![]() Type design and typography are routinely informed by conscious and unconscious contexts that change with time. Practical and commercial motivations prevail but social and political rationales are never far away. ![]() Typefaces and typography are never designed in a vacuum. As if to prove further how mutable such symbolism can be, in the 1940s Tschichold lambasted the ‘New Typography’ as inherently Fascist, prompting a backlash by betrayed followers who saw him as Alvin Lustig characterised him, a turncoat. Yet in 1941, the Nazis abandoned its own Volk type in favour of more readable faces. In 1933, however, the Nazi government revived the blackletter face, proclaiming it Volk (or the people’s) type and condemned the New Typography as un-German. In the sixteenth century, blackletter stood for German protestantism and nationalism, in the 1920s it was attacked for being antiquated, replaced by the New Typography, characterised by sans serif type in asymmetrical compositions and codified in 1928 by Jan Tschichold. Around the same time Maximilian, the German king rejected Antiqua (used in Latin manuscripts) in favour of spiky blackletter. Believing that standardised typography would make governance easier, Garamond’s face was ordered to be used for all official papers, and became a symbol of French enlightenment as well as the nation’s first proprietary font. In about 1540 the French monarch François I commissioned Claude Garamond to design the typeface that bears his name. Not every typeface is transparent, not all typography recedes certain types symbolise philosophies and ideologies, some represent institutions, nations, and cults, many have intrinsic meaning. ![]() The meanings of type The back-stories, informed by trends, cults, philosophies and nationhood. Type families such as Helvetica, Univers, and Interstate include a variety of widths. Instead of torturing a letterform, choose a typeface with the proportions you need, such as condensed, compressed, or extended. This distorts the proportion of the typeface, forcing heavy elements to become thin, and thin elements to become thick. You can change the set width of a letter by fiddling with its horizontal or vertical scale. Some typefaces have a narrow set width, and some have a wide one. The width of a letter is intrinsic to the proportion of the typeface. The set width is the body of the letter plus a sliver of space that protects it from other letters. Width The horizontal dimension of a letter is its set width. (A point is roughly equivalent to a pixel.) Most software applications let the designer choose a preferred unit of measure picas and points are a standard default. Typography also can be measured in inches, millimeters, or pixels. Twelve points equal one pica, the unit commonly used to measure column widths. The point system, used to measure the height of a letter as well as the space between lines ( leading ), is the standard measurement for type. Height The size of type is usually measured in points, a unit of length in use since 1735. If a typeface were not positioned this way, it would appear to teeter precariously, lacking a sense of physical grounding. Commas and semicolons also cross the baseline. The curves at the bottom of letters such as a or c hang slightly below the baseline. The baseline is the most stable axis along a line of text. The bigger the x-height is in relation to the cap height, the bigger the letters will look. The x-height is the height of the main body of the lowercase letter (or the height of a lowercase x ), excluding its ascenders and descenders. Some vertical elements (ascenders) may extend slightly above the cap height. ![]() The cap height is the distance from the top of the capital letter to its bottom. Choose these with caution! Examples: Balloon, Klang, Lithos. This category includes historical, high tech, and just plain wacky styles. Examples: Brush, Zapf Chancery, Commercial Script.ĭisplay / Decorative Typefaces Display fonts are generally used at large sizes and are designed to attract attention. Script Typefaces Script fonts relate to the fluidity of different kinds of handwriting such as calligraphy (think Wedding invitations), roundhand (think cursive, with connected letters), and brush (Think brush painting). ![]() (often times typography used for webdesign or public signage will utilize a san-serif typeface for “readaibility”) The lines are characteristically clean and in often are easier to read. Sans-Serif are a more modern typeface and have no embellishment. Serif has decorative embellishments on the ends of character lines. There are two basic groups that typefaces may be classified Notes on typographic anatomy and history Basic Typeface Anatomy ![]()
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