The purpose of this project is to become familiar with some important historical typefaces and their typographical features.
Since the establishment of printing as a technology, font manufacturers and printers have used font specimens to display the range of characters in their fonts, both as an advertisement of their design capabilities and as an enticement to the customer.
For this project, you will use one typeface from our collection and create a four-page font specimen that is visually appealing and emphasizes the characteristics of the font.
In studio, we will decide the dimensions of the pages. I want everyone to use the same dimensions so that I can join the specimens together in a single document in chronological order and distribute it as a PDF file that you can use as a reference.
Your font specimen must include the following:
Organize the material according to a thematic or visual principle of your own choice that you feel will interest the viewer.
For example, you might arrange the roman face with its italic counterpart in the same family; combine uppercase and lowercase letters near each other; order them by their visual similarities, or create a visual image using letterforms. You may use different font sizes, font styles, contrast of weights, layering, repetition, rotation, tints, and other devices. Be creative!
You may wish to include an epigraph (short saying) or pangram (sentence with all 26 letters of the alphabet) as part of your font specimen. Feel free to invent your own, or choose from the material I provide on these web pages: epigraphs and pangrams. You may also provide some material about the history of the font (see Bringhurst, Updike, or other references).
We will be looking at these font specimens to inspect the important features of letterforms, to discuss the historical development of typefaces, and to compare and contrast the typefaces visually.
Vocabulary: font, typeface, uppercase, lowercase, roman, italic, serif, sans serif, leading, tracking, alignment.
Some terms to describe letterforms: em square, baseline, x-height, cap height, body height, ascender, descender, stem, terminal, bar, bowl, counter, leg, bracket.
QuarkXPress features: facing pages document, margin settings, text box tool, item tool, content tool, font size and style, applying leading (vertical space between lines), tracking (horizontal space among groups of letters), text overflow symbol, creating and applying color and tints
I suggest that you get used to working in the measurement system of picas and points, rather than inches. So I will show you how to use this system of measurement as a default for all new documents.
1 inch = 6 picas
1 pica = 12 points
1 inch = 72 points
In Quark, the measurement 27 picas 6 points is rendered as "27p6". Quark can "do the math" for you: If you type "32 pt" or "p32" Quark will render it as 2p8, because 32 pt = 12 pt + 12 pt + 8 pt = 2 pi + 8 pt = 2p8.
To space material uniformly down the page, select your entire text (Command A) and then use the up or down arrows in the Measurement palette. This changes the leading, the amount of space between consecutive lines.
To space letters uniformly across the page, select your entire text (Command A) and then use the left or right arrows in the Measurement palette. This applies tracking, uniform spacing between letters.
In Quark, 200 units of tracking is a horizontal distance equal to the point size of the type. This horizontal distance is called an em, because it is roughly the width of an uppercase M.
If your text goes beyond the available area in a text box, a small square with a red X in it will appear at the end. You should change the spacing or size of the text box so that all of your text appears.
Save your work using a file name with your last name, a hyphen, the project number, and the suffix .qxd that shows this is a QuarkXPress document: lastname-1.qxd.
Drag a copy of your completed file into the appropriate place in my faculty folder when I announce the project is due. As part of my evaluation process, I look at your Quark files to examine your work.
Readings should be completed while working on this project.
Weinmann and Lourekas. QuarkXPress 6 for Windows & Macintosh.
Chapter 1: The Basics
Chapter 2: Startup
Bringhurst. Elements of Typographic Style.
Historical Synopsis (pp. 12-15)
Chapter 7: Historical Interlude (pp. 119-136)
skim Chapter 10: Prowling the Specimen Books
skim Appendix A: Sorts & Characters
skim Appendix E: Recapitulation
Updike, Daniel.
Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use. Vols. 1 and 2.
On reserve in the library. Two volumes with lots of information about
the history and development of fonts and typographers.
Bodoni. Manuale Tipografico, 1818.
http://www.octavo.com/collections/projects/bodtip/index.html
Online presentation of a famous collection of typefaces.
Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
http://www.typography.com/catalog/index.html
Online type catalog.
Font Bureau.
http://www.fontbureau.com/fonts/
PDF files of their display and text fonts.
Dutch Type Library.
http://www.dutchtypelibrary.nl/PDF.html
PDF files of well-designed font specimens. Booklets and page proof.