TYPOGRAPHY - IAM

Historic Milestones in Typography
Blackletter
The Middle Ages: very little white space and difficult to read
Humanist or Venetian
15th century, lighter than blackletter with more open forms
Old Style or Garalde
16th and 17th century with larger variations of stroke width;
Aldus Manutius creates italic type
Transitional or Neoclassical
18th century, the first that did not reproduce handwritten script; greater thick
and thin stroke width
Modern or Diodone
Late 18th century, extreme contrast in stroke width, known for elegance and still used in
high-end publications as headings – not for running copy
Slab Serif, Square Serif or Mechanical
Late 18th century, used with advertisements and headings on posters and billboards
Modern Art Periods and Typography
Staatliches Bauhaus - The Bauhaus
Staatliches Bauhaus, more commonly known as Bauhaus,
was the influential art and architecture school founded
in Germany in 1919.
Bauhaus became most influential on schools of thought
in regard to typography, modern design, art, architecture
and interior design. With the belief that artistic
forms should be united, practise crafts should be promoted,
and all should contribute to a utopian whole.
Typography played a large role in the Bauhaus movement,
with many important and famous typefaces
finding their roots there: Kombinationsschrift (Joseph
Albers), Futura (Paul Renner), Super Grotesk (Arno
Drescher) and Universal (Herbert Bayer).
TYPOGRAPHY
Early 20th Century
Futurists: Often used text that had no meaning, influenced by cubists
Russian Constructivists: Used a variety of sans serif type in posters
De Stijl Movement: Stripped away the decoration, used geometric shapes and blocky sans
serif fonts
The Bauhaus School and Their motto: Form follows function. Type is stripped of
decorative elements; lowercase lettering is favored and asymmetrical balance becomes a central
feature in design composition.
Bauhaus typography was typically unadorned and clean. They believed: “Typography is an
instrument of communication. It must present precise information in a suggestive form… For
legibility, the message must never suffer from a priori aesthetics.”
Contemporary: Styles borrowed from the past, reinvented using electronic manipulation;
free fonts are available for download or creation with simple computer graphic tools, new approaches
include grunge, cannibalism and distortion using filters.
Bauhaus: The Founders of Modern Design
and Page
Layout
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A Brief History of Type
Bauhaus Master Instructors
1926
From left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk
Scheper, Georg Muche, László
Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost
Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel
Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee,
Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and
Oskar Schlemmer.

Type Categories Type Relationships Type Contrasts and
Terms
Oldstyle
A serif group based on hand lettering, works
well with large areas of printed text
Modern
Influenced by the Industrial Revolution and
Mechanical Age; advances in advertising. Serifs
are horizontal and very thin. Best in large sizes
for headings and titles. Very low legibility.
Slab Serif
Thick throughout the letter form, easy to see
from afar, on posters, readable for smaller areas
of text with wide leading and often used
for children’s books
Sans Serif
No serifs, come in a variety of different
weights (bold, regular, thin, etc), Easier to read
on screens for large areas of text.
Script
Resembles hand writing where letters connect;
like cursive writing. Not good for large
areas of text, best for small areas of text, logos
or large accents.
Decorative
Fun, distinctive, are best in small quantities and
work great for headlines and small accents.
Some look really awful no matter what!
Concordant
When you only use one type family without
much variation – a safe mix—but can be a bit
dull
Conflicting
When you use different typefaces that are too
similar in size, style, etc. Usually not a good
direction in typography
Contrasting
Using completely different typefaces, which
can be exciting and is a good direction in typography.
NEVER USE MORE THAN THREE
PER PAGE!
Type Spacing
Leading
The horizontal space between one line of text
and the next
Kerning
The space between two letters
Tracking
The spacing across a whole string of letters,
used for decorative purposes
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Size
Obvious differences in the font size or the use
of large areas of white space
Weight or Style
Thickness of stroke. Some examples include
regular, bold, semibold, extra bold, light, etc.
Using contrasting weights makes a page more
attractive and helps organize content.
Structure
The design of the typeface, such as stroke
width, serif thickness, distance between letters
Form
Refers to how a letter is shaped, such as the
difference between upper case and lower case
of the same typeface
Direction
Refers to the diagonal slant or vertical direction
of the counters.
Type
A printed character or printed characters; an
element in design.
Typeface
The style or design of a font.

Sans Serif History
Egyptian
The term was first used by Joseph Farington
after seeing the sans serif inscription on John
Flaxman’s memorial to Isaac Hawkins Brown
in 1805, although today the term is commonly
used to refer to slab serif, not sans serif.
Antique
In about 1817, the Figgins foundry in London
made a type with square or slab-serifs which
it called ‘Antique’, and that name was adopted
by most of the British and US typefounders.
An exception was the typefounder Thorne,
who confused things by marketing his Antique
under the name ‘Egyptian’. In France it became
Egyptienne, and to worsen the confusion, the
French called sans-serif type ‘Antique’. Some
fonts, such as Antique Olive, still carry the
name.
Grotesque
It was originally coined by William Thorowgood
of Fann Street Foundry, the first person
to produce a sans-serif type with lower case,
in 1832. The name came from the Italian word
‘grottesco’, meaning ‘belonging to the cave’.
In Germany, the name became Grotesk. German
typefounders adopted the term from the
nomenclature of Fann Street Foundry, which
took on the meaning of cave (or grotto) art.
Nevertheless, some explained the term was
derived from the surprising response from
the typographers.
Doric
It was the term first used by H. W. Caslon
Foundry in Chiswell Street in 1870 to describe
various sans-serif fonts at a time the
generic name ‘sans-serif’ was commonly accepted.
Eventually the foundry used Sans-serif
in 1906. At that time, Doric referred to a certain
kind of stressed sans-serif types.
Gothic
Not to be confused with blackletter typeface,
the term was used mainly by American type
founders.The term probably derived from
the architectural definition, which is neither
Greek or Roman;and from the extended adjective
term of ‘Germany’, which was the place
where sans-serif typefaces became popular in
19th to 20th century.[13] Early adopters for
the term includes Miller & Richard (1863), J.
& R. M. Wood (1865), Lothian, Conner, Bruce
McKellar. Although the usage is now rare in
the English-speaking world, the term is commonly
used in Japan and South Korea.
Classification
For the purposes of type classification, sansserif
designs can be divided into four major
groups:
Grotesque
Early sans-serif designs, such as Grotesque,
Akzidenz Grotesk, and Franklin Gothic.
Digital Types
of Fonts
Postscript Type 1
Developed by Adobe, these consist of a printer
or outline font, a screen or bitmap font, and
usually a font metrics file (.afm). Type 1 fonts
are considered the high-quality standard for
years, although OpenType is changing that.
TrueType
Developed by Apple and MicroSoft, TrueType
was to replace Type1 font standards.
TrueType consists of a single file and more
commonly used on Windows computers.
Multiple Master
Developed by Adobe, Multiple Master fonts
were intended to give the designer creative
freedom to scale fonts to custom widths and
weights. They are similar to Type 1 fonts.
Adobe no longer supports these fonts.
OpenType
Developed by Adobe and MicroSoft, Open-
Type is a universal font format that includes
the benefits of Type 1 fonts and TrueType font
technologies. It is Unicode compliant, is crossplatform,
and consists of a single font file.
Neo-grotesque or Transitional
or Realist
Modern designs such as Standard, Bell Centennial,
MS Sans Serif, Helvetica, Univers,
Highway Gothic, and Arial. These are the most
common sans-serif fonts. They are relatively
straight in appearance and have less line width
variation than Humanist sans-serif typefaces.
Transitional sans-serif is sometimes called
“anonymous sans-serif” due to its relatively
plain appearance.
Humanist
Calibri, Johnston, Lucida Grande, Segoe UI, Gill
Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma,
Verdana and Optima. These are the most calligraphic
of the sans-serif typefaces, with some
variation in line width and more legibility than
other sans-serif fonts.
Geometric
Futura, ITC Avant Garde, Century Gothic,
Gotham, or Spartan. As their name suggests,
Geometric sans-serif typefaces are based on
geometric shapes. Note the optically circular
letter “O” and the simple construction of
the lowercase letter “a”. Geometric sans-serif
fonts have a very modern look and feel. Of
these four categories, geometric fonts tend to
be the least useful for body text.
Note that in some sans-serif fonts, such as
Arial, the capital-i and lowercase-L appear
identical. Verdana, however, keeps them distinct
because Verdana’s capital-i, as an exception,
has serifs. Other fonts may have two
horizontal bars on the capital-i, a curved tail
on the lowercase-L, or both.
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For Your
Viewers
Legibility
How easy it is to distinguish one letter
from another in a particular typeface.
• Doesn’t call too much attention to
itself
• Has good contrast
• Has a larger x-height and little
variation in stroke width
• Has easy to recognize characteristics
• Isn’t too bold or light
• Does not use all caps or caps on each
word in a headline
Readability
The ease with which a reader can scan
over paragraphs of type.
• Line lengths
• Point size
• Leading
• Typeface selection
• Type alignment
• Background content
British Standards
classification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox-ATypI_classification
(scroll down for examples)
Grotesque
Lineale typefaces with 19th century origins.
There is some contrast in thickness of strokes.
They have squareness of curve, and curling
close-set jaws. The R usually has a curled leg
and the G is spurred. The ends of the curved
strokes are usually horizontal. Examples include
Stephenson Blake Grotesque No. 6,
Condensed Sans No. 7, Monotype Headline
Bold.
Neo-grotesque
Lineale typefaces derived from the grotesque.
They have less stroke contrast and are more
regular in design. The jaws are more open
than in the true grotesque and the g is often
open-tailed. The ends of the curved strokes
are usually oblique. Examples include Edel/
Wotan, Univers, Helvetica.
Geometric
Lineale typefaces constructed on simple geometric
shapes, circle or rectangle. Usually
monoline, and often with single-storey a. Examples
include Futura, Erbar, Eurostile.
Humanist
Lineale typefaces based on the proportions of
inscriptional Roman capitals and Humanist or
Garalde lower-case, rather than on early grotesques.
They have some stroke contrast, with
two-storey a and g. Examples include Optima,
Gill Sans, Pascal.