“No, no, no...the letter A is too far away from the letter R!” I didn’t feel comfortable with the unbalanced spacing of the letters when I looked at the logo “PRO ART” on my exercise book. I am not usually frustrated by these kinds of things before. However, after attending the Typography class this quarter, I have learned more about types and became more critical when it comes to typography.
Typography is the art and technique of arranging, designing and modifying types. It plays an important role in graphic design and is an essential skill for every designer. We can find typography everywhere in our life. But have you noticed that every element of a type, including font, size, color, spacing, angle, etc. is used for a reason?
In the first Typography lesson, the instructor, Irene, told us the history and traditional technique of typography. Listening to the evolution of typography, and all the weird typographical terminology, like upper case, lower case, leading, etc. suddenly made sense.
In the class, I also explored typeface anatomy. I never imaged that even a simple letter would consist of so many parts, like serif, crossbar, bracket, counter, ear, bowl, loop, hairline, etc. In order to understand the characteristics of different fonts better, Irene taught us how to trace different fonts with markers and tracing paper. It was fun to experiment with the most traditional method of creating and modifying fonts. Nowadays, even though there are so many advanced designing programs, tracing by hand is still the major method for designing and modifying fonts.
I had a lot of fun with my first kerning and tracing assignment. I look forward to my next lesson.
