#kudesign

  Define and give 3 font examples: Old Style, Transitional, Modern, Slab Serif and Sans Serif.

Old style: Renaissance- and Baroque era type designers looked to Roman lettering and calligraphy as inspiration for their typefaces.  These humanist letterforms incorporate elements of calligraphic handwriting such as the diagonal axis of the broad-nibbed pen and the softened, wedge serifs that replicate the pen stroke’s starting point.  Type designers continue to create contemporary revivals and interpretations of humanist form.

EX: Adobe Garamond, Goudy, Bembo

Transitional: Transitional serif letters retain humanist traces, yet their forms are more ordered and rationalized than old style characters.  These rationalized features usually include vertical axis, increased stroke contrast, and details that appear formalized and constructed, like symmetrical serifs.

EX: Baskerville, Americana, Perpetua

Modern:  Typefaces like Bodoni and Didot modernize and streamline the forms of the alphabet, pushing them farther from their humanist origins.  Modern letters have a strictly vertical axis, heightened or extreme stoke contrast, and serifs that feel mechanically drawn or constructed rather than smoothly written.

EX: Didot, Bodoni, Walbaum

Slab Serif: As their name implies, slab serif letters possess squared-off serifs that abruptly extend from the character’s main strokes.  First developed in the early nineteenth century for signage and advertising printing, the slab serif, with its relatively uniform stroke weight, was a counterpart to the extreme stroke contrast of the popular Ultra Bodoni style.

EX: Serifa, Archer, Rockwell

Sans Serif: Though sans serif type and lettering did not become popular until the twentieth century, examples of sans serif lettering exist in some Renaissance inscriptions and have precedent in classical Greek letterforms,  The modulated stroke weight, greater contrast, and true italic versions of humanist sans serif letters convey a calligraphic influence, which in some cases even includes flared terminals that suggest serifs.

EX: Scala Sans, Univers, Helvetica

Proportions of the letterform: The proportions of letterforms are an important component when designing and using typography.  There are four main factors that influence typographic proportions.  The first is the ratio of stroke width to the height of the character.  The second is the contrast between the thickness and thinness of the stroke weight.  Third is the proportion of the x-height to the height of the capital letters, ascenders, and descenders.  The final factor influencing proportion is the width of the letterforms.

Stroke Weight: The contrast between the thin and thick stokes in a typeface.  Various typefaces contain particular stroke-weight characteristics.

Define Axis or Stress as it relates to font classification: The direction of stroke emphasis within a letter.  Letters with modulated strokes display thick and thin areas, based on the angle of the writing tool used to create them. The vertical, horizontal, or diagonal emphasis on the stroke of a letter can help with font classification by how the axis might be angled.  Angles change within each classification.

Small caps:  Capital letters that are the same (or nearly the same) height as the tvpeface's x-height. Some software programs automatically create their own small caps, but true small caps (with correct proportions and weight) are usually only found in expert typefaces.

Lining Figures: A modern style of numerals where all figures are of the same height (and typically larger than Old Style Figures in the same font) and rest on the baseline. Some fonts come with both Old Style and Lining Figures.

Non-aligning figures: Designed to simulate the x-height of lowercase letters – full size capitals and aligning figures tend to jump out of the text. Small caps and non-aligning figures are ideal for telephone numbers and postcodes.

Ligatures: Ligatures are specially designed characters that overcome unfortunate clashes between certain letter combinations. The top part of a lowercase f can clash with the dot of a lowercase i. Some typefaces overcome this by merging the two characters in a sensitively designed fashion. Many software programmes can implement ligatures automatically or you can use the ‘find and change’ facility. You can ascertain whether the face has ligatures by checking ‘key caps’ – sometimes they are in the expert set of a particular face. In some typefaces the fi and fl ligatures can also be set by typing 5 and 6 respectively while holding the shift and option keys.

Dashes:  A dash is a punctuation mark that is similar to a hyphen or minus sign but that differs from both of these symbols primarily in length and function. The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—), named for the length of a typeface's lower-case n and upper-case M respectively.

Apostrophes (smart quotes):  mark of punctuation that can denote missing letters (can’t), plurals (3’s), or possessive case (Georgia’s) depending on how it is used. The typeset apostrophe is a specific glyph used in typeset text and other instances where appearances and good typographical practices matter. Although its appearance varies from one typeface to another, in general the typeset apostrophe is usually a small curved mark that faces to the left (like a tiny 9). It looks like a comma except it sits up above the baseline.

Summarize optical relationships within a font: Optical relationships within a successful typeface have a structural integrity, or unity, when all of the characters visually relate to each other. Thicks and thins are consistent, interletter and interword spacing create an even tone, or color and the typeface has an overall visually appealing appearance.

  Summerize Type measurement: units of measurement used in typography or typesetting. The traditional units are different from common metric units, as they were established earlier. Even though these units are all very small, across a line of print they add up quickly. Confusions such as resetting text originally in type of one unit in type of another will result in words moving from one line to the next, resulting in all sorts of typesetting errors (viz. rivers of white, widows and orphans, disrupted tables, and misplaced captions).

TYPE ANATOMY:  http://www.thinkingwithtype.com/contents/letter/#Anatomy

Define a type house or font house (business that sells fonts). Name 6.

1)   My fonts: http://www.myfonts.com/

2)   House: http://www.houseind.com/

3)   Typotheque: https://www.typotheque.com/

4)   The Font Bureau: http://www.fontbureau.com/

5)   Hoefler & Frere-Jones: http://www.typography.com/