Introduction to typography

In his book The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst introduces the creating of typography as an art: “The typographer's one essential task is to interpret and communicate the text. Its tone, its tempo, its logical structure, its physical size, all determine the possibilities of its typographic form. The typographer is to the text as the theatrical director to the script, or the musician to the score" (20). In the book Graphic Communications Today, William Ryan writes about typography: “The craft of typography is about making the complex clear and the uncomplicated interesting, all with an apparent effortlessness that is democratic in its presentation” (70). It's typography that brings all the elements of a graphic presentation together, as Robin Landa states in Thinking Creatively: New Ways to Unlock Your Visual Imagination. "One advantage of visual communication--graphic design, illustration and advertising--is that it combines visuals with words to convey a message. The two together relay a message greater than either one could do alone. Some designers call it synergy. Some simply call it good design" (42). These quotes show how typography is important and how it serves a valuable purpose in society.

In this first post I will give some introduction to typography.

For hundreds of years, type was set by hand. Compositors, or typesetters, picked out single characters and laid them out in galleys, one row at a time. Over the years, printers started using machines to set type. In the 1960s phototypesetters used film to print characters and now computers make typesetting quick and easy (Harrower 18).

There are thousands of types but there are some basic characteristics of each one. Years ago, type foundries would cast each typeface in a number of different sizes. The word to describe each size of type is called a font. Many fonts of one typeface make up a family, many of which include varying weights (lightface, regular, boldface) and styles (roman, italic, condensed). Most type families can be classified as being serif, having characters with tiny strokes at the tips, or sans serif, having characters without those strokes (Harrower 19). A common example of a serif type is Times Roman, and an example of a sans serif type is Futura. The red circles indicate the serifs.



Two styles of type, cursive and novelty, fall outside the classification of serif or sans serif. Cursive type looks like handwritten script, sometimes with the letters connecting and sometimes not. Novelty type is more dramatic and colorful. It can work well in small doses, like in headlines or ads, but it can be overused quickly. Here are three examples of novelty type.



To become well-versed in typography, it is important to learn to look all around you to see various examples of typography. "We should train ourselves to look at every form of graphic display, be it in stores, on billboards, in newspapers, magazines or books, and make a conscious and critical assessment of what we see" (March 12). It is also a good idea to travel with a pencil and paper to make note of what you see that interesting.

Image source 1: http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eolympics/banff/armenia/Typography-170_1.gif
Image source 2: http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eolympics/banff/armenia/Typography-131_1.gif