Letterforms fit into a group of 6 materials of what they would have once been created with, these groups are as follows;
Stone- have an impact because they had to use serifs to neaten up the carved stone.
Sable- is a brush style font.
Bone- usually a quill, hard edge script font.
Wooden- hard straight edge letterform.
Cast lead- a whole range of typefaces.
Silicone- is what is used in chips for computers etc allowing digital fonts to be created.
Letterforms are what they are because of the materials. Originally form followed function as legibility was the key, but now both form and function coincide together. The driving forces in typography was the industrial revolution creating a global economy that drives mass communication.
We then rearranged our font groups into those 6 classifications;
We found this difficult because it's hard to distinguish which are silicone because many fonts are created digitally in the style of the other categories. There was correct and incorrect answers but the main aim of the task was to show that we understood the categories and had a basic idea of which was which.
We were then set a task to go away, swap our five fonts with a partner and to identify them using www.identifont.com, we must then come back with the correct fonts and detailed background history about one of the fonts.