Design Exploration

TYPOGRAPHY: EXERCISES

28.8.19 - 18.9.2019 (Week 1 - Week 4)

Maisarah bt Muhd Zamri (0335576)
Typography
Exercise

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LECTURES

28.08.2019 (Week 1)
Lecture - Introduction to Typography
Honestly, when someone asks me what typography means, I would reply with, "the art of typo." After today's lecture though, I think I can give a better answer.  From what I understand, typography is a way for us to express how we feel through lettering.
Typography had existed since a long time ago. Back in the old days, typography was done manually. People had to draw or paint the letters on billboards/signboards/posters/etc by hand. Now that technology has pretty much populate the world, typography is done digitally.
Typography has a lot of words being used to describe it. Peasants Commoners refer to it as 'fonts'. It's not accurate, though. Font, typeface, and type family are three different things in typography.
I'll be honest, I kind of drift off during this part, but I recalled Steve Jobs having something to do with typography being digital or something. It's basically made so that people feel more engaged in reading.

04.09.2019 (Week 2)
Lecture - Development/Timeline
Basically, as mentioned from the first lecture,  typography has been around for like 2000 years and has changed throughout the years.
Savages People used to scratch on wet clay using sharp sticks or carve into stones using chisels to write. Back then there were only uppercase - no such thing as lowercase - and they were merely combinations of straight lines and curved lines. The writings evolve as the tools used changed. The more delicate the tools were, the more defined the letters became.
So apparently the eccentric people of Greek somehow came up with the idea of writing from left to right, and following the second row, right to left, and the third row left to right again, and so on. I don't know how it makes sense, but my lecturer thinks so. But as the directions of writings changed, the letters had to be inverted too so that's a no-no.
Aright so I remember something about letters using to be big and pretty, but someone started to compress the letters together, making them smaller so that they can fit into a smaller space.

11.09.2019 (Week 3)
Lecture - Tracking: Kerning and Letter spacing, Formatting Text, Texture, Leading and Line Length
In today's lecture, I learnt a few new terms in relation to typography. When adding space between letters in a word, it is called "letter spacing', while when decreasing the space between letters in a words, it is called "kerning." But when we do both letter spacing and kerning in a word or sentence, it is known as "trafficking."
I understand that in texts, left alignment is the normal thing, whereas right alignment should be used minimally, because the starting of the sentences are ragged. This applies to center alignment, too, as the texts would have ragged sides. Center alignment is best to be used for short texts. Justified, however, seem to be what designers love most, because it looks clean - all the sides are aligned. But sometimes justified texts leave uneven grey value (the spaces between words), which people call 'rivers', in the texts.
The appropriate line length should only be 55 - 65 characters in a line for it to be pleasingly readable.

18.09.2019 (Week 4)
Lecture - Indicating Paragraphs, Widows and Orphans, Highlighting Text, Headline Within Text, Cross Allignment
So there's this symbol people used to use to indicate paragraph. It's called "pilcrow" (¶). There would just be a block of text and we would see this symbol just appearing every now and then in the text to indicate that it's a new paragraph. Another way to indicate a paragraph is "line spacing". If the line space is 12pt, then the paragraph space is also 12pt. People often put line space and leading in the same class, but they are actually very different. "Leading" is the space between two lines, whereas "line space" is the end of a line to the end of the next line. The most common paragraph indicator we see nowadays is the indentation where the first line of a paragraph is indented. The opposite of this would be extend paragraph, where the first line of a paragraph is extended. 
A "widow" is a short line that is left alone at the end of  a column, while an "orphan" is a short line that is left alone at the beginning of a new column. These two are very big no-no's when creating a text in columns, so we should really put care into the texts we're making to avoid this abominations. 
There are multiple ways to highlight a text, for example:
- Change the type face
- Change the type family
- Change the colour
- Put a light coloured box behind the text
- Put quotation marks
Cross alignment is when sentences in a text next to each other are parallel. And this is when I zoned out.

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INSTRUCTIONS




28.08.2019 - 04.09.2019 (Week 1 - Week 2)
Exercise 1

We were told to pick a personality that suits us and design 5 different lettering of our name for the personality. And then we have to digitize the chosen lettering using Adobe Illustrator.
My name designs consists of 5 different things related to death/horror because apparently I have a morbid personality. Also, I'm dying. The first design is a blood smear, second is finger bones, third is decaying, fourth is gravestones, and fifth is idk flesh being cut in half.

Fig. 1.1 (I am: Dead - designs/sketches) 

I'm gonna go with the third one (decaying) because that's what my lecturers think is the most interesting. And now to digitize it :')

 Fig 1.2 (I am: Dead; decaying - lettering)

Done digitizing, we were then told to animate our personality lettering.

 Fig 1.3 (I am: Dead; decaying - gif making)

Fig 1.4 (I am: Dead; decaying - gif)

I made this with only 6 frames so it doesn't look very smooth. I still think it's pretty good. It kind of looked the way I wanted it to, so I'm happy with it. 

Fig 1.5 (I am: Dead; decaying - lettering redone)

Fig 1.6 (I am: Dead; decaying - PDF file)

SIKE!! I changed the design a bit so it looks more like it's decaying instead of melting. Turns out I wasn't very happy with how my first design turned out because I consulted my friend and she said it looks unfinished or something and that it looks like contamination(?) was washing away from my name. Then she gave me an idea of how to make it look more like it's rotting. I didn't use her idea, but I took inspiration from it and thus this lettering was born. 

Fig 1.7 (I am: Dead; decaying - gif making redone)

Fig 1.8 (I am: Dead; decaying - progress of animated gif)

I really did the bare minimum with this one (as I did with the first one), because if I wanted the animation to be very smooth, I would have to draw a whole lot of frames of different stages of decaying for my lettering. That would take so much hard work and I am not hardworking. So I settled with only 8 panels, but hey, it looks alright :) lecturers also said it's alright yay minimalism. But they advised me to add some delays between the frames because right now it looks too fast. 

Fig 1.9 (I am: Dead; decaying - animated gif final work)

11.09.2019 - 18.09.2019 (Week 3 - Week 4)

Exercise 2 

We were tasked to express the meaning of the words 'Sneeze', 'Clean', 'Party', 'Gigantic', 'Explode', and 'Emerge' using 9 type families given (Bembo, Garamond, Janson, Caslon, Baskerville, Serifa, Futura, Gill Sans, and Univers). These six expressions are to be put into one (1) A4 sized artboard. After that, we are to choose one of the six words that we like best and animate it, as we did with our personality lettering exercise.

Fig 2.1 (type expressions - designs/sketches)

The typefaces/families I have decided to use for the expressions are:

  - Sneeze: Universe
  - Clean: Gill Sans Shadowed

  - Party: Bembo

  - Gigantic: Gill Sans Ultra Bold

  - Explode: Caslon

  - Emerge: Gill Sans

Fig 2.2 (type expressions - artboard 1)

I decided to animate 'EMERGE' because I've always had a clear vision of how I want it to look like animated in my head.

Fig 2.3 (Emerge - gif making)

Fig 2.4 (Emerge - apparently unaccepted animated gif)

I have to redo Emerge, Explode, and Gigantic because I apparently missed the part where they say not to stretch/distort the type families. My animation of Emerge also has to be redone because I was advised to simply make the word emerge smoothly instead of shaking.

Fig 2.5 (type expression - artboard 2)

Fig 2.6 (type expression artboard 2 - PDF file)

I changed my Explode design completely because sticking to the original design without stretching the letters would be impossible because I wouldn't be able to fit the letters into the box. I tried. I mean, I might be able to fit them in the box, but then the word would be very small and that's not explosive at all. If I'm sticking to my original design, the word should be powerful, and even though the current design isn't very explosive, (I want to believe) it's better. Plus, a lot of my classmates did it this way (I'm not saying I copied them, I merely took inspiration from them).

Fig 2.7 (emerge remake - PDF file)

Fig 2.8 (Emerge - remaking gif with Illustrator)

Fig 2.9 (Emerge - remaking gif with Photoshop)

Fig 2.10 (Emerge - final animated gif)

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FEEDBACKS

04.09.2019 (Week 2)

• Specific feedback: Mr Vinod and Mr Shamsul both agreed that my third design (decaying) is best to be digitized and later animated.
• General feedback: We were told to keep our hand busy jotting down notes during lectures so that we don't get side tracked. They also told us to get used to the pen tool in the Adobe Illustrator software.

11.09.2019 (Week 3)

• Specific feedback: My personality animation was fine but Mr Vinod and Mr Shamsul said I could’ve added more delay between the frames so it doesn’t look too fast.
• General feedback: Label all pictures with Fig n.n (personality; description). Also, always mention the personality and description in every upload. Mr Vinod also reminded us to remember that there are 5 important sections in our E-Portfolio, which are Lectures, Instructions, Feedbacks, Reflections, and Further Reading. The ‘exercises’ we put under Instructions are subheadings. We shouldn’t get confused with the headings and subheadings. 

18.09.2019 (Week 4)

• Specific feedback: I shouldn't stretch/distort the letters for the expressions, specifically for Gigantic, Explode, and Emerge. But my Sneeze is fine because it's only a matter of perspective. For the animation of Emerge, I should just make it come up smoothly instead of shaking. And I should keep the background of my blog white. 
• General feedback: When documenting the process of an assignment, we can screenshot. But when we are submitting said assignment, we should export the work as JPEG and submit that. the JPEG should be 72 dpi. For the type expressions assignment in particular, we should save a PDF for the 6 words and embed it in our blogs. For the REFLECTION section in our blog, instead of breaking them down in weeks (we can do that, but) we could just summarize the whole experience in one paragraph (or it could be one paragraph for experience, one for observation, and one for findings). We were also told to download and install all the 9 typefaces that were given to us. 

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REFLECTIONS

Experiences: During these two exercises, I have experience the hardships of a typographer. Honestly, I've done literally two exercises and I'm already dead.

Observations: I have observed that people have different ways of expressing the same things, meaning people have different perspective on things.

Findings: I find this class to be especially hard :')

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FURTHER READINGS

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