Chapter 2 - The Anatomy of Typography / S.Duran

S.Duran

Typography 230

Chapter 2 - The Anatomy of Typography

This chapter helped explain a lot about typography, its looks, and how each character should be appealing to the eye based on the foreground to background relationship, as well as making all 26 letters of the alphabet similar to one another since they are a set. It starts of explain the different parts of a letter form, much like the Anatomy of Type project we are currently doing. Compared to the list of vocabulary given to us, apex, eye, leg, spine, and terminal stood out the most. I never knew there were these parts of a letter carried a name to them. Based on this reading, I have added these parts to my Anatomy of Type project, in hope of understanding type better. Along with analyzing the parts, I've come to see the differences in the styles of each letter, from Old Style to Bodoni as each letter form’s hairline changes, helping one identity it’s font family. In the middles there is a layout on the historical classification of typefaces: Old style, Italic, Transitional, Modern, Egyptian, Sans Serif, which give each font family a bit of historical usage and how each one differs from previous fonts.The examples of type gauges starting on page 42, along with reading the passages, helped me understand how to go about using and reading this tool better as I was having a bit of trouble before hand. Also how each letter in a word should be carefully looked over so that the font doesn't take up so much em space, as well as making the inter letter spacing “even” from each letter, by using tracking or kerning. In addition it was nice to see how inn each font family, every style can convey a different meaning or idea.One of the last pages goes of the styling of the Univers font family, the same font that is used in the book. It was fascinating to see how changing the weight, proportions, spacing, and angle of the Univers font cause so much of a change in how the font could be perceived or used. While they change in various forms, the way the still belong to same font family is by their x-height, capital height, ascender, and descender length.