Exercises in Typography
As part of classwork for Communication Design Fundamentals, I performed some exercises to help us get in touch with the element of typography in design. These exercises included tracing out different typefaces, identifying the “emotions” of different fonts and playing with fonts and layouts.
Typeface Tracing
In order to become familiar with the elements and nuances of different font, we traced over a sample of Adobe Garamond, Didot, Helvetica and Futura with tracing paper and a fine-tipped Sharpie. I was quite struck by how the little indentation of the ‘A’ in Garamond could influence how it appeared significantly. I would say my favorite to trace would be Didot, with its extreme changes in stem sizes within each uppercase letter.
Typographic Voice
In this exercise, we explored how different typefaces affect the meaning and emotional feelings of different words. I created artboards in Illustrator with different iterations of the same words but with varied fonts.
Tradition
For the word tradition, I was thinking heavily about Roman tradition (I was taking a history class on democracy at the time). Tradition invokes a sense of heaviness, describing a set of rules that are important and ever-present, but salient and not overbearing. They are principled and historic. Most of the typefaces I found are serifed, but I wanted to have something that felt dated, but yet also relevant in the modern context.
I felt that Trajan Pro best represented these aspects of tradition, with its imposing figure as a small-caps font and short but sharp serifs, especially on the ‘T’. Luminari and Zapfino were certainly remarkable, but I felt that they were a little too whimsical and fancy to have the restraint that also comes with tradition.
Future
For future, I was thinking about sleek, fowarding looking and and simplistic. Of course sans-serif fonts came to mind, and I experimented with italic options if the font family had one.
I chose Orator Std Slanted to represent the future. It is simple and utilitarian, and makes no distinction between upper and lower case as a small caps typeface. The slanted option for Orator Std also has a notable lean, with the parallel lines between stems making it very pronounced. It is outstanding and determined in its message.
The computer I was working on unfortunately did not have 1980s-style fonts that would become commonplace in sci-fi media. I would have certainly considered them strong contenders for showing a juxtaposed future.
Experiment
For experiment, I was thinking about whimsical, unusual characters, but also mainly scientific experiments. What came to mind were handwritten notes, complicated chalkboards, top secret files, and military testing. This was certainly more varied than the other two, and I found multiple fonts that fit each characteristics.
I would say OCR A Std had my vote for experiment. The monospaced font has the element of sterility that would come from a typewriter or an old-timey computer display. The additional angles in the ‘p’ and ‘e’ characters also give an element on complicatedness and sophistication that is associated with science experiments. I guess the font also evokes a sense of mystery and espionage.
Typographic Hierarchy
In this last exercise, we layout some text about a seminar series. For each layout, there were restrictions to different typographic variables: linespacing, weight, indentation and size change. From each work, you can see how each element allows us to communicate structure in the text.
Working with the restriction really let me appreciate how we take each of these available parts for granted, and how we can make the best use of it, especially when they were all combined in the last work.
