Experiments in Typography
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Transcript of Experiments in Typography
Carrie Jordan
This book is an effort to seek a
deeper understanding of the world of
typography.
The experiments are designed to find
two typesfaces that are in harmony.
You may feel a spiritual change in your
life after reading this book. This is a
mystical experience, but it is not a
hallucination.
It’s all about EXPERIMENTING
ic
Table of Contents
Overlaying 3
Mixing fonts 5
Highs and lows 6
Line length 7
A Smokin’ New Typeface 8
All about Herman Zapf 9
My Groovy Self portrait 10
The Dove of Peace 11
A Hilarious Type Joke 12
1
M O H R (The most important word in learning about type)
~ M
~ O
~ H
~ R
M is the widest letter in the alphabet.
O is round on both sides and the axis can be straight or tilted.
H is wide and has strong verticals and horizontal lines.
R has round, straight, and diagonal aspects, as well as decorative elements.
2
HROM
OverlayingOverlaying
The bottoms of Optima have “bell bottoms.”
Lines in Optima are diagonal, as opposed to Palatino’s straight lines.
Palatino’s Rs (and Ps) do not connect, while Optima’s R does connect.
In this
experiment I placed
Palatino over Optima to find out
if the shapes of the letters were similar.
The white outline font is Palatino, while
the pink font is Optima. You can see that the
counters and shapes of the most important letters
of the alphabet in typography, MOHR, have have
almost the same overlap. One distinction is that
the axes on the Palatino Os are shifted to the
left while the axes on Optima are straight
up. The differences create compli-
mentary contrasts between the
types.
It’s all in the
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee FfGg Hh Ii Jj K k L lMm Nn Oo Pp QqRr Ss Tt Uu Vv WwXx Yy Z z
Notice the variations in details the letters for each type face.The differences create contrast.
4
My next experiment was mixing the Palatino and Optima fonts in a passage to find out if the difference affected readability. Upon testing my classmates, I found out that they did not notice the difference.
Yeah come on, flattophe come, movin’up slowlyhe gotjuju eyeballhe oneholy rollerhe got
over me.
hair down to his knees. Hold you in his armsyeahyou can feel his disease
right now
Here, I was interested in finding out if the ascenders and descenders of the letters are of equal length and shape. I did this by putting the letters side by side and making guide lines to check how large the counters were and if the ascenders and descenders extended the same lengths.
You can see that Optima letters are taller than Palatino, but the descenders are the same length. The counters in the different typefaces are very similar, but there are differences. For instance, the tails on the lower-case gs are different, and counters in Optima extend slightly past the line.
AaAa BbBb CcCc DdDd EeEe FfFf GgGg
OoOo PpPp QqQq RrRr SsSs TtTt UuUu
HhHh IiIi JjJj KkKk LlLl MmMm NnNn
VvVv WwWw XxXx YyYy ZzZz
the highest and lowest points
I think
are the most im
portant ones. Anything else is just...in betw
een. I want the
freedom to try everything. – Jim
Morrison
6
The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. The caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. Oh Juanita, I call your name. Oh, the snow will be a blinding sight to see as it lies on yonder hillside. The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is. Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
The ideal line length for Optima and Palatino is two columns in size 9 font. I discovered this by laying out a passage at a variety of line lengths and asking my classmates which was most readable. They chose the length of a two column grid.
The grid for this book is based on the ideal line length.
L
7
JustGroovePro
After studying typefaces as shapes, I wanted to create a typeface that looks like smokey shapes, like the smoke forms from incense. I set my typeface to the lyrics of this song to test readability, and asked my classmates if they could read the typeface with different blurs and shades of grey.
Hermy Zapf is a typographer
who lives in far-out Germany. He once
traveled to Florence, Italy and saw
lettering under a rainbow that spoke
to his soul. After that, he designed
Optima which is the typeface used
on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Wall, and celebrated his genius by
partying with Jimi, baby. The people dig
Palatino. It is one of the ten most-used
serif typefaces, based on the humanist
fonts of the Italian Renaissance, giving
it a calligraphic nature (that’s deep).
However, Zapf’s world is not always
peace and love forever. Zapf resigned
from the Association Typographique
Internationale because he viewed some
members’ unauthorized imitation of his
typeface as hypocritical.
Hermy’s love Children
11
gotta have the funk.
This exercise requires you to open your
mind, man. Each letter’s form has a
specific movement to convey the figure.
The fewer characters, the better. It’s the
gestures, man. . . the GESTURES.
Yeah.
I chose this representation of myself
because through the movement that the
letters create, you can feel the music
and recognize I am dancing. You dig?
A Portrait in Type
12
!f ?:V )
v
r ~yyf vjt= lo
<3 468
&
p b I/ /
V ! o/ /
V !
The dove has been a symbol of peace
since...forever.
This is the first psychadelic illustration I
created out of type. Several of the letters
are italicized because they look more
graceful and the curves are more pro-
nounced. The curvatures of the letters I
chose to incorporate in the illustration
portray the main gestures and grace of
the figure and the message.
Peace, man.
Peace typein
13
!f ?:V )
v
r ~yyf vjt= lo
<3 468
&
p b I/ /
V ! o/ /
V !
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas. –Bob Dylan
If so
meo
ne th
inks
that
love
and
pea
ce is
a cl
iche
that
mus
t hav
e been left behind in the sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal. –John L
enno
n
Music is a safe type of high. It’s more the way it was supposed to be. That’s where highness came from...It’s nothing
but
rhy
thm
and
mot
ion. –Jimi Hendrix
The sixties was one of the fi rst times the power of music was used by a generation to bind them together. –Neil Young
The sixties were an amazing time.
–Pete
r Max
They won’t give peace a chance; that was just a dream some of us had. –Joni M
itchell