OUGD404: What is a book?: Content

For the brief What is a Book? We were required to first research our content and use that to inform our layout decisions. In order to produce the vast amount of content that would be needed we asked ourselves the question, what are the ten things you need to know about graphic design?

My two questions were on the Origins of Type and the Classifications of type.


Type Origins and Type Classifications 

Type Origins

Stone

History: Stone type dates back to ancient Rome and Greece where typography was carved into rock using a hammer and a chisel.

Method: Chisel

Type Style: Roman, Serifs

Characteristics: Historical, classical, strong, established

Why: The act of carving letterforms into stone was a delicate process. It required the chisel to be eased into the rock gently before the main stroke could be carved out. If the tools were simply forced into the stone damage to the work surface would often occur causing wonky letterform. This act created the small line at the end of a stroke in a glyph, know as a serif.

Look: The results are very strong and stiff looking typefaces, with moderate variations of stroke width and all capped off with distinctive serifs.

Times New Roman

Trajan

Sable

History: Originating in eastern Asia and existing as the earliest examples of typography sable type is produced using a brush, ink and paper, it was widely used in countries such as Israel and Japan.

Method: Brush/Painting

Type Style: Painted/Brush Script

Characteristics: Fluid, hand produced, ornamental

Why: The distinctive looking strokes in script letterforms are due to way brush and ink move together on a page. Brush/script typefaces attempt to replicate the natural tapering that occurs at the end of a stroke when a brush is applied to paper.

Look: (The final product ends up resembling) Resemblance to hand scribed/painted typefaces ranging from the classical calligraphic look to the sloppily splashed on a page. Its strokes vary in width and taper at the ends and its glyphs are angled slightly replicating the method of production.

Brush Script

Street Brush

Bone

History: One of the first examples of a writing tool akin to a pen was the quill, a bone or feather carved at the end to form a pointed nib, which was then dipped in ink and applied to paper.

Method: Bone Nib e.g. Calligraphic Pen/Quill

Type Style: Calligraphic/Handwritten Script

Characteristics: Decorative, precise, elegant

Why: The product is glyphs, like brush script typefaces, that taper at the ends of their strokes following the movement of the pen across paper, however, in comparison to brush script, the tapering is far less severe.

Look: (The look is) Similar to brush script with angled glyphs and tapered strokes, however calligraphic script is usually far greater in flamboyance and detail due to the larger amount of control given when using a pen over a brush.

Characteristics: Decorative, precise, elegant

Sloop Script Three

Savannah Script Regular

Wood

History: When the printing press was invented the first letterforms used upon it were carved out of blocks of wood, these carved glyphs were then covered with ink and pressed against a piece of paper.

Method: Wood Block and Printing Press

Type Style: Block

Characteristics: Bold, solid, sturdy, stout

Why: Wood, as a material for creating a letterform for print, isn’t one you can get great detail out of. Due to the repeated pressing process glyphs with fine details and thin strokes would easily become damaged and need to be replaced.

Look: Strong and very bold, the straight thick strokes were used to guarantee that the letterform wouldn’t break and the save the printer the hassle of carving another. Some modern block fonts even attempt to replicate the ‘patchy’ look created during the printing process.

Franchise Bold

Rockwell Extra Bold

Lead

History: The next stage for the printing press was replacing wood block type with lead and metal type. The process still required the use of a press, ink and roller though.

Method: Lead Block and Printing Press

Type Style: Lead, Letter Press

Characteristics: Angular, minimal, sophisticated

Why: Lead type was very exciting, letterforms were less likely to break under repeated use and so this meant great detail could be now be achieved in individual glyphs. As well as that the new technology of metal casting meant that creating a replica glyph was now a much simpler process in comparison to the previous tedious and time-consuming one.

Look: Pointed and angular in look, often with thin strokes. A lot of typefaces produced in the era of lead echo the style of stone/roman type with the classical serifs, however their design is a lot more adventurous and flexible due to the lead type being able to endure the pressure of printing. 

Courier

Baskerville

Silicone

History: The youngest category of them all. Silicone type is produced on a computer using specialized type or design software. These typefaces differ from the other in the fact that they are created for both print and screen display.

Method: Computerized Type

Type Style: Digital

Characteristics: Clean, geometric, modern, varied

Why: Software goes a long way to cover what a steady hand, patience and lots of time used to meaning clean, balanced and perfectly measured letterforms can be produced with relative ease. The challenge is now in conception of ideas and silicone based type ranges from normal to the crazy, the fairly legible to the barely recognizable and can include patterns or even textures.

Look: Clean vectorised lines are the calling cards of computerized type with the digital process taking human error out of the picture. The additions provided in type software give the designer a vast range of tools to use and the products of these programs are vast and varied typefaces completely unconstrained by physical production method.

Flourextine

Bauhaus 93

Type Classifications

Roman

The decorative serifs of Roman typefaces help the eye track from letter to letter, which is why they are typically used for body text. Roman typefaces comprise the oldest typeface classification and its designs originate from text that was carved into Roman stonework (See STONE). Many variations of Roman typefaces have been developed. These variations can be further sub-classified as Old Style Venetian (or Humanist), Old Style Aldine (or Garaldes), Old Style Dutch, Old Style Revival, Transitional, Didone, Slab serif (or Egyptian), Clarendon, and Glyphic.

Cochin

Garamond

Souvenir Demi 

Gothic

Gothic typefaces – also called sans-serif typefaces – have been in existence for more than 100 years. The absence of any serifs, whilst providing a clean letterform, can impinge on the legibility of the body text. Historically typographers have tried to address this issue by cutting Gothic typefaces suitable for setting body text. Even so Gothic typefaces remain limited in their use and are more commonly used in short bursts as headings or other display functions. Gothic typefaces always have a ‘g’ with a tail rather than the double-storey ‘g’ used in some serif typefaces.

Din Text

Tablet Gothic

Frutiger 

Block

Block, Blackletter, Broken, Old English or Gothic typefaces (not to be confused with sans-serif Gothic), are based on the heavy, ornate writing style that was prevalent during the Middle Ages. Due to the complexity of the letterforms they can be hard to read – particularly if used in large blocks of text – and therefore usually serve a similar function to the decorative use of Scripts or initial capitals. Legibility is however linked to familiarity, thus the Gothic sans-serif styles that are common to us today would be equally hard for Middle Age man to decipher.

Engravers Old English

 Goudy Text

 Fraktur

Script

Script typefaces were created to mimic handwriting (see SABLE, BONE) and indeed some, such as Pushkin, were based on the handwriting of a specific person. Many have extended termination strokes so that they link together, much like the handwriting they are intended to resemble. They are neither classified as Roman or Gothic, as they may share attributes of each. As Script typefaces are difficult to read in large text blocks, their usage is usually confined to providing supplementary decorative details such as brand names or captions.

Pushkin

Zapf Chancery

Flemish Script

We were then asked to condense the categories each of us had researched into five definitive choices and five possibilities for layout content.

Finalising Content

The next stage was to finalise our decisions on what content would make the final cut and then I had an idea.

Personally I felt I could easily produce ten pages out of my own extensive research on the origins of type and the type categories. One of the biggest headaches with layout is having far too much to cram onto a page/pages and I worried that I couldn't effectively get the amount of content needed to educate anyone in enough detail about ten things to do with design with only one double spread per category (especially with the addition of a contents page taking up one spread and an introduction taking up a second).

So instead of producing a book- Ten things you need to know about graphic design. It seemed much more suitable to produce the book- Origins and Categories of Type.