Design Brief 1.0 : Getting Started

Following the reading of Lupton. Letter | Text | Grid and Type Workshop. Basics, I have a new vocabulary arsenal for decomposing and dissecting letters and typographical elements. Typography is a very visual material to work with. The harmony between characters, words, sentences, lines, etc. depends on a visual and imprecise art of placement. It may not help to calculate heights or widths while designing a font. They must be appealing optically. In previous design works, I have intuitively selected fonts and applied treatments without truly pausing to consider the meaning beaming through the typography. After reading these tutorials, I found myself more carefully observing many examples of typography all around me. I am reminded of parts of the Helvetica movie. Each letter building words directly influences the emotional response from the font used. Different words in a similar font will produce different experiences from the viewer. I will also try to avoid Type crime, especially new forms which I was unaware of (like negative tracking). Although I am ready to bet that with "good reason" all rules can be broken. With more experimentation, it will surely become more apparent how minute changes impact legibility and emotion.  

Building fonts will be a completely different experience. I will be thinking about individual characters as well as their multitude of possible combinations. I have learned a few shortcuts like inversing "n" to make "u" but there are many more adjustments to apply after that. I was also struck by the visible difference between fonts conceived for printing and those built for screen based presentation. I may have been under the impression that typography was simple because the alphabet contains only 26 letters. In fact, combinations including characters and fonts along with various treatments make this medium a powerful way to affect the message. 

Can you see the "P" in the image on the left?