GDE710 – Week 10

This week, I have been continuing to work on my brief three for Contemporary Practice. As part of this, I have been defining my area and seeing what points of interest there are within the area. I have decided that I am going to produce work based on the historical angle of hidden sites around Barnsley and the surrounding area. I have not yet decided what I am going to produce as an outcome, but that will come very soon. I have been interacting with things on canvas this week, but more of the research material and less of the lecture. Personally, even though I love typography, I struggled with this weeks lecture purely because of the speaker. I found it quite hard to follow and that there was a lot of stop and start going through it.

Type and Typography – Phil Baines & Andrew Haslam

• Designing with type in two dimensions
  • key elements of typographic palette are based on the practicers of print
    • despite the changes to print since its invention in 1450, the way we read has not fundamentally changed.
  • Typography is a discipline that has presented language within a set of physical and intellectual boarders.
  • the structure of typography, like the design and manufacture of type, fundamentally deals with issues of vertical and horizontal space, constantly exploring the minutiae of proportional relationships within letter form and layout.
  • When designing for a page there are 10 key decisions that need to take place
    • typeface
    • type size
    • colour
    • line length and horizontal space
    • vertical space (leading)
    • alignment of text
    • paragraph articulation
    • column depth
    • position of text on the page
    • format
  • typeface
    • choices based on legibility, what is available on the computer and the nature of the text
    • typefaces can also be chosen for historical reasons
    • the text needs to be readable and attractive
  • type size
    • the type size for adults is around 8.5pt to 10pt where as type size of children is a lot bigger
    • larger type in a book can suggest children’s text. Smaller type on a poster can draw the viewer in.
  • colour
    • colour in typography can mean of three things:
      • Relative shade or tonal value of a particular typeface or style
      • it can refer to the actual colour of the ink used in printing.
      • colour can also describe the background on which the sits and has a larger part to play in terms of readability.
  • horizontal state
    • when reading, we don’t read individual letters or individual words: the eyes travel along each line and reads groups of words together.
    • for continuous reading, around 65 characters per line is considered best.
    • but everything between 45 and 75 characters can be made to work with careful choices of leading.
  • vertical space (leading)
    • leading is the invisible framework running vertically down a page, and together with type size and line length has the greatest effect on readability of a piece of printed text.
  • paragraph articulation
    • a paragraph represents one unit of thought and as such, one paragraph needs to be distinguished from another.
  • column depth
    • many examples of fine printed books throughout history have column depths of around 40 lines. but constraints of page size and format are often a limiting factor.
  • position on a page
    • a design can be arrived from the outside in. this can establish the margins and define the format of the page.
  • format
    • concerns the shape and size of a job. Whether that is the trimmed size of a book or the number or the number of pixels and their aspect ratio on a computer monitor.

Tunes of the week