Reading

Angie Taylor: Design Essentials


After looking a lot at text and typography, I read a chapter of Angie Taylor's Design Essentials about typography. Taylor says "One way you can make your designs stand out from the rest is by designing your own lettering". I agree with this. There are so many standard and instantly recognisable fonts on the computer, so to even have the slightest chance of standing out is to create a type font that is unique to your brand or company.

"Typography is the art of selecting typefaces, sizes, colors and textures, type elements on pages or screens, spacing, and alignment of words and letters."

Whilst reading about fonts downloadable from the Internet, Taylor reminds us that some fonts are not all complete, hence why they are normally free. A font is not just simply letters and numbers but are made up of characters such as punctuation marks, full stops, commas etc. She makes a valid point and I need to remember this when create text for my projects. I need to make sure that all necessary characters are included or else I will either have to combine to different font types which may not look very professional, or find and research a whole new font altogether.

Italic fonts are used when you want to highlight certain words or phrase from a block of text, as well as quotes and captions. They are slightly more curved and sloping, resembling handwriting. You can make any font italic, yet real typefaces normally have an italic font as part of the font 'family'. 

Taylor also talks about ligatures, a word I had never come across. Ligatures are when letters together clash and make "ugly shapes". For example, an f and an i when put together can look quite difficult to read (fi). That is why some packages that support ligatures have a custom made letter for when these classes arrive. I find that extremely interesting and something that I am going to look out for in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

On page 190, Taylor talks about the certain choices you have to make when deciding on a font face. Firstly, you have to be aware of it's cultural associations for example old style calligraphy fonts would resembles medieval times, as this is what they used to use. Secondly, fonts possess a certain personality. Taylor used the example of have the words "The Big Butch Gym" written in a pink and swirly decorative font. This does not represent it at all and unless she was trying to provoke a reaction or sense of irony, then this is the wrong font style to use.

Overall I have learnt that there are so many different aspects of font you need to take into account. I need to make sure that for my project I research thoroughly into different fonts and also to ask for people's feedback to make sure that the reaction I'm trying to get is right.