Archive for the ‘Books and Magazines’ Category
Contrast and Meaning in Web Design
Posted via web from ❁ vina ❁
Typographica
Making Geometric Type Work
For graphic designers beginning to experiment in type design, a geometric or modular typeface is a natural starting point. Illustrator and other programs offer a simple collection of elements such as circles, squares, and triangles which can be combined to create a passable alphabet. This is the same route I took when dissatisfied with the limits of commercial fonts at the time. I twisted and distorted each character to fit into a few simple, incredibly strict rules of construction. Invariably this produced a wide range of exotic letterforms, some more legible that others.
The intention of creating an entire alphabet from a few shapes is a design challenge — problem solving at its purest. For those with minimalist tendencies, the temptation is to strip away all the decoration and produce a simpler form. With software such as FontStruct and Font Constructor — which allow the user to quickly assemble a font from a set of geometric elements — this approach is now easier and more accessible than ever.
Luckily for those who make a career from type design, the Latin alphabet is not simply a collection of modular elements. A purely geometric solution in a short passage of text, with a certain combination of characters, may work, but once set in several lines of text the faults are much easier to spot. A typeface composed of strict geometric rules can lose subtle details and relationships between white space and stroke widths that have developed over centuries. Quirky characters that look great in isolation can snag the eye when repeated in a block of text.
Attempting to apply exactly the same set of rules to each letter is similar to handing out the same size clothes to a random selection of adults. Some will have excess baggy sleeves, others will be skin tight, and some will barely squeeze over their heads. To solve this problem the pattern has to be adjusted for each character, without losing sight of the overall design. As you make adjustments to the new characters, these changes echo back through the letterforms already designed. For example, if you started drawing a font created from a simple set of circles and lines, this may work perfectly for ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, but then throw in a ‘v’ or ‘z’, or even an ‘s’, and you meet a dilemma. Should the letter be squeezed into the current template or adjust the template for the new letters? It’s best to start with a group frequently used within the English language such as ‘a’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘n’, ‘p’ and ‘s’, and later try diagonals such as a ‘v’ or ‘x’ to test the design.
This is not an argument against all geometric or modular typefaces, but simply some guidance on how to make them more readable, work effectively and be visually consistent.
Balance
This is an example of a typeface created some years ago, based on a very strict grid of squares and circles. Many characters look quite presentable, but these few look particularly top heavy. Both counters of the ‘8’ are identical in size, but optically the top looks bigger. The ‘5’ has a squared-off counter on the top half, which creates larger area of white space than the bottom — making it look ridiculously unstable.
Widths
By cutting and pasting modular elements it’s common to make many characters the same width, but this creates widely different white spaces inside each character. Take the ‘b’ and ‘h’ for example — the squared-off counter of the h makes it appear much larger than the ‘b’s.
The Joins
At the point where two strokes meet or cross each other, the join is liable to “clog up”. A typical example above, shows a circle attached to a vertical line to create a ‘b’. A heavy area appears where the curve tries to pull away from the straight. By trimming a little from the inside, it pushes the curve down in the right direction.
The ‘S’
The ‘S’ is a difficult character to get right, it relies on a careful balance of two open counters both horizontally and vertically. The classic “cut and shut” technique of pushing two semi-circles together leaves a tell-tale kink in the middle. This meeting point has to carefully smoothed out to give the impression of one long stroke.
Stroke Widths
The horizontal and vertical strokes should not be the same thickness. If they are, the horizontal strokes will look heavier. An example above shows how a visually monolinear typeface such as Futura, has subtle adjustments to the horizontal strokes to make them appear even.
Overshoot
Unfortunately, lining up straight and curved edges using guidelines does not work. In the above example, the circle is the same height as the two squares, but appears to be significantly smaller. To compensate for this optical illusion, the curve needs to increase in size so it seems level with the horizontal lines.
Spacing
Spacing can be a huge challenge to those new to type design, and only gets easier with practice. The example above shows rounded and straight shapes, all equally spaced apart. However, the two squares appear much closer than the two rounded shapes. By adding extra space to the straight edges and less to the curved shapes a good balance can eventually be achieved.
These examples are only an outline of the issues you will face when designing type, but will draw your attention to the most common mistakes. A strict set of rules at the beginning can produce some very interesting ideas, but they need to be flexible. This will not only to make your type work better, but will help differentiate yours from the others being churned out every day. The simplest rule to remember is: trust your eye more than the grid.
Ian Moore works as a full-time graphic designer and in his spare time as a type designer for The Colour Grey. This is an updated version of an article originally posted on Design Assembly. It’s been re-edited and expanded for Typographica.
Fraktur Mon Amour, 2nd Edition
Posted: 07 Feb 2010 11:00 PM PST
Fraktur Mon Amour is the work of Judith Schalansky, written while she was a student of the Communication Design program in Potsdam. She developed a serious passion for blackletter and was disappointed to find all the reference books about this fascinating genre are very dated and often quite staid, and in many cases not easily available. Judith started to search for blackletter typefaces that are available in digital form. She soon discovered hundreds upon hundreds, lots of them being true creations of the digital age which haven’t been featured in a type book before. Hence, Judith compiled her own collection. The outcome was published by Hermann Schmidt Mainz in 2006. Now, a second, revised and enlarged edition is available.
The book’s design is exceptional: a massive black block from the outside, about 8 × 5 × 2 inch, more than 700 pages thick, with titles, edges and endpapers all colored in a loud pink! This “porn bible style”, as it was referred to, certainly is not to everyone’s taste. In an interview for Fontblog, Judith admits she herself was a bit shocked about her fetish book. “I was surprised how intense it turned out. Someone told me: ‘What you’re doing, that’s type sex’. He had a point.” Her chutzpah earned her a number of awards, including the TDC Award for Typographic Excellence.
The layout and the typography is more conventional: the accompanying texts are set very well in FF Profile. There’s an introduction with a brief history of the genre, some thoughts on its difficult image and its role today, plus a few descriptive words at the beginning of each chapter: Rotunda & Bastarda, Textura, Schwabacher, Fraktur, Decoratives & Initials, Modern, Contemporary, Display. All those texts are bilingual. The English translation was provided mainly by Jay Rutherford, a Canadian expat who is professor for typography at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar.
With as many as 333 featured typefaces — 64 of them newly added — it was a good idea to attach a triple index: by typeface name, designer, and foundry. The range is wide. Fraktur Mon Amour has the classics like Wittenberger, Goudy Text, Rudolf Koch’s Wilhelm-Klingspor-Gotisch; along with more contemporary faces like Lucida Blackletter, Letterror’s FF Brokenscript or San Marco by Karlgeorg Hoefer; as well as fresh additions including Blaktur, Fakir, and Darka. Several fonts debut exclusively in Fraktur Mon Amour, or, like Tim Ahrens’ Herb, haven’t officially been released yet.
The “Modern” chapter contains a number of entries that I wouldn’t classify as strictly blackletter: Eckmann, Fanfare, Banco. However, I think the inclusion of those “greyletter” designs is reasonable: the boundaries are not that sharp, especially when it comes to written forms. Large parts of “Contemporary” and “Display” aren’t worth a long look; dozens of grungy free fonts and PoMo exercises in deconstruction that I am honestly not that interested in. Then again, some intriguing insights into unexplored terrain: blackletter pixel fonts and textura FontStructions — modular renderings of medieval forms, not dusty reactionary but rather cutting-edge hipness. Two ribbon page markers help navigating the tome.
Each typeface is presented on a double page. The recto shows the character set; upper- and lowercase alphabet, umlauts, alternates and ligatures (if present), a few special characters including punctuation, and figures. In some cases, there’s an accompanying style; a bolder weight, a swash variant, or even an oblique. That secondary style is not shown in full, only a handful exemplary glyphs are included. Below, there are three lines of continuous text set in a smaller size, with the wording carefully adjusted from page to page, in order to integrate each typeface’s special features, like ligatures or matching Lombardic caps. The point size always is stated: the character set is shown at a size of 30 to 40pt, while the text settings vary from 9 to 14 pt. All in all, the specimens are pretty useful.
The verso is the playground. It is filled with a kaleidoscopic pattern made from repeating letters of the respective font. While that may look nice, those pink-and-black arabesques don’t make much for me. After having looked at the first twenty or thirty of those ornamental textures, the typographer in me wished that space had been used for something less contemplative and more useful: background information that goes beyond the minimum data — designer, foundry and year of release — like a list of significant usages, or specifications regarding the language support. On the other hand, I can understand that this rather pictorial half of the book, together with the unconventional color, helped to address a wider — and different — audience. Introducing novices to the beauty of blackletter and tempting them to take a closer look is not the worst goal to strive for, I guess.
The appendix, in turn, is very informative. Friedrich Forssman, author of Detailtypografie, explains all the ſpecial rules that need to be considered when typesetting blackletter text. Also, a few books are listed that invite further reading.
The book comes with a CD, packed with 150 fonts — often “free for personal use, not to be used commercially”. A great deal stems from Petra Heidorn’s, Manfred Klein’s, and Dieter Steffmann’s large collections — digitizations both of well-known classics and obscure display gems, of mixed quality. That doesn’t mean they’re all trash. Most of them can’t compete with the commercial offerings of professional foundries, and I won’t recommend using these fonts for an elaborate blackletter project. Still, it’s nice to see this digital addendum. Having access to these fonts helped me to quickly explain the differences of Schwabacher and Fraktur to my students. And the CD holds some really nice surprises in store, too: Georg Seifert’s attempt at a modernized-yet-unromanized Fraktur, RosenRot, and its monolinear companion Rostrot — to name but one example.
Blackletter is alive, and it ain’t a zombie. Fraktur Mon Amour is both a document and a promoter of this resurrection.
Posted via email from ❁ vina ❁
Inspirational Pagination: Magazine Layouts | Denis Designs
Posted via web from ❁ vina ❁
