Chapter three discusses the way
letters, words, and sentences work together to communicate ideas when
space, margins, and alignment are taken into consideration. There has
to be a balance between object and space, a principle echoed
throughout many other forms of design, and typography is no
exception. Syntax is just that balance, between letter and space, and
order of words. A lot of things have to go under consideration when
seeking to achieve good syntax, including alignment, margins,
tracking and kerning, point size, contrast, and visual hierarchy,
just to name a few. It is all about guiding the reader of your
typographic design through your meaning and making sure they come out
understanding what you wanted them to understand.
With the most important of the
aforementioned elements being visual hierarchy, I thought the portion
of the text with the nine diagrams was the most interesting. Maybe I
am just a sucker for visual examples of things, but that is one thing
this textbook does so well, is give handy visual guides for many of
the concepts it discusses. This portion showed nine different ways of
establishing a visual hierarchy, from having none at all to using
thick black boxes to isolate the most important text. Its just one of
those pages where one could turn back to if they needed some simple
examples of how to achieve (or what to avoid when establishing)
visual hierarchy.
I have some experience working with
abstract objects and playing with their figure/ground relationship,
but it is far more interesting to see how that plays out in type, as
it is often taken for granted.
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| Here is a type logo that uses figure/ground to create its letterforms. |
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