Thinking With Type

1. What are the advantages of a multiple column grid?   

      Flexible formats for publications. 


2. How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line?

     60 characters per line, 12 words per line


3. Why is the baseline grid used in design?
     
     So everything lines up evenly across the whole page or spread.


4. What are reasons to set type justified? ragged (unjustified)?

     Justified makes the page flow smoothly, ragged can be used depending on where you place
     the text.


5. What is a typographic river?

      Gaps in your type setting that appear to run through the whole paragraph of text.


6. What does clothesline, hangline or flow line mean?

     An area across the top of the page that is reserved for images and captions, and body text can 
     "hang" form a common line. 


7. What is type color/texture mean?

     How dense or heavy the text appears on the page.


8. How does x-height effect type color?

     X Height is the difference between the lines. This can make the type color look less dense or
     more dense if the X Height is large. Or vice versa.


9. What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules?

     Indent - use 3 spaces or the tab key
     Double Space between paragraphs - indent the first paragraph
 

Marilyn Minter

Marylin Minter 

Bio: Marylin Minter was born in 1948 and is an American artist currently living in New York. She has had many solo exhibitions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, the Center for Contemporary Art in 2009, La Conserva, Centra de Arte Contemporaneo, Ceuti/Murica, Spain in 2009, the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany in 2011. Her work has been exhibited in the lobby of MoMA, shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in LA, and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Time Square, NY. She has has also been included in many group exhinitions in museums all over the world. She was most recently featured in "Riotous Baroque," an exhibition that originated at Kunsthaus Zurich and traveled to the Guggenheim Bilabo. Minter is represented by Salon 94, New york and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.


Photography:

 Video work: Green and Pink Caviar, 2009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj5nygOPW9Q



Sources:
http://www.marilynminter.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Minter

Identifying Fonts

Know Your Fonts

Old Style:

A style of serif font developed by Renaissance typographers to replace the Blackletter style of type. Based on ancient Roman inscriptions, Old Style fonts are generally characterized

  Examples:

 

Transitional:

The Antiqua or Old Style of type of the 16th and 17th centuries evolved into a serif typestyle known as trasitional  

   Examples:

Modern:

A style of typeface developed in the late 18th century that continued through much of the 19th century. Characterized by high contrast between thick and thin strokes and flat, hairline serifs, Modern fonts are harder to read than previous and later typestyles developed for text.

    Examples: 

Slab Serif:

A type of serif font that evolved from the Modern style. The serifs are square and larger, bolder than serifs of previous typestyles. Considered a sub-classification of Modern in some type classification systems and its own class in other systems, Slab Serif is further divided into: Clarendon, Typewriter, Slab Serif or Geometrics (a separate sub-category of Slab Serif), Fat Face (a fattened Didone/Modern style).

 Examples:

Sans Serif:

In typography, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, san serif or simply sans typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without".

 Examples:

 

Dissecting a Font: 

 

Stroke Weight: 

 The thickness of lines in a font character. The HP LaserJet defines stroke weights from Ultra Thin (-7) to Ultra Black (+7), with Medium, or Text, as normal (0)

 Stress:

The diagonal, vertical, or horizontal thick-to-thin transition in the stroke of a letter  

Small Caps:

Small capitals (usually abbreviated small caps) are uppercase (capital) characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase (small) letters or text figures.

Lining Figures: 

A modern style of numerals where all figures are of the same height (and typically larger than Old Style Figures in the same font) and rest on the baseline. Some fonts come with both Old Style and Lining Figures.

Non-Aligning Figures:

Also called Old Style figures, are Arabic numerals varying in height and position. Some sit on the baseline while others descend beneath the baseline.

Ligatures:

Two or more letters combined into one character make a ligature. In typography some ligatures represent specific sounds or words such as the AE or æ diphthong ligature. Other ligatures are primarily to make type more attractive on the page such as the fl and fi ligatures.

Type Measurement:

A common unit of measurement in typography. Em is traditionally defined as the width of the uppercase M in the current face and point size. It is more properly defined as simply the current point size. For example, in 12-point type, em is a distance of 12 points. em dash.

 

 

Adobe Caslon

Adobe Caslon Quick Facts

• Serif
• Designed by William Caslon I
• William Caslon I also designed:
• LTC Caslon
• ITC Caslon 224
• ITC Caslon 224 Black
• ITC Cason 224 Black Italic
• Caslon 3
• Caslon 540
• Caslon Black
• Adobe Caslon Bold
• Caslon Bold
• Caslon Classico
• Caslon Graphique 
• EF Caslon Graphique
• ITC Caslon No. 224
• Caslon Old Face
• Williams Caslon Text

• Caslon's earliest design dates to 1722
• Dutch Baroque type
•  Family Members
• Bold
• Regular
• Italic
• SemiBold
• Bold
• Bold Italic

Designspiration

 

Want more Viscom inspiration? 

Check out my pin board: http://www.pinterest.com/carolineheller/viscom/

5 Examples of Good Infographics

Behance

Check out my portfolio on Behance:  http://www.behance.net/carolineheller

Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli, January 10, 1931 – May 27, 2014, was and Italian designer who worked on an array of areas including, packaging design, houseware design, furniture design, public signage, and showroom design. He co-founded Vignelli Associates with his wife, Letta, and his personal motto was, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.”

Vignelli was a Modernist and his work reflected simplicity through geometric forms. He received numerous awards including nine Honorary Doctorates, an AIGA Gold Medal, the first Presidential Design Award, presented by President Ronald Regan, and the Visionary Award from the Museum of Art and Design, New York.

Max Bill

Max Bill, December 22, 1908 – December 9, 1994, was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer, and graphic designer. Bill was the most influential person on Swiss graphic design and was connected to the Modern Movement. He wanted to create art that represented the New Physics of the early 20^th century and create objects so that the new science could be understood in the form of art.

Paul Rand

Paul Rand, August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996, was an American art director and graphic designer, as well as one of the first American commercial artists to embrace the Swiss Style of graphic design. He was best known for his corporate logo designs for companies such as IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and Steve Jobs’s NeXT. He attended Pratt Institute, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Art Students League of Yale University. Rand was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972.

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold, April 2, 1902 – August 11, 1974, was a typographer, book designer, teacher, and writer. He converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 and became a leading advocate of modernist design. His most noted work Die neue Typographie was a manifest of modern design, which pushed only sans-serif typefaces. He also preferred non-centered design and advocated the use of standardized paper sizes for all print. He published a series of manuals on the principles of Modernist typography, which were influential in Germany. Later in life he moved towards Classicism and condemned Die nueue Typographie as too extreme and went as far as to condemned Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and fascistic.

Typefaces he designed include, Transit, Saskia, Zeus, and Sabon.

Piet Zwart

Piet Zwart, May 28, 1885 – September 24, 1977, was a Dutch photographer, typographer, and industrial designer. He was trained as an architect, but began graphic design projects when he was thirty-six. Although he had no formal training in typography he became a pioneer of modern typography and was well known due to his work for Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft and the Dutch Postal Telegraph and Telephone. His influences included Constructivism, Dada, and De Stijl. He was awarded the “Designer of the Century” award by the Association of Dutch Designers.

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister, co-founder of the design firm Sagmeister & Walsh Inc., was born on August 6, 1962 in Bergenz Australia. He is a New York based graphic designer and lettering artist and has designed album covers for artists such as Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith, and Pat Metheny. He has received two Grammies and won the National Design Award for Communications from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He has designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients such as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum, and Time Warner. His personal motto is “Design that needed guts fron the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.”

Matthew Carter

Matthew Carter is a typeface designer, born in London on October 1, 1937. He is the son of typographer Harry Carter and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and designed the famous 1.0 web fonts Veranda and Georgia. In 2010 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, also known as a “genius” grant.