Monday, November 2, 2015

Type Setting Lecture Notes

Typesetting lecture 2/11/15

‘The grid represents the basic structure of our graphic design, it helps organise content, provides consistency, gives an orderly look, and projects a level of intellectual elegance that we like to express.
– Vignelli, 2010

The more columns the more flexible the grid is.

The grid is always informed by certain design decisions.

Legibility:  The quality of being clear enough to read.

‘Line lengths that contain 45-65 characters are legible… Line lengths exceeding these limits, challenge legibility’.
– Fassett’s theorem of legible line length.

Main factors that affect legibility:

-typeface
-serif or sans
- X height

Readability: The ease with which a reader can understand a written text.

The way in which words and blocks of type are arranged in a layout.

-tracking/kerning
-leading/line height
-type size
-contrast
-hierarchy

Type size
No more than two type sizes on a page but there are exceptions.

Alignment
“It is important to control the shape of the rugged side by shifting sometimes the text from line to line in order to obtain a better profile. This maybe time consuming but aesthetically rewarding.”
-Vignelli, 201

In typography, “rag” refers to the irregular or uneven vertical margin of a block of type. Usually it’s the right margin that’s ragged (as in the flush left/rag right setting), but either or both margins can be ragged.

Main types of alignment:

Flush left: usually leaves a very uneven rag on the right hand side when not edited by soft return or manually tracking.

Centred: Very difficult to read and tiring on the eye.

Justified: Eyes very quickly realise that lines start and end in the same place however, you are left with something called rivers. Rivers are lines that appear when you adjust a body of text. These appear because there are massive gaps between certain words.

Orphans and widows.

A widow is a very short line, usually one word, or the end of a hyphenated word at the end of a paragraph or column. A widow is considered poor typography as it leaves too much white space, interrupting the reader’s eye and diminishes readability. Fix them by reworking the rag or editing the copy.

An orphan is a single word, part of a word or very short line, except it appears at the beginning of a column or a page. This results in poor horizontal alignment at the top of the column or page. The term “orphan” is not as commonly used as “widow,” but the concept is the same, and so is the solution: fix it!

Opinions

“I don’t think type should be expressive at all. I can write the word dog…and it doesn't have to look like a dog. But there are people that [think that] when they write ‘dog’ it should bark” – Vignelli, 2010

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