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TYPOGRAPHICAL PORTFOLIO

Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Summer Sixteen

An exploration of the history, usage & terminology used in the graphic arts.

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table of contents

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personal logo font library typographical terms character study logo design ubiquitous type sketchbook lyric poster MOMT poster pop!

font library Antonio Goudy Old Style Didot Helenic Bauhaus Bebas Neue 05

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typographical terms

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hairline rule A hairline rule is the thinnest graphic rule (line) printable on a specific output device.

cursive

distressed blackletter Distressed typefaces are made or processed in order to appear faded or wrinkled, as if from long, steady use.

An early, ornate, bold style of type, typically resembling Gothic.

This style of handwriting was most popular in the fifteenth century.

Cursive, also known as longhand, script, handwriting, looped writing, or running writing is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a flowing manner.

Tracking

Tracking refers to overall letter spacing. It refers to a consistent degree of increase (or sometimes decrease) of space between letters.

Dingbat The word Dingbat is used to describe certian fonts that have shapes and symbols in place of what would normally be letters and numbers.

Didone

Didone is a genre of serif typeface that is characterized by narrow and unbracketed serifs and the strong contrast between thick and thin lines.

Calligraphy

wood type Type made from wood. Formerly

Serif

REVERSED

Elegant handwriting, or the art of producing such handwriting.

In typeface design, a small, decorative stroke appearing at the ends of the main strokes that define a letter.

used for larger display sizes more than 1 inch where the weight of the metal made casting impractical.

Reversed type is type that is printed white on black, or light colored type against a darker colored background.

kerning The adjustment of horizontal space between pairs of characters to create a perception of uniformity; critical where large typefaces are used, as in headlines.

Geometric

Simple geometric shapes influence the construction of these typefaces. Strokes have the appearance of being strict monolines and character shapes are made up of geometric forms.

Slab Serif

A slab serif typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs.

Display

Display text is large or eye catching type used for headings or advertisements.

Swash

Typographical flourish on a glyph, like an exaggerated serif.

Oblique

A sloped typeface with a design that usually retains the basic roman letterforms, serving as a companion version of a roman typeface.

Decorative

Decorative typefaces are popular for signage, headlines and similar situations where a strong typographic statement is desired. Some decorative typefaces use unorthodox letter shapes and proportions to achieve distinctive and dramatic results.

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rop cap refers to a document style in which the first captial letter of a paragraph is set in a larger point size and aligned with the top of the first line. Used to indicate the start of a new section of text, such as a chapter.

Grotesque These are the most common sans-serif typefaces. They are relatively straight in appearance and have less line width variation than any other Humanist sans-serif typeface.

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character study

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Character study | The Letter Q

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or as long as there have been Qs, designers have been having fun with the letter’s tail. This opportunity for typographic playfulness may even date back to the Phoenicians: the original ancestor of our Q was called “ooph,” the Phoenician word for monkey. The ooph represented an emphatic guttural sound not found in English, or in any Indo-European language.

Most historians believe that the ooph, which also went by the name “gogh,” originated in the Phoenician language, with no lineage to previous written forms. Historians also believe that the character’s shape depicted the back view of a person’s head, with the tail representing the neck or throat. It’s possible, but if you consider that the letter’s name meant monkey, then perhaps the round part of the symbol represents another kind of backside, and the tail of what became our Q may have started out as, well, a tail.

The Greeks adopted the ooph, but found it difficult to pronounce, and changed it slightly to “koppa.” The Greeks also modified the design by stopping the vertical stroke, or tail, at the outside of the circle. The koppa, however, represented virtually the same sound as “kappa,” another Greek letter. One of them had to go, and koppa was ultimately the loser, perhaps because it had begun to look much like another Greek letter, the P. Unlike the Greeks, the Etruscans could live with the somewhat redundant nature of the koppa, and continued to use the letter. In fact, they had two other k-sound letters to contend with. The Romans elected to use all three signs when they adopted much of the Etruscan alphabet.

The first Roman Q had the Etruscan vertical tail, but over time it evolved into the graceful curved shape that cradles the U which usually follows it.

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Phoenician

early greek

Roman

Goudy Old Style Goudy Old Style is one of the most popular typefaces ever produced.

It was created by Frederic W. Goudy in 1915 on behalf of the American Type Founders. Goudy Old Style is characterized by it’s diamond shaped dots on the i, j and punctuation marks, and the uppercase Q’s calligraphic tail.

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CHARACTER STUDY || THE LETTER A

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o one knows why ‘A’ is the first letter of our alphabet. Some think it’s because this letter represents one of the most common vowel sounds in ancient languages of the western hemisphere. Other sources argue against this theory because there were no vowel sounds in the Phoenician language. (The Phoenician alphabet is generally thought to be the basis of the one we use today.)

No one also knows why the ‘A’ looks the way it does, but we can construct a fairly logical chain of events.

Some say the Phoenicians chose the head of an ox to represent the ‘A’ sound (for the Phoenicians, this was actually a glottal stop). The ox was a common, important animal to the Phoenicians. It was their main power source for heavy work. Oxen plowed the fields, harvested crops, and hauled food to market. Some sources also claim that the ox was often the main course at meals. A symbol for the ox would have been an important communication tool for the Phoenicians.

It somewhat naturally follows that an ox symbol would be the first letter of the alphabet.

The Phoenicians first drew the ox head ‘A’ as a ‘V’ with a crossbar to distinguish the horns from the face.

They called this letter “alef,” the Phoenician word for ox. Through centuries of writing (most of it quickly, with little care for maintaining detail) the alef evolved into a form that looked very different from the original ox head symbol. In fact, by the time it reached the Greeks in about 400 BC, it looked more like our modern ‘K’ than an ‘A’.

The Greeks further changed the alef. First, they rotated it 90° so that it pointed up; then they made the crossbar a sloping stroke. The Greeks also changed the letter name from alef to alpha. Finally, they made a horizontal stroke and the letter looked almost as it does today.

Ancient History

OX HEAD

PHOENICIAN ALEF

GREEK ALPHA

LATER GREEK ALPHA

The Romans received the Greek alphabet by way of the Etruscan traders of what is now northern Italy. While the Romans kept the design, they again changed the name of the first letter–this time to “ah.” The sound “ay,” our name for the ‘A,’ was not common to the Latin language.

The Roman capital letters have endured as the standard of proportion and dignity for 2,000 years.

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ROMAN AH

The History of Didot Didone types were developed by printers including Firmin Didot, Giambattista Bodoni and Justus Erich Walbaum, whose eponymous typefaces, Bodoni, Didot, and Walbaum, remain in use today. Their goals were to create more elegant, classical designs of printed text.

Developing the work of John Baskerville in Birmingham and Fournier in France towards a more extreme, precise design with intense precision and contrast. Showing off the increasingly refined printing and paper-making technologies of the period.

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Character Study

G

enerally speaking, there are no launch dates for the letters of our alphabet. For the most part they’ve come down to us through an evolutionary process, with shapes that developed slowly over a long period of time. The G, however, is an exception. In fact, our letter G made its official debut in 312 B.C. Of course, the story begins a bit earlier than that. The Phoenicians, and the other Semitic peoples of Syria, used a simple graphic form that looked roughly like an upside-down V to represent the consonant ‘g’ sound (as in “go”).

They named the form gimel, which was the Phoenician word for camel.

Some contend this was because the upside-down V looked like the hump of a camel.

The Greeks borrowed the basic Phoenician form and changed its name to gamma. They also made some dramatic changes to the letter’s appearance. At various times in ancient Greek history, the gamma looked like a one-sided arrow pointing up, an upsidedown L, or a crescent moon.

Throughout this time, however, the gamma always represented the same hard ‘g’ sound that it did for the Phoenicians.

The Greek form was adopted by the Etruscans and then by the Romans, where for many years it represented both the hard ‘k’ and ‘g’ sounds. This brings us to 312 B.C., when our modern G was formally introduced into the reformed Latin alphabet. The G was created to eliminate the confusion caused by

The Letter G

one letter representing two sounds.

The basic shape, which now looked like our C, was used to represent the palatalized sounds ‘s’ and ‘c,’ and a little bar was added to create the letter G, which denoted the guttural stop ‘g.’

The G took its position as the seventh letter of our alphabet, replacing the letter Z, which was considered superfluous for the writing of Latin. The ousted Z took its place at the end of the line.

ANCIENT HISTORY

PHOENICIAN

GREEK

GREEK

EARLY ROMAN

LATE ROMAN

Helenic

A very wide, mostly monolinear slab that was very common in the mid 20th century after releases by ATF and Bauer. Metal and wood precursors can be found back to the 1800s, including ATF’s Antique Extended.

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Character Study The Ampersand

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ooted in the Latin “et” (meaning “and”), the ampersand is a ligature composed from the letters “e” and “t”. The word “ampersand” itself is an alteration of “et per se and,” which became corrupted to “and per se and”, and finally “ampersand.”

The history of the ampersand dates back to 63 B.C.E., and was a commonly used character during the Incunabula. For example, a single page from a book printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499, has over 25 ampersands!

Today, however, the ampersand has relatively limited uses. The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t even address ampersands, except to say that it’s OK to spell them out at your own discretion, and the Associated Press Stylebook explicitly bans the ampersand from anything but a proper name or an abbreviation like “B&B” for “bed and breakfast.”

While playing fast and loose with ampersands isn’t a good idea, and client guidelines should always be respected, there are times when a little ampersand creativity can produce excellent typographic results.

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Bauhaus In 1925, Herbert Bayer was commissioned to design a typeface for all Bauhaus communications. Bauhaus was a school that existed in Germany during the lull between WWI and WWII. He used his approach to modern typography to create an “idealist typeface.” The result was “universal” - a simple, geometric sans-serif font.

Character Study The Letter O

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ome believe that our present O evolved from a Phoenician symbol; others vote for an even more ancient Egyptian heiroglyph as the source. The most fanciful explanation, though, is offered by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories. “How the Alphabet was Made” recounts how a Neolithic tribesman and his precocious daughter invent the alphabet by drawing pictures to represent sounds. After finishing the A and Y (inspired by the mouth and tail of a carp), the child, Taffy, asks her father to make another sound that she can translate into a picture.

The father’s sketch of the first O would serve perfectly well today, since round remains the defining property of the letter.

Actually, the O did start out as a drawing of something, but not an egg or a stone, or even a mouth. The true ancestor of our O was probably the symbol for an eye, complete with a center dot for the pupil.

The symbol for eye, “ayin” (pronounced “eye-in”) appears among the Phoenician and other Semitic languages around 1000 B.C. The Greeks adapted the ayin to their communication system and used it to represent the short vowel sound of ‘o.’ The Greeks also changed the name of the letter to Omicron. (The Omega is another Greek O, which they invented to represent the long ‘o’ sound.)

While the Phoenicians and the Greeks drew the letter as a true, nearly perfect circle, the Romans condensed the shape slightly to be more in keeping with their other monumental capitals.

ANCIENT HISTORY

PHOENICIAN EARLY GREEK LATE GREEK ROMAN

Bebas Neue Bebas Neue is a sans serif font family based on the original Bebas Neue font by Ryoichi Tsunekawa. It has grown in popularity and become something like the “Helvetica of the fonts”. Now the family has four new members – Thin, Light, Book, and Regular. The new weights stay true to the style and grace of Bebas with the familiar clean lines, elegant shapes, a blend of technical straightforwardness and simple warmth which make it uniformly proper for web, print, commerce and art.

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logo design

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ubiquitous type

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Typography thrives as a shared concern and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions. A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travellers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn.

The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the TYPOGRAPHY old, well-travelled IS THE CRAFT This book has roads at the core OF ENDOWING therefore grown of the tradition: HUMAN LANGUAGE into something paths that each WITH A DURABLE more than a of us is free to VISUAL FORM, short manual follow or not, and AND THUS WITH of typographic to enter and leave AN INDEPENDENT etiquette. It is when we choose EXISTENCE. the fruit of a lot - if only we know of long walks in the paths are there the wilderness of letters: in and have a sense of where they part a pocket field guide to lead. That freedom is denied to the living wonders that are us if the tradition is concealed found there, and in part a or left for dead. Originality meditation on the ecological is everywhere, but much principles, survival techniques, originality is blocked if the way and ethics that apply. The back to earlier discoveries is principles of typography as I cut or overgrown. If you use understand them are not a set this book as a guide, by all of dead conventions but the means leave the road when you tribal customs of the magic wish. That is precisely the use forest, where ancient voices of a road: to reach individually speak from all directions chosen points of departure. and new ones move to By all means break the rules, unremembered forms. and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That One question, nevertheless, is one of the ends for which has been often in my mind. they exist.

When all right-thinking human ypography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual sense and historical sense. The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its visual form are many and widespread. The history of letterforms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions and old books, but from others it is largely hidden.

beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exists for these commandments, suggestions, and instructions? Surely typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose.

Letterforms change constantly yet differ very little, because they are alive.

The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first books were printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used

by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens.

THE PRESENCE OF TYPOGRAPHY BOTH GOOD AND BAD, CAN BE SEEN EVERYWHERE. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made.

Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize, whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdom, typographers set for themselves than with the mutable or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less

sensuous anatomy of the human mind. I don’t like to call these principles universals, because they are largely unique to our species.

Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.

Its heartwood is calligraphy the dance, on a tiny stage, of it is true that typographer’s tools are presently changing with

considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium. I suppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, and true surprise.

sketchbook

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lyric poster

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MOMT poster

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hel ve tica

NEUE Helvetica Neue is a reworking of the widely used sans serif typeface Helvetica, which was originally designed by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger. Helvetica Neue is a more structurally unified set of heights and widths. It was developed at D. Stempel AG, Linotype’s daughter company. Other changes include improved legibility, heavier punctuation marks, and increased spacing in the numbers.

Helvetica Neue is a self-contained font family and today consists of 51 different font weights.

October 2, 2017 - March 25, 2017 221 S. Grand Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90012 // www.momt.com

MoMt museum of modern typography

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