Sketchbook Lecture and Demo

Title

Typography journal

Goal

Great typography is everywhere. This project will force you to find it in your everyday life.

Description

Over the course of the semester, you will collect samples of typography. You may sketch, photograph, cut items from magazines, find scraps of paper on the street, or cut out bits of packaging. Web typography is OK if it is really good-remember though, its low resolution will yield poor printouts.

Directions

Create a two-inch-square sample of each specimen that you find. (Making a viewfinder will help you frame your samples nicely as well as cut them out without measuring.) Arrange your specimens in a simple grid (2 columns, 4 rows, all cells touching.) Complete 8 entries by end of semester.

Due

Finals Week

• http://ilovetypography.com/
• http://typophile.com/

Classwork: Design a page using Lorem Ipsum that demonstrates the following concepts: Serif, Sans-serif, Monospace, Hand-drawn, low-resolution (photoshop), kerning, tracking, leading.

Project 2 Lecture and Demo

Title

Type prototype

Goal

To familiarize students with the unique features of the standard character set we interact with each day. Consistent design will challenge students to be creative, as will physical restraints of canvas size and 1-bit palette.

Description

Design a new font whose forms relate to an 10 x 10 square grid. Each box in the grid must be either black or white. You have no curves or true diagonals. Consider proportion, weight, and structural features such as height of cross bars, how elements end, how to accommodate curves and diagonals within the grid of squares, etc.

Directions

Build your file out in a photoshop file. Use the 1-pixel pencil tool to plot your letters on a 10x10 pixel grid. It will help to use a duplicate window to observe the letters at native resolution while working on the 1600% zoom view. Consider the characters that can be accessed either directly or by holding shift on a mac keyboard, yielding 94 characters you must construct. Your photoshop file should show these characters in a neat grid, but the arrangement is up to you. Give your typeface a name. Print out your typeface and mount on foam core adhered to black mat board. Post your design on your website.

Due

Tue, Sep 15

• Read Man of letters (pdf)
• Check out Veer's Mean Tangerine collection for inspiration.
• Read about Silkscreen, a popular free pixel font.

Project 3 Lecture and Demo

Title

Word, Text, and Paragraph compositions

Goal

To understand how the appearance of words influences their meaning.

Description

Typography utilizes the medium of type, just as sculpture utilizes clay and metal. Unlike those lifeless materials, however, type is packed with a-priori meaning. The words speak independently of their format. But the format can enhance the meaning. This project will encourage you to seek ways to enhance the meaning of your type.

Directions

Choose two words from the list below. In 6 different compositions, arrange each word to express its meaning (one word per composition). The composition is 6 x 6 inches square. You may vary the size, spacing, placement, and orientation of the letters. You may execute your project by tracing letters, cutting and pasting photocopied letters, using a computer, or any combination of these methods. Use the typeface Futura Bold.

You may repeat, omit, slice, block, or overlap words or letters. Do not use drop shadows or horizontal/vertical scaling (distortion). Consider the entire space of the square. Mount your two best designs to foam core and black museum board.

• compression
• transition
• contraction
• addition
• subtraction
• disruption
• repetition
• elimination
• migration
• expansion

Part 2: Text exercise as part of project 2

Pick your best two word designs, and both of your paragraph designs, and present on foam core/black mat board.

Here's the text for the parapgraph part of the project:

Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space. Control of position is everything in print. Printed texts look machine-made, as they are. In handwriting, control of space tends to be ornamental, ornate, as in calligraphy. Typographic control typically impresses most by its tidiness and invisibility: the lines perfectly regular, all justiÞed on the right side, everything coming out even visually, and without the aid of guidelines or ruled borders that often occur in manuscripts. This is an insistent world of cold, non-human, facts.

Due

Thu, Oct. 1

Examples

http://www.papress.com/other/thinkingwithtype/teachers/word_project.htm

Bring in rubbings/photos and be prepared to discuss graveyard imagery.

Exercise 1: Design your gravestone utilizing some of the faces/design conventions you discovered during your research. If you did rubbings, combine the correct letters "ransom note" style into your final design.

Instructions

Use Photoshop/Illustrator for this exercise. In PS, create a new document at 8.5"x11", 300dpi, and save gravestone.psd in a folder called username_ex1_384. Incorporate design conventions that you observed last class. Use an interesting gravestone photo as your background image; rubber-stamp or otherwise clone out the old text and work in the new. Type on arches/curves should be done in illustrator, copy and pasted into Photoshop as a smart object (more on this in class). Add effects as appropriate to create a convincing gravestone.

Due: Tue, Sep 29

Project 4 Lecture and Demo

Title

Grids

Goal

To examine the nature of grids as they relate to page design

Description

A typographic grid organizes text and images across the pages of a document. A grid can consist of a single column framed by margins, or it may have multiple columns. When you design a grid, you typically begin with vertical divisions (columns), and then add horizontal divisions.

Directions

Create a new document in InDesign. Your page size is 8 x 8 inches. Create a grid with 1/4-inch margins all around and four vertical columns, 1/4-inch gutters. When your document appears on screen, use guidelines to divide the grid again horizontally. Arrange the text below on the grid. Create three different designs on three different pages, all using the same underlying grid. You may use any typeface that was designed in Switzerland. Suggestions: Helvetica, Frutiger, Univers, Sabon. Do two layouts using 8-pt type only, and one layout that introduces one additional size of type. week one: Bring three designs to class, each trimmed to the edge and taped to a black board. final project: Choose one design to mount permanently on a sheet of black board.

Use this text

COMMON TYPOGRAPHIC DISEASES

Various forms of dysfunction appear among populations exposed to typography for long periods of time. Listed here are a number of frequently observed afflictions.

Typophilia

An excessive attachment to and fascination with the shape of letters, often to the exclusion of other interests and object choices. Typophiliacs usually die penniless and alone.

Typophobia

The irrational dislike of letterforms, often marked by a preference for icons, dingbats, andÑin fatal casesÑbullets and daggers. The fears of the typophobe can often be quieted (but not cured) by steady doses of Helvetica and Times Roman.

Typochondria

A persistent anxiety that one has selected the wrong typeface. This condition is often paired with okd (optical kerning disorder), the need to constantly adjust and readjust the spaces between letters.

Typothermia

The promiscuous refusal to make a lifelong commitment to a single typefaceÑor even to five or six, as some doctors recommend. The typothermiac is constantly tempted to test drive ÒhotÓ new fonts, often without a proper license.

Due

Tue, Oct 20

Demo:Mounting your Project 3 designs.

Project 5 Lecture and Demo

Title

Motion

Goal

To explore the impact of motion on typography.

Description

We will be using Flash and/or Adobe After Effects to create movie trailer type effects.

Directions

Find a movie trailer you like. Recreate the title sequence.

Due

Tue, Nov 03

Or, do the poster project:
Click here to download pdf

Project 6 Lecture and Demo

Title

Books

Goal

To examine that nature of books and bookbinding.

Description

This project will greatly enhance your knowledge of managing multi-page documents in Indesign. Students will import text, organize it using master pages and style sheets, print, and bind a unique, handmade book. Japanese, saddle-stitch, and other forms of binding will be demo'd. Furthermore, original binding approaches are encouraged.

Directions

Find a poet who you like (song lyrics are acceptable). Use their poems for the content of your book. Search the library, bookstores, etc. for examples of poetry books for inspiration. If the text is online, just copy/paste. If it's in a book, type it in, or try the OCR scanning software in the web lab. Graphic elements such as lines and shapes are ok; images are not. We will be doing class trips to UB's Poetry and Rare Books collection and P22 Type Foundry as part of our research for the project.

Due

Tue, Dec 08

• facing pages vs. single sided (spreads)
• stylesheet review
• master page, including page numbers
• columns and text overflow
• dummies