Haley Wright - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 goes through the full anatomy of typography and all it entails. To start out the chapter, the book takes you through many vocabulary words that help you truly understand each and every aspect of letterforms, which is important to truly understand typography. While some of the vocab seems like common sense, there were many words that were new for me that have really helped grow my understanding of font and typefaces. I think it’s really cool how changing different aspects of type like slightly changing the tails or ascenders, or the eye of letterforms can completely change a font into something new. This chapter also goes into the different classifications of typefaces. I knew a few aspects of the different classifications but these descriptions really helped me be able to identify them and truly understand the differences. The one thing that this chapter really taught me the most about was all the things that went into how font is measured and how those measurements came to be. After reading this chapter and doing the in class exercise I really have a much better understanding for how to measure type as well as what each size of type is best used for. What’s really fun for me was reading about all the different variations that exist within each type family. I’ve known about and used Univers and other type families many times and knew about all the different variations but seeing how the variations for other type families I haven’t used often side-by-side was really interesting. I really liked the end picture that showed a typographic interpretation of an Edgar Allen Poe poem using the different variations of the Univers type family because it helped show how while side by side there are so many variations, they really do all flow together in the end even if it may seem like they wouldn’t.