Monday, January 27, 2014

Skai Stundziaite - Chapter 1 Reflection

Chapter 1 - The Evolution of Typography

Chapter 1 of “Typographic Design: Form and Communication” showed the history and evolution of type and texts in general. What I found to be most interesting was how events in society, architecture and art affected the way type looked. In the beginning of type history I would expect most of all letters to look like they do in their hand written form. What I found to be fascinating is how computers and technology have taken over the idea of font and text, almost all fonts today are computer generated and not hand drawn what so ever. Also because of modern day printers, all different types of fonts can exist without having to carve out each letter of a font that might be next to impossible to carve. Fonts have evolved so much over the past thousands of years they have existed. To think that typographers existed many, years before graphic design came to be but typography is such a key point to graphic design. It was really interesting for me to see how exactly history developed the current fonts everyone knows and uses. On page 8, there are four images of the letter B; all are different people’s variations of the letter B in 1500’s. What I noticed was that all the B’s had serifs. All the B’s looked fairly similar but with some alterations between each artist. Now days if an artist where to craft a letter for a new font, there could be so many possible variations, from thin and thick hairlines, the height of the ascenders and the length of the descenders, the list could go on and on. I thought it was really cool to see how color began to play a role in typography around the 1970s in the book. I feel like typography gives a stronger messages/meaning when pair with the correct colors. 


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