I am really excited to start working on this chapter. Typography is something of an unexplored realm for me, and just doing the first reading of the chapter has cleared a lot of confusion for me. Just understanding the meaning behind “serif” and “sans-serif” and understanding how the point measurement works has helped tremendously. I cannot wait to learn more as this section progresses!

Exercise one recommends that I find as many fonts as possible and categorize them in at least two sections: serif and sans-serif. I have done this by going through almost all of the fonts I have in Photoshop. Some of these fonts came with the program, some I have gathered throughout the years, and some of the fonts were mentioned in the OCA book. However, I have created more than the serif and sans-serif categories. I wanted to have these pages for reference whenever I needed a new font, and I thought it would be useful to also have a “script” category, a “text letter” category and a “decorative type” category.

Out of each of these categories, I chose one typeface to put in different contexts in order to see where certain typefaces work and where they don’t. For each font, I chose a context which I thought appropriate, then used all the fonts in that same context. These were all achieved in Photoshop.

Serif

Sans-serif

Script

Text Letters

Decorative Type

Didot (created by Firmin Didot, 1784-1811) is a typeface often associated with magazines and luxury, partly because of its sharp angles and high-contrasting line variation, and partly because it has been used by Vogue since 1955. It considered one of the most luxurious fonts in use.

I am not entirely sure luxurious is the word I would use, but I cannot deny that it is elegant in its simplicity. Even the entirely unplanned page of text I have created somehow looks like it has a good direction to go when this font is used. Though I have used the same font both for the titles and the text. This was purely for experimental reasons, and not something I would normally do. The text reads well enough, but I wouldn’t do this again for the sake of variety. I would use a sans-serif for the text instead.

Every other font does not really work, however. The one that is still readable is the Museo Sans, but while it doesn’t look bad, it looks out of place. I made a note on the page that it looks more suited for a technology ad or something regarding cars or perhaps modern architecture. In comparison with the Didot, the Museo looks a bit cold. The other fonts are not really readable when in large swathes of text. They can look interesting as a texture, but they are barely comprehensible. The Brotherhood Script looks like a letter, the Colchester looks like an excerpt from an illuminated document, and the Gust looks like cuneiform. Therefore all of them are better suited for large, single letter or single phrase situations.

After the impression the Museo gave me on the magazine cover, I decided to make a technology advertisement with it. The very simple, very thin type lends itself well to the subject.

The others did not fare well at all. The Didot looks ok but out of place or perhaps amateurish, while the rest look bad to a degree that they seem sarcastic.

The Colchester seemed well-suited for a museum gala invitation. I chose to only use the font for the more essential text and use a simpler one for the rest. The magazine experiment did not need repeating. The Colchester looks appropriate if somewhat busy on the card. The same can be said for the use of the Gust font. The rest do not look inappropriate, just boring.

Script fonts are probably best used when mimicking handwriting, so I made a thank you card with the Brotherhood Script. Unlike the advertisement of the magazine article, these all look presentable. Though the Museo card might look a little lazy.

This is an interesting case. I originally chose a menu for the Gust because the brushwork texture of the font made me think of restaurant logos, but in the end all the fonts ended up looking very nice. I might even like the Museo menu the best, despite the fact that back at the beginning of the exercise I classified it as cold and best suited for a technology advertisement.

After experimenting with the fonts digitally, I printed out the pages I created and started to trace the letters in order to get a better feel for how the strokes were made and how the fonts were constructed. I also looked up diagrams on the internet similar to the one in the book on the anatomy of typeface in order to find more terms related to typography, then I labeled some of the parts I wanted to remember.

Lastly, I gathered all the material I have created and printed into a small folder in order to have an easy reference point for whenever I am creating something that involves type. I have learned that while type can be meant for very specific tasks (Didot for magazines and such) it can also can be experimented with in different contexts that I would not have used it in originally.

The Golden Section or the golden ratio, discovered by the mathematician Euclid, is a specific ratio between multiple objects or shapes that is said to be found in nature (honeycombs, the human body, nautilus shells, etc.) and in structures created long before the ratio’s discovery 2,300 years ago (Stonehenge).

More importantly, it has been used by great artists such as Da Vinci, it has been used in architecture and in book design. Jan Tschichold says: “There was a time when deviations from the truly beautiful page proportions 2:3, 1:√3, and the Golden Section were rare. Many books produced between 1550 and 1770 show these proportions exactly, to within half a millimeter.”

It is considered to be a perfect set of proportions, or if not perfect at least the most aesthetically pleasing to the human eye.  This claim has been questioned and there is evidence on both sides of the argument. Some consider the golden ratio to be the epitome of design principles, while others find it overrated and the evidence supporting it biased. The truth probably sits somewhere in the middle. The golden section is a useful tool to be employed not religiously but wisely to whatever the brief of the project requires. If the golden ratio would be superfluous or if it would overcomplicate the design then the designer need not bend over to adhere to it, but if the design can benefit then it should be employed.

Jan Tschichold holds a similar view in his Canons of Page Construction when he says that he had encountered medieval manuscripts which employ the golden section but “While beautiful it would hardly be useful today.” Instead he maintains that a 2:3 proportion used by Rosarivo is  “the Golden Canon of book page construction as it was used during the late Gothic times by the finest scribes.”

Raul Rosarivo was an Argentinian typographer well known for his analysis of Renaissance-era books. Upon researching, he determined that those scribes used the “secret number” 2:3 to create the layout of a page of a book.

Again quoting Tschichold, who states things in the clearest manner:

“In figure 5 the height of the type area equals the width of the page: using a page proportion of 2:3, a condition for this canon, we get one-ninth of the paper width for the inner margin, two-ninths for the outer or fore-edge margin, one-ninth of the paper height for the top, and two-ninths for the bottom margin. Type area and paper size are of equal proportions. … What I uncovered as the canon of the manuscript writers, Raul Rosarivo proved to have been Gutenberg’s canon as well. He finds the size and position of the type area by dividing the page diagonal into ninths.”

To analyze double-page spreads, I first gathered images of spreads on Pinterest. I collected images of magazines, books, children’s books, newspapers, etc. Some are conventional and some are creative. Some keep within the boundaries of a grid, creating a balanced, conventional outcome. Others break the rules by introducing type slanted in odd angles, or by changing the font, by arranging the text to create a shape across both pages, by leaving a lot of white space, by dominating the entire page with just a few letters that don’t even fit, etc.

I have also photographed a few spreads from my own books.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

Contrapunctul Tratat de polifonie vocală clasică, de Knud Jeppesen Editura Muzicală a Uniunii Compozitorilor din Republica Socialistă România, publicat la București 1967

Study Bible

Color Choices by Stephen Quiller

Teoria superiorara a muzicii Vol. 1 Sisteme tonale (Editura Media Musica 2001) Constantin Rîpā

Traffic law book

For further analysis, I measured and copied and/or traced two of the spreads used in these books. First, I traced the  Good Omens  book because it is a novel with a very standard and pleasing design, and i thought I would start with something easy. Second, I wanted to try out something with images so I also traced teh  Color Choices  spread. The proporitons for both are interesting to note.

Good Omens  sports very even margins the difference between the inner margin (1.5 cm) the outer margin (1.6 cm) and the top (1.4 cm) is extremely small, while the bottom margin measures 2 cm precisely. The wide bottom margin is consistent with what I learned from researching book layouts.

This cannot be said for the Color Choices book, however. The bottom margin (1.5 cm) is equal to the inner margin and smaller than the outer (1.7), while the top margin (2.5 cm) is significantly taller if one ignores the title at the top which is only 8 mm away from the end of the page.

Good Omens

Color Choices

Now that I had traced my layouts on paper, I had to start familiarizing myself with a digital tool that would allow me to create the spreads. I uploaded Adobe InDesign from the Cloud and tried to figure out how the program worked.

For further experimentation with typography, I was assigned a short section of text from the beginning of Verne’s  20 000 Leagues Under the Sea. With this text, I tried to re-imagine the design of both the layout and fonts in order to further enhance the experience of the reader.

I started out by simply writing the text out on paper in order to get a feel for the words and the flow of it. While copying down the text, I emphasized words which I perceived as important. Next, I started playing around with the layout of the sentences and the words, separating them into different paragraphs or putting more space between them than normally necessary in order to further emphasize an idea or imaginary “voice” of the text.

Then I did the same thing in Photoshop (not a DTP software quite yet, I felt I had more creative freedom with this program instead). I started out by typing in the text as it was, both in landscape and in portrait layouts. Then I got more creative with it. Again, I separated the text into smaller phrases (without changing the punctuation) in order to further emphasize the theatricality of the “voice”. For the same reason, I also changed around the fonts of certain words as well as their size. For words such as ‘rapid’ or ‘long’, I used fonts that I felt emphasized the meaning of those words. I also noticed that at the beginning of both paragraphs, there is a reference to time “The year 1866 was…” and “For some time past…”. Since they were markers of the start of each paragraph, I emphasized both of them with a text letter fonts. I used text letters because they were often used in older books in the first letter of a chapter to mark it. These emphasized words came and went as I tried different layouts and different versions of the design. I ended up blending in many of them with the rest of the text because the emphasis tended to loose its meaning if there were to many words emphasized, but there were some I kept to the end.

One of my favorite ideas was to emphasize the phrase “an enormous thing”. These words had a lot of theatrical potential if read aloud. At first, I simply made the text very large in comparison with the rest, but when reading the text I always imagined a dramatic pause before the them. To achieve this effect, I decided to put them on a different page entirely, on their own. This both created that imaginary cliffhanger before turning the page, and emphasized the meaning of the word “enormous” since it would veritably take over the page.

I experimented with separating the text in different ways in order to change the way it was read or the way it sat on the page. The most obvious thing was the two paragraphs and the fact that they both started with a reference to time, but there was also the fact that both paragraphs contained some sort of list: the first of people interested in the matter at hand and the second of characteristics of the “beast”.  The thing bridging the two was precisely the “an enormous thing” phrase, which was brilliant structurally because it could be a sort of climax in the story, while the two paragraphs could be the content at the beginning and end. The first sentence served well enough as an introduction, but the last sentence of the text was slightly questionable as a ending. “If it was a whale, it surpassed in size all those hitherto classified in science.” I tried to make it fit better by emphasizing the word “If”. I imagined it would read more like a dramatic statement encouraging the reader to question the text and creating a sort of cliffhanger, instead of just ending the “book” with a random sentence.

I also tired my hand at using only typography to make an interesting design for the title of the book, which would be the only design on the cover.

After I had these initial concepts, I printed them out and started developing and critiquing them on paper. I took note of how the text looked and how I would have preferred to read it. I rearranged the text and crossed out what I felt were unnecessary separations. This is also when I came up with the ideas for the title page.

In the end, what I did was I designed it like a little book. Many of the initial ideas were on a single page, but the “an enormous thing” concept made me want to design the text in a little book form. So I separated the text I had into different sections and put each section on its own page: the front cover, which held the title of the book, the first page with the title of the chapter, the introduction with a the first sentence of the text, the third with most of the first half of the text, the words “an enormous thing” on their own, then the last half of the text, and on the very last page the last sentence of the text to serve as an ending.

I discarded a few of my ideas, such as separating the words in small sections like poetry, and instead just kept the text in a more book-like format, only separating into small paragraphs instead of sections of just a couple of words.

I edited the little book in InDesign, which was a challenge, but was interesting to do nonetheless. Pagination was a small adventure. Lastly I printed it out, cut the sheets to the appropriate size and bound them with string.

The final result is kind of cute, if not perfect. I might have not thought out the margins too well, but the text mostly lines up despite the unorthodox nature of the fonts and sizes, so I can say that I am happy with the final result.