'Type is speech made visible' Through the industrial reveloution education became manditory and there became a need to read. Before this point in time there was no need to read type because of oral tradition, story tellers, town criers etc... Visual dynamics represent accents, tone, speed in which we speak. Different fonts have different characters to represent oral dynamics.
When asked to choose which font best suited the word crude the top left instantly stands out because a stencil is a crude and is used on crude materials such as oil cans, military trunks etc...
When asked which font suited the trainer, Arial italic is most suited as it shows movement which relates to movement of running as opposed to the static fonts. Type accompanied with an image is easier to reference and understand the interpretation of type.
When image, type and colour all come into play you find yourself associating colour with a style of shoe or gender. For example even though the two bottom fonts are the same red is associated with the stiletto because of femininity. The green font is more suited to the boots as it's a rugged bold font and the green relates to outdoors etc...
Vocabulary-
- Font
- Typeface
- Font family
- Weight
- Stroke
- Uppercase and Lowercase
- Tracking
- Kerning
- Serif
- Sans Serif
- Script
- Blackletter
- Display
- Monotype
- Symbol
Typeface- A collection of characters, letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation etc... that have the same distinct design.
Font- The physical means used to create a typeface, be it computer code, lithographic film, metal or woodcut.
Typeface is a group of fonts based around same font such as Helvetica Bold, Light etc... Individual fonts but collectively typeface.
An easy way to distinguish Helvetica from Arial is that Helvetica has a square full stop whereas Arial has a round full stop.
The difference between a font family and a type family is that a font family is the same font just different weights, whereas a type family is much more broader including italics.
Within a typeface you can have; Gothic, Block, Roman and Script.
- Gothic is a stripped down simple sans serif font
- Roman is a serif font
- Block is largely used for headlines and short sentences
- Script is a sweep of a brush or stroke of a quill
However there is a problem, it's possible to have block roman, block gothic or block italic meaning that block is a sub category, block is about the weight and usage.
What makes a font readable? Size, leading, counters, space in between and around help us identify letters. The eye creates letters from counters.
Legibility is the degree to which glyphs (individual characters) in text are understandable or recognisable based on appearance.
Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood. It is influenced by line length, primary/secondary leading, justification, typestyle, kerning, tracking, pt size etc... (tracking is spacing out letters, kerning is pushing closer)