Type Workshop 01

The first of the typography workshop sessions today was all about considerations that should be addressed before you even place anything on the page as well as during the design progress as an on-going awareness of the letter forms and how they affect the compositions readability.

The key aspects are as follows:

Size / Size
Weight / Weight
Serif / Sans Serif
UPPER CASE / lower case

The main thing that I took away from today was how these different considerations can alter the connotations of a letter form or word in regards to sound or temperament. Loud, soft, quiet or angry, happy, lonely for example.

Exercise 01: Lonely Dog.
To portray a lonely dog I used a light looking, sans serif typeface in lower case. The weighting was Roman and point size fairly small; 12pt I think. What's more I also placed the word in the bottom right-hand corner of the page as it's the last place you look when reading left to right as our culture does.

Exercise 02: Angry Dog.
To demonstrate an angry dog I used a bold and strong structured typeface that was of a large point size and in uppercase. I aimed to make it bigger than the actual size of the composition to give the impression that the 'dog' was close up and in your face with an attitude... I actually feel like a geek, but aspects such as these are crucial.

Anyway, thanks to a brief demonstration by Graham I was also educated in thinking about how a reader actually reads a document; something so straight forward it's easy to overlook. A magazine is held further away than a novel for instance and as a result different typographic decisions have to be made to compensate for this. The number of words on a line, the word alignment/justification... not to mention all of the above.

Such a headache, but I love it!

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