of feel, he then did the opposite by making the letters softer, smaller and more spread out to give a quiet haunting fear feel. Maeda sees it that the way the characters of a word are formed links directly to how you want the mood to be and that it effects the audiences view more than the word itself, talking alot on content which is the actual word in this case and then form which is the style or technique and media which is used to form the word.

We then looked at another lecture on type called 'If h is a chair' where Graphic and type designer Andrew Byrom speaks about his love of type and talks about his past commissions and works which he was very passionate about. Byrom spoke of his work with a whole range of medias, from venetian blinds to neon lighting. He collaborated with a huge range of people, spending his own money to fund his ideas so he could grow his own portfolio and widen his understanding of what type can be and what can be type. Byrom spoke of his process of working, beginning with some sketches before attempting to form his ideas further, he is easily taking of course into new ideas which he finds during his research, he speaks to different people getting opinions and finding collaborations which take him out of his comfort zone and into a new way of looking at things and a brand new media that hes never worked with before.