Study task 4 - typesetting - 02/10/2015

Setting type

The grid
Vignelli - Continuity

Matt Willy
- Leading designer in grid use.

Legibility - The quality of being clear enough to read.

Spiekermann - Legibility is not communication; but in order to communicate type has to be legible.

Fassets theorem of legible line length
45 - 65 characters in a line is legible.


Readability - The ease with which a reader can understand a written text.
Way in which words and blocks of type are arranged in a layout.

• Tracking / Kerning
• Leading / line height
• Type size
• contrast
• heirachy

Type size and contrast
We stick to no more then two type sizes on a printed page, but there are no exceptions.
Alignment - Flush left.


The rag
- refers to the uneven vertical margin in a block of type.

Flush Left
-the text aligned to a margin or a gutter from the left.

Centred
- text is aligned to neither the left or right margin, an even gap is on each side of the lines.

Justified
- the text is aligned along the left margin and the letter/word spacing is adjusted so that text falls flush with both margins

Orphans and Widows

-Orphan and widows are lines at the end or beginning of a paragraph.


Study task four

My task was to find a take away menu which needed to be redesigned. I needed to use the skills I had learnt in my morning lecture, keeping in mind the terminology I have learnt to create a clear and well laid out take away menu which is a redesign of an unsuccessful one.

I found this take away menu on the internet and immediately took a dislike to it, the type is tacky and a mixture of types and is not very well readable, the text gets lost due to the colours chosen using read on yellow. The text is very tightly kerned so the text blurs into one and the words are lost. The use of image gives a lot less room for the type which is why it is so tightly kerned, these images are also wrongly placed on the menu. The information within the menu is very jumbled and repeated a lot.  

I made sure I had lines to keep a steady alined structure. I chose the type Din as it is clear and bold, the lettering is thick and I kept a good spacing by not including imagery, I wanted to create a clear straight forward type based menu. I chose to use lines to split up key parts of the menu so it could be legible and be easily understood as a menu with simple sections. I chose to take out some of the repeated things to make it understandable and clean, taking these out gave more space for the type.