Font – CortexFachada

07 Sep 2015

Typography matters

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed.

The arrangement of type involves selecting specific typefaces, point size, line length, line-spacing (leading), letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space within letters pairs (kerning).

Typography is the work of typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, manga artists, comic book artists, web designers, graffiti artists, and now—anyone who arranges words, letters, numbers, and symbols for publication – from clerical workers and newsletter writers to anyone self-publishing materials.

The current era of logo design began in the 1870s with the first abstract logo, the Bass red triangle. As of 2014 many corporations, products, brands, services, agencies and other entities use an ideogram (sign, icon) or an emblem (symbol) or a combination of sign and emblem as a logo.

As a result, only a few of the thousands of ideograms in circulation are recognizable without a name. An effective logo may consist of both an ideogram and the company name (logotype) to emphasize the name over the graphic, and employ a unique design via the use of letters, colors, and additional graphic elements.

Ideograms and symbols may be more effective than written names (logotypes), especially for logos translated into many alphabets in increasingly globalized markets.

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.

Howard Schultz

Designing a good logo may require involvement from the marketing team and the design agency (if the process is outsourced), or graphic design contest platform (if it is crowdsourced). It requires a clear idea about the concept and values of the brand as well as understanding of the consumer or target group.

Broad steps in the logo design process might be formulating the concept, doing an initial design, finalizing the logo concept, deciding the theme colors and format involved.

Principles of craft

Legibility is primarily the concern of the typeface designer, to ensure that each individual character or glyph is unambiguous and distinguishable from all other characters in the typeface. In part, legibility also is an aspect of concern for the typographer to assure selection of a typeface with appropriate clarity of design for the intended use at the intended size.

Selection of case, upper, called also capitals, or lower, severely influences the legibility of typography because using all-caps or upper case letters, significantly reduces legibility.

Legibility refers to perception and readability refers to comprehension understanding the meaning. Good typographers and graphic designers aim to achieve excellence in both. Some commonly findings of legibility research include:

Text set in lower case is more legible than text set all in upper case: capitals or all-caps.
Extenders – ascenders, descenders and other projecting parts – increase salience or prominence.
Regular upright type – roman type – is found to be more legible than italic type.

Studies of both legibility and readability have examined a wide range of factors including type size and type design. For example, comparing serif vs. sans-serif type, roman type vs. oblique type, and italic type, line length, line spacing, color contrast, the design of right-hand edge (for example, justification, straight right hand edge) vs. ragged right, and whether text is hyphenated.

A legible typeface can become unreadable through poor setting and placement, just as a less legible typeface can be made more readable through good design.

06 Apr 2015

Print Typography

As human societies emerged, the develop of writing was driven by pragmatic exigencies such as exchanging information, maintain codifying laws and record history.

In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language. Writing is not a language but a form of technology.Within a language system, writing relies on many of the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar and semantics, with the added dependency of a system of signs or symbols, usually in the form of a formal alphabet. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader.

Alphabets

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation.

Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order.

It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of “numbering” ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum.

The term “alphabet” is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense.

Etymology

The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek (alphabētos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and originally meant ox and house respectively.

Informally the term “ABCs” is sometimes used for the alphabet as in the alphabet song, and knowing one’s ABCs for literacy, or as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order.

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, educate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art.

James Felici

Another terminology is that of deep and shallow orthographies, where the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic

In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme.

This would mean that the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation; and conversely that a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt.

This ideal situation is rarely if ever achieved in practice – it seems that nearly all alphabetic orthographies deviate from it to some degree or other.