Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Typography Anatomy - Philip Bradley







I chose nouvella vague black as my serif typeface. Although I normally lean more towards sans serifed typefaces, as do most of my generation, I really like the strong contrast between strokes found in this one. There are nice, smooth curves found throughout all the characters that help string them from one to another, and the serifs on each of the letters is a thin as the hairline stroke. This adds to the contrast between the thick strokes and many hairline curves. There are also some very interesting characteristics to some of the characters. For instance the lowercase “j” has an interesting shape to it as it curves around the baseline. The lowercase “f” mimics this with it’s peak going as high as the ascenders. My favorite character is the capital “Q” as it has the stylish upright axis with a hairline top and bottom and it’s tail goes into a lengthy descender with another piece cut out from it. The capital G has a descender as well which sets it apart from most typefaces. Unfortunately, this typeface has a large lack of special characters. Even the numbers only go up to five. It reminds me of a fancy black limousine service.


My sans serif font I chose is nexa light. I’m always partial to light typefaces as I enjoy thin minimalist strokes. Nexa light holds true to this with it’s uniform stroke throughout each character. I like how most of the lowercase characters have a round feel to them, and many of them just look like variations of the letter “o”. I think the lowercase “g” is pretty great because it essentially distills the letter down into its most basic form. The ear on it helps balance the character in my opinion. An interesting feature found in the capital “J” is that it is missing half of its arm. This helps drive the minimalist feel since it is again distilling the letter down to its most basic form. This reminds me of apple products with clean minimal design.

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