Typography

Type talks
"After all, typefaces have feelings too."
John Maeda

This idea is that a typrface doesn't have to just be displayed on a straight line, by displaying a set of text in a set shape or action, you then convey another image than just some plain text.

A film directed by Peter Greenway called 'The Pillow book' helps to represent this. A woman has a fetish almost for people writing onto her body. She then asks an english book writer to write some words onto her body. Being a common book writer, he writes text in a straight line. She then says "I'll give you one more chance" and again he does the same thing. She becomes very dissapointed and says that he is not a writer. The reason for this is because he did not write the text to express any feelings, he just merely wrote them in a straight line.


The anatomy of a type
There's alot more to consider about a typeface than you may initially consider. Here's a breakdown of what I mean;

BASELINE: is where a type sit except for the descenders
DESCENDER: The part of a character (g, j, p, q, y, and sometimes J) that descends below the baseline.
ASCENDER: The part of a lowercase character (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) that extends above the x-height
X-HEIGHT: The height of lowercase letters, specifically the lowercase x, not including ascenders and descenders.
BODY SIZE: is the actual dimension of the type, including ascender and descender part


Your choice of font case can also represent a different feeling;

superscript and subscript used for logic, maths chemistry etc
capitals - anger, shouting
lower case - quiet, calm
serif + sans serif = sans serif - without the tails
times new roman - serif       arial - sans serif
Sans serif tends to be easier to read large pieces of text due to the curls on the end of the letters, they then merge together.

Here's a list of the different typefaces available;

A type family is one font, and font cases are the available sub-fonts of how you can make it look differently.

A few keywords which could be revised when creating the assignment;
TRACKING: adjust the space between characters, evenly
KERNING: reduce the space between characters, oddly
LETTER SPACING: add the space between characters, oddly, opposite of kerning
LEADING: The line spacing given between text