Exercise: Typeface Tracing

Adobe Garamond is a serif font with bracketed serif. I found the bracketed serifs and high contrast difficult to trace, especially the ‘g’ and ‘a’, since I almost never hand write those two letters in this style. I also noticed that the top part of ‘g’is smaller than other x-height letters, and that it floats a bit above the base line. The capital letters were easier to trace because of all the straight lines. The cap height for Adobe Garamond seems to be around two times the x-height. The same is true for Didot. Didot is also a serif font, but it has hairline serifs and extreme contrast. The hairline serifs were much easier to trace, but the ‘g’ was more difficult than ‘g’ in Adobe Garamond because of the extreme contrast. I noticed that the top serif for ‘r’ and ’n’ (and probably any other lowercase letter with a top serif is not centered, but protrudes to the left.

Helvetica and Futura are both sans serif fonts, which I found much easier to trace. Because the lines were quite thick, I generally traced the outlines of the letters and then colored in between the outlines. ‘g’ was easier for these two fonts, because they are shaped more similarly to how I usually write ‘g’ (with the hook under an x-height ‘a’). I noticed that ‘a’ for Helvetica is still in similar shape as the two serif fonts, the fonts seem to progress top to bottom from traditional style (more flourishes, curves) to modern (simplistic, clean lines). Future pushes the two types of lines in fonts to the extreme, using either absolutely straight lines, or curves that resemble circles.