Type workshops

Lack of blogging on these workshops so I thought I would post something as I have learnt quite a lot from them and I enjoyed them quite a bit too. I am definitely choosing this as my module focus for later in the year but that's enough of that.

There's a number of decisions that have to be made about type. The case, weight, size and form of the characters on the page have to be considered. Appropriate spacing between characters (kerning) is also something to be considered. For instance when adding a word to a page, we can look for the largest space between any two characters and use this as template for our other character spacing. We can change the kerning to strike a balance so that the space between each letter is the same. Being or becoming aware of spaces and spacings is crucial to the development of understanding layout based typography.

The typographical hierarchy (Size, case, weight, layout, space) can help us make informed decisions when selecting fonts to apply to document. Target audience is an important factor when deciding upon these options. What is the purpose of the type? to give information on a sign or poster? or to be read in a publication like a magazine or a book?

Things such as size are dependent on the viewing public and the type of document being produced. In a newspaper it is more than likely than the typeface will be larger than that in a book. This is because we read a newspaper at arms length appose to a book which is read much closer.

Sans Serif and Serif typefaces are selected based on the document. Traditionally, a book would always feature a serif typeface due to the amount of copy in a page. The serifs guide the eye horizontally across the page, which makes for easier reading. A sans serif font is usually found in magazines and on documents with less information.

These are a few images from the first session, where I was introduced to spacial awareness and how space and sizing can impact on how a piece is viewed.

The first image portrays an angry dog, the second, a playful dog and the third, a nervous or shy dog. The power of space and size can make an impact if executed correctly.

Here I am looking at spacing but character spacing as appose to negative spacing on a document. The bottom line is kerned correctly. I started with the biggest space between the 'R' and the 'A' and then kerned the rest to fit with that. Kerning like this is common practice with a single word. However, you wouldn't kerning singular characters if you were to use a more than a few words.

This exercise got me thinking about space, weight, orientation and size all at the same time. The exercise involved adding text to a page (four, three two, one) and then making them read backwards (one, two, three, four) using the methods shown above. The first attempt did not get good reviews from the others in the group as your eye is not led the way I want even if the the word is bigger or has extra weight. However, if I start by using rotation as well as position on the page, the eye is drawn to the center of the page so reads the one first.

Once I had grasped this concept, I moved on to playing around with a sentence in the same way. As a rule the eye is drawn to the largest font and then to which ever is the next dominant in terms of size, weight, case and position and perhaps even form.

I was told that this worked but I am not sure. It just looks like a bad movie poster, I think.

After this I started looking at whole paragraphs of type. Even though I had jumped from singular words to paragraphs the considerations still stayed the same. The size, weight, layout, space, form, and now alignment came into consideration. Left aligned is much more of a formal justification often seen in broadsheet newspapers, etc. However fully justified text is usually found traditionally in books and most tabloid newspapers and magazines. Leading is also key to setting up paragraphs of text and should act as a direct result of the size being increased or decreased.

This is my first attempt with setting out a 4 column document with what I felt was appropriate leading and type size to fill a page. By the end I had selected a fully justified text alignment with a smaller typeface and larger leading. I found this easier to read and felt that the larger leading made the text more appealing to read.




The final session brought more layout work and now I was using a whole body of text to fit into various documents with a varying number of columns.

The first example shows a 10pt font on 13pt leading, without line spacing and added 4mm of indentation, which is about 3 character widths, and I'm told that is the safest option when indenting. This meant the copy fit perfectly into the three columns and the leading was appropriate. If I wanted line spacing I could reduce the size or the leading to accomodate. However, there should be no less than 5 words per line and and no more than 11 or 12.



Once I had cracked this I could move onto adding imagery to my layouts and playing around the type and number of columns to achieve different effects but keep the readability.

This example is a standard two column document without line spacing and the appropriate ammount of leading for the size of the font. I thought this attempt was ok but after doing a few more I thought this seemed poor.

These two examples were much better and finally seemed to be coming together, and I had kept the readability. On the first example I reduced the top margin and allowed the image to bleed of the page. The document started of as a 5 column document but I felt the columns were far too small to be able to hold the text. I reduced the gutter and that changed the look of the document.

The second example shows a four column document with an image over three columns. Because I had sorted out my type fits I could then be flexible with how small or large I wanted my image. I found that the more columns I had the smaller the type and the bigger the image would be to compensate.

That is it for type for now...