Type Camp: Typography 101 for Graphic Designers

1. Welcome to Type Camp!: Hey everyone and welcome to type camp. My name's Neal and I will be your proverbial counselor on this adventure through all things graphic design and typography. We're gonna cover a lot in this short class, like, what typeface do I use? What alleles fonts come from? And how can I best supply them to my projects to make them look good, but also make them communicate clearly. We're going to cover all the terms you need to know like kerning, letting, tracking, what's the difference between all those. So gets underway with get comfortable and let's get started. 2. Font vs. Typeface: Do you care?: Alright, typography. When you're working in the world of graphic design, you're going to hear the word typeface a lot and you're gonna hear the word font a lot. So what's the difference? And when do you use what? Well, the good news is. You can use either anytime you want. You can use them interchangeably. And at the end of the day it doesn't matter. But I think for the purpose of a typography class, we should really look at these words and see what the difference is just so we know for our own edification. Before you pure us out there who really want to use the right term at the right time. What is the difference? So, typeface, a typeface refers to the specific style of a specific set of letters or words, right? This is what you see on the printed page. This is what you see on your screen. This is what we referred to when we're talking about the specific style and design of letters. Now a font, it's technically the mechanism or file that produces the typeface that you see. So as an analogy, think about your iPhone. On your iPhone you have specific mp3 files, but you don't dance to your MP3 or sync to your MP3. Mp3 gets loaded into your iPhone. And that plays and produces the music that you hear. The music is like the typeface, whereas the mp3 is like the font. It's the physical mechanism that produces the typeface or the music. Now if we look at the word font and we go back in time and look at the origin of the word. We're eventually going to get to the word foundry. And you think about at a letterpress studio, those little bits of type. Those are called the fonts and they were forged in metal. Now you take that bit of type, you press it onto the page and that produces your typeface the thing that you see. So again, it's the physical mechanism that is producing the typeface that you see. It's like the MP3, produces the music that you hear. Okay, let's go down here and we're going to further complicate things, okay? To further complicate things. Fonts are also a reference to the individual family members that make up the greater typeface. So let's take a typeface like helvetica. Now within Helvetica, you might have Helvetica regular, Helvetica bold, Helvetica oblique, which is just a different word for italic. And each of those versions of Helvetica are different fonts that make up the typeface that we call Helvetica. So back to the music analogy. So for this analogy, the graphic designers, the musician, and you're gonna put out an album near element's going to be called Helvetica. When you flip that album over and you look at the song tracks on the back, you're going to have a song called Helvetica irregular. Helvetica bold, italic, fin, regular, whatever. Easy, right. So now that we've got that cleared up, I go back to what I said at the beginning of the video. The end of the day doesn't matter what term you're using. Nowadays. Font means typeface, typeface mean spawn. Don't feel intimidated about using the right one or the wrong one at the right time or the wrong using the right one or the wrong one at the right time, at the wrong time. We know what you mean. All right, feeling good. Alright. 3. Choosing Fonts: Quality Over Quantity : Oh my God, who had font should I use? There's so many. It can be really intimidating as a designer with so many fonts out there, literally thousands of fonts. So where do you begin? First off, the amount of fonts you have is not bragging rights doesn't make you a better designer. The first rule for typography, quality over quantity. So what, so you've got 1000 fonts on your computer doesn't really help you out. If you don't know how to use them properly or you're choosing the wrong ones. So here's what I recommend, especially when you're starting out, is just choose a handful of fonts that you're drawn to that are somewhat known and have been tested over time and get to know how to use those. Get an understanding of what the spacing is like in the tracking and kerning. And are they going to work with my designs? And start out by maybe picking a variety. So take a sans-serif that you like, choose a serif that you like, and then you'll be an expert in those particular ones. So then when you have to dive into a project, you'll already have a great set of fonts to work with and you'll know what to look for. For example, this font, I know that the kerning between these two particular letters is always off. So I'll know to make that adjustment when I see it. At least when you're starting out, you want to stick with some of the time-tested classics. Some of these fonts have been around for literally hundreds and hundreds of years. And they have stood the test of time. They're legible. They function well, they're designed well, and you know, they're going to work. So instead of picking some cute, obscure fonts, stick with the time tested classics. Pick about font like Helvetica oven year. Adobe counseling is a gorgeous font. Baskerville, low, more old school, but still a beautiful typeface. Futura future has got more of that modern edge. So here's a confession. I really like Times New Roman. I think it's beautifully designed. It reads really well. I think there's some apprehension with Times New Roman because it's sort of that: I'm writing a paper and loading up Microsoft Word and this is the font, so this is what I'm using. Unless maybe you're looking for something with a little more fashion or zing to it, you might look at a modern serif font like Bodoni. Okay, so how do you choose then? Once you have your set narrowed down? Well, look at the client or project you're working on. If you're working on a project for a 100 year old law firm, you might want to use something that has a sense of longevity, that has a sense of professionalism to it. He might wanna do something like million Pro. Or maybe you're doing a design for a retro began hotdog stand. I might recommend something like cooper black. But you don't want to use Cooper black for a law firm and you don't want to use Minion Pro for a retro vegan hotdog stand. So always consider the client and the project that you're working on. The other important thing to consider when choosing a font is the time period that it came from. So as a general rule, sans-serif typefaces are more modern and are newer than serif type faces, which had been around much longer. The other thing you need to consider is the form and functionality of what you're actually creating. If you're typesetting a long novel, it's going to be a better choice to use a Serif typeface because they have more readability than a sans-serif. Readability is going to be the number one priority. And another thing to think about when you're picking a typeface is how many different elements am I going to be creating? If I'm doing a big brand where I'm gonna have whole corporate identity, you know, an annual report and billboards and business cards and all these things. You're going to want to choose a typeface with a lot of font family members, right? A lot of different weights and variations. And then you can play those up throughout your designs. So, you know, he might like a font like impact. But to the best of my knowledge, there's only really one weight with impact. Whereas a font like Avenir here, you're gonna have thin, thick, condensed all these variations to work with and within the same family. So choose a typeface that you're gonna be able to build out and really create a robust, diverse brand down the road. Alright, the last thing you need to think about when choosing a typeface is how does it compare with the other typefaces that I'm using in my design. So that might be a poster or an annual report. You know, it's okay to use one type face, especially if you have multiple family members, multiple weights within that typeface. But if you're working on something bigger, you might want to integrate additional typefaces just to add a sense of variation and not to let it look too mundane. Now the first thing I'd tell you though, is you don't want too many. So if you're working on a particular design, I would really limit yourself to 12 or three typefaces. Anything over three can be distracting and can really throw off the viewer on something like a poster to might be a good happy medium, especially if you're working with typefaces them, those multiple weight. Now when picking out your multiple options, you don't want anything that's two matching, matching, you know, you don't want to pair Helvetica with accidents grotesque because they essentially with the same to the layman, not us pros, right?. And when thinking about pair and remember what I said about readability, right? Serifs tend to read a little bit better, especially in body copy versus a sans-serif. So you might choose a sans-serif like Helvetica for your headline. But then in your body copy you might use something like minion pro. You know, I like to really stick to the classic minimal stuff myself. But that's not to drag you away from some of the really cool like scripty, grungy, weirdo fonts out there. And, but just remember if you're using something like that for a headline, which can be great. And just remember that you want to use something more legible for your body copy. You don't want to be using some weird script font for your body copy. You know, choosing a Serif typeface that can be easily read. So you may be noticing that I've always been referencing this body copy and legibility and readability as needing a nice old serif typeface. But that's not always true. I don't mean to totally steer you away from using a sans-serif typeface as the body copy. Those can work well. I've even seen novels laid out with a sans-serif typeface. But just as a standard rule, I do think that the serif typefaces do read better, longer form, and embody copy. One more thing to think about is the size of the type you're using. It's easy to get sucked into this like bubble of designing on a computer and where everything is just like laid out for you in perfect scale on your screen. I think Aaron Harappa and this great designer that I really like, he calls it being drawn. So of course consider the distance. So that's going to be read at, am I going to be cruising down the street and need to read a poster at a certain distance in two seconds as I go by, Choose Your sizing and your typeface accordingly. But if it's in a book, you know, if I'm typed saying a book, I know what the distances. It's going to be 18 inches from my face or whatever. And I'm probably going to typeset it around ten points. Ten points is a pretty good average for body copy or a long form book or brochure. And it's funny because on a lot of programs, your default typeface size 12, which is actually quite large once you print it out. So a good standard to follow is newspapers. I think our printing usually around 9, give or take. So yeah, 12 is going to be massive compared to that. So remember, your job is the graphic designer to make it clear and to communicate well. You are not a junior high school student who's trying to turn a one-page paper into a two-page paper. But I'll show you how you can do that with letting instead of point size. Alright, so now hopefully you have a little sense of where to start in choosing your fonts. Remember, quality over quantity. Stick to the classics, especially when you're starting out, get a handful your favorite fonts and really get a sense of how they work. I always consider the client or the project, the form, the functionality, train skew towards typefaces that have multiple family members or multiple weight. And when you pair fonts together, really try and keep it to just two or three. Don't go overboard with too many fonts. 4. Type Crimes: Ending the Injustice.: We need to talk about type crimes. As graphic designers, it's our job to uphold the principles of proper typography. These are the things you should avoid. And what you see here is Times New Roman. This is going to be our baseline for all the type crime examples we see. Ready? Alright, what's wrong about this? Write our first crime here is we never want to stretch out that type. Quality typefaces are designed with a very specific proportions in mind that lend to legibility and readability. And we don't want to distort these and make them more difficult. We want to respect the original design of the typeface and the typographer that made it. And here again is the correct version. What do we give you? Another example of type being stretched? This time it's stretched horizontally and not vertically. The focus. And the correct version. Oh, somebody has put a stroke on the outside of their type to make it look like it's bold. And now the letter forms have been destroyed, were shooting. We don't want to fake bolding. We want to use the true bowl. Members of the font family of a particular typeface for Times New Roman, real bold looks like this. Someone has attempted to make this typeface look like an italicized version. But it's not. All they did was skew the letters so they look slanted, normal, normal role. We wanna use true metallic or oblique versions of that typeface family. Makes sure you're picking the right font. Don't fake it. This is what the real italicized version of Times New Roman looks like. As track this topography way too tight. And now the letters are all pushing together and it's difficult to read and please don't make this mistake. Someone has used double quotes instead of actual quotation marks on the typography. These are not quotation marks, these are inch marks. And I've seen the same thing with apostrophes where people use foot marks instead of apostrophes. We can't let this continue. Quotations need to be slightly currently on a Serif typeface or slanted on a sans-serif. We live another day. Did you see that two spaces after the period? Don't listen to what anyone else tells you. Now you're marketing manager, not your junior high school, a typing class teacher. There's only one space after a period. Not too. You've heard it here. If anyone disagrees with you, you can have them contact me personally. No, worse than revolt. Never use the double hyphen. If you need to pause in a sentence, always use the proper M dash. There are three primary horizontal lines and topography. The shortest is the hyphen. Hyphen is used to hyphenate words or when comparing two value sets. For example, the twins won last night nine to six, and we have two primary dashes. The shorter of the two is the n dash. And n dash is used for a range of values. For example, John Doe lived from 1987 to 2042. Just don't forget. And that one. And the longest of all the dashes is the all-powerful M dash. This is used to create a pause in the language. K-mean is nothing worse in this world than bad Kearney contented anymore. Or what's called Schroeder. 5. Work that Type...: In this video, we're going to break down individual letters and we're going to talk about what the pieces or parts of those letters are called. We're also going to look at the invisible grid that makes up these letters and words. So our example here, menu and pero, beautiful serif typeface. We're going to start with the baseline. Baseline is the line where all the letters sit at where they come to rest at sort of their foundation. I'm moving up from the baseline to the top of the lowercase letters. This is referred to as our x-height. Now the area, the x-height, which extends to the highest point of the grid that our letters are designed on, is referred to as our Cap Height. Anything above the x-height is referred to as an ascender. And anything below the baseline is referred to as a descender is not a beautiful double storey G there. Now this particular word and typefaces interesting because we have a ligature going on here. A ligature is when two letters are combined into the same glyph. What is a glyph? A glyph is any one piece of a typeface. It could be a letter, number, punctuation, or any unique ligatures for unique symbols. Now this phi ligature works particularly well because the ascender, the F, acts as the dot on the lowercase i. In typography, that dot on top of a lowercase i or lowercase j is referred to as the tittle. Now ligatures came out of the world of the letter press. Or sometimes you would have two pieces of type and they wouldn't necessarily line up side by side as well as you'd want them to be printed. So instead they would create these individual ligature that would combine certain letters. Then the typographer wouldn't have to worry about that spacing between the f and the eye and can simply grab the FI ligature in place of the two letters. Now sometimes when you're designing an InDesign and Illustrator, the software will automatically insert a ligature for the letters you've typed out. But if you want to dig deeper and want to see what's available, you can always do that in your glyphs palette to find that we go to Window type in gluts. Now in this palette. And we have all our glyphs from Minya in Pro. And I can see down here we have our FI. And anytime you see one of those little carrots, one of those little arrows, that means there's more options underneath. So you can click on that and hold and you can see what other options underneath. So there's a lot going on in this typeface. You may not need a ligature in a specific spot, but sometimes they're a nice design touched, especially if you're working on a logo. Now we can talk about ligatures without mentioning the most famous and widely used to ligature of them all. The ampersand. So the ampersand is technically this sort of distorted integration up the letters E and T, which are Latin for the word. And now there's a lot of really cool ampersands out there. So if you're ever working on a logo for a name that uses in and in it, he might want to consider finding a unique ampersand for it. This one here is pretty classic, but I know that menu and pro italic has a particularly unique ampersand. And there it is. And here you can really see the lowercase E and the T here representing the Latin word. Ok, so now that we know all the pieces and we know the grid and layout of our letters. Let's talk about how we can change the letters. So the most obvious thing we can do is increase or decrease the size or the point size. Now that's going to be in our character palette here. If you don't see that character palette, you can find all of your palettes and windows in the Window menu. Go down to type and tables, character, paragraph and our glyphs from earlier. Now, this is already set to 72.72 points equals one inch. The distance from the top of the cap height to the bottom of the descender. Now we can just decrease or increase as we see fit. Or we can take the dropdown menu and choose a preset. Alright, and now the term you've all been waiting for, Kearney. Carnian refers to the spacing in between individual letters or glyphs. Now do adjust the kerning. We'll put our cursor in between the two letters we wanted adjust. And we can find our kerning here just underneath our point size. And we can decrease the Kearney to move the letters closer together. Or we can increase the Kearney to move them further apart. Every typeface is different in the way that it current. That's why I recommend particularly for people starting out, is just find those handful of typefaces that you can really get to know. So that when you type out a specific combination of letters, you know that those letters may need some adjustments. Kerning is more of an art form than a science. If it was a science, it would already be programmed into the letters and we wouldn't have to worry about it right soon. Our AI is we'll be doing all our kerning for us, but for the time being, we opt to do it ourselves to move a little quicker as you current through multiple words and letters, you can use your left and right arrow keys to move the cursor. And when you're ready to occur and hit your Alt or Option key. And then the left arrow to bring them closer together, or the right arrow to move them further apart. And basically we're just looking for a nice, even balanced set of letters that's going to communicate as clearly as possible. Remember the 20th century, tough times for Kearney. Number one is a very thin glyph, and so they're always appears. Extra spacing. Anytime you see a date or certain numbers paired together. For that reason, I was very excited for the year 2020. Now what's the term for bad kerning? Coming? Okay, so we talked about kerning. That's the spacing in between individual letters or glyphs. Now we're gonna talk about tracking. You'll want to use tracking whenever you want to expand all the letters within a word or a sentence. So to do that, I'm going to first convert this to all capital letters. I'm gonna do that by going to the very important, hit a little hamburger menu here in the corner of my character palette. And I'm gonna go down to all caps. And I'm going to reduce this to maybe about half the size. I'll, I select my type and I can go to my tracking, which is just to the right of my Kerning. And as I increase the tracking, it will space those letters out. Or as I decrease the tracking, eliminate them together. Now, don't go too tight on this. If you go to tight things gets smushed together and they become difficult to read. If I wanted to jump this out, say 2222. There are now we went from a $10 played Italian restaurant to a $20 a plate Italian restaurant with just a little bit of tracking. Okay, so we talked kerning, we talked tracking. Now let's talk Ledi, not leading. The way to remember that pronunciation is to think about what letter press studios that we're using type made out of a leg. That's where the term came from. And they would literally stick pieces of lead in-between the lines of type to space them out. So that's what Letting is, it's the inter line spacing. So we're going to select this box of text and we're gonna go to our tracking. So we're going to select this box of texts. And we're gonna go to our letting, which is just to the right of our point size. We can see it's set to 12 here, which is a standard for the point size of ten. So that means it allows to points of spacing in-between each line of 10-point type. And the point size of the type is measured from the top of the cap height to the bottom at the descender. Now again with a letting, you don't wanna go too tight. Because we're going to have the same issue as our tracking where things get smushed together and they become harder to read, especially as these ascenders start to collide with each other. But you can get some nice effect when you space things out, get a little bit more readability, maybe some sophistication there. If you have the room on your page to work with, it can add a nice touch. Always skewed to the side of too much letting as opposed to not enough. Let's say you wanna do something a little more creative than just keeping it on that street baseline. I drew this happy little line here with my pen tool and I want to get this type set on this line. So the first thing I'm gonna do is double-click and select all my type. I'm gonna go Edit and Copy. So now that My clipboard, I can go down to the Type Tool. I see another little carrot or arrow there so I can click and hold and go down to my type on a path tool. And as I approached the line, you're going to see the cursor change and it's going to be a little plus sign. That's when I know I can click. My cursor will go onto that line. And I can now go Edit and paste. Am I type gets set on there. Now there's a lot of ways to get rid of that line. Way I'm gonna do it as I'm going to first hit escape. To get that cursor out of there. I'm gonna go over to my swatches. Make sure my stroke is in front here. I'm going to select none and make it disappear. Now I can get even more options if I go over to type and I go down to type on a path, options, you can do things like flip the type or even play a little bit with the perspective or how the baseline sets. Easy right? Now with Adobe, you're not just limited to having straight lines a type, or keeping them in rectangular boxes. You can really put type into any shape. I'm going to go over to my shape pallet here. I'm going to click on the Shape and hold it to get my other options here, I'm going to choose an ellipse. I'm going to draw a circle. I'm going to hold down my shift key. And that will create a proportion circle in this case. Now I can go back to my standard text tool, as you might type on the line is already selected. So I'm going to click and hold and choose Type Tool. And when I enter into the shape, you can see my cursor changed again, right? To sort of a dotted line circle from a score. We're going to click in there. And now my cursor is inside the Shape. Any shape work. And now I can go into Edit and Paste still on my clipboard from earlier when we copied it. Edit paste and I can fill it up and I can format it as I see fit, get rid of the hyphens if I like. And just like the type on the line. So go to my swatches palette and I can hide that. So we have just the tight, lots of ways to get creative here. Okay, back to our Italian unite. Now, right now, Adobe is viewing this as a set of editable letters. I can put my cursor in here if I want. I can highlight, I can change the spelling, can change the phase, whatever I like. But there are gonna be cases as you're designing where you're going to want to convert these letters into what Dolby InDesign is essentially going to read as shapes. And we call that creating outlines. So i'm going to escape out of here, make sure my text is selected. And I'm gonna go up to type and create all lines. So I can no longer edit this text. And InDesign now views this as shapes, not letters. So this has beneficial is you can now manipulate the type. This is really great if you're working on a logo because you want your logo to be unique. So you have the option now. To customize the letters. So to do that in this instance, I can take my white arrow and I can select some of these handles or bits and pieces of my type. And I can pull them out however I see fit to create something a little more interesting or unique. And again, especially with a logo, you don't want it to just be some typeface typed out, calling it a day. You want to do something to make it a little more memorable, especially if you're not working with a particular symbol or color palette. Think that looks pretty good. I think we're up to a $30 a plate Italian restaurant. So not bad, right? Build a client. All right, you may have heard of the MTV show. So we're going to Prim some type here. We have a nice block here, a nice paragraph. So how can we make this a little bit better, a little more legible? Well, the first thing let's talk about justification. We can select our type and clearly we up the plane all the options of left justify, centered, or right justified. Let's go back to the left here. I'm actually going to copy this box by holding my alt key down. And I'm just going to slide my copy over at like go just so that we have a before and after to see how this, the first thing I wanna do is get rid of this hyphenation here anytime I can. I just want to avoid that. Make it a little more legible and I do that in my Paragraph window. This isn't showing for you. You can go up to your window palette here, type and tables, and everything is available. So I'm going to uncheck that. That's the default in InDesign. And there we go. The next thing I'm gonna do for this is think about this as a newspaper or magazine, and I'm going to justify it on Bolsa. Get those nice even lines on each side and see how that looks bad. But I really want to print this out. So I'm going to select my text and we're going to go into my paragraph. Remember this really important tiny little hamburger hidden menu. And I select that, I'm gonna go down to justification. Now what this menu is going to allow me to do is give permission to InDesign, to make some minor adjustments to space things out a little more evenly. So that can be the spacing between the words or the spacing letters. And I'm also gonna give InDesign a little bit of leeway with glyphs scaling, which is allowing it to sort of stretch those letters just a little bit. If it will help make the paragraph look better. Now I'm super apprehensive about stretching out letters because I feel like it's the destruction of the design of the typographer. But I'm actually going to allow it up to 2% because I don't think that's going to be very noticeable, especially at a small scale. So I'm gonna say you can go down to 98% or all the way up to a 102%. Word spacing. This default is pretty good, 80% less. Now the default maximum is 133. But I like to set that to 120 because then it's 20% on either side of my desired amount. Letter spacing, I'm going to allow it to go down 5% or 5% as InDesign sees fit. The rest of these parameters we can leave for now. And we'll hit OK. And watch the paragraph change. Pretty good, right? Let's unclick. Looks a lot better from our first option on the left. 6. A (brief) History of Typography: Hey everyone and welcome to a history of typography and understanding the history is really important for graphic designers because it makes you a better designer. First and foremost, it gives you a context for where these typefaces came from, which helps you decide what to choose on your projects. But as contemporary designers, you are now a part of the history and a part of that heritage. And that's something that's very empowering as a designer. So the word topography is Greek. It comes from typos, meaning impression in graph via meaning writing. Before we go too far, I just wanna give you a sense of the timeline that we're working out. We're going to be cruising through about 4 thousand years of visual communication. Now most of what we're going to cover is from Europe and it's going to be from the perspective of Western civilization. But I would really be remiss if I didn't mention everything that was going on in East Asia, 500 to even 1000 years before what we're going to talk about in Europe. Now the Asians were very ahead of their time in terms of language in printing technology. This woodblock printing you see here was from the Han dynasty in China about 2 thousand years ago. This was printed on cloth, but they would also develop paper, as you know, they developed hemp paper for a 100 years after this would have been printed. So what was the motivation for pushing this printing technology and disseminating this information? While in the case of Asia, it was to spread the message of Buddhism. Now we're gonna see a parallel story in Europe with the need to spread Christianity. But it's interesting how in the earliest days, this was the primary function and motivation for printing technology, religion. And this is interesting here. This is a diagram of essentially a Lazy Susan for Asian topography. Now the agents first made their type out of ceramic. So just like in a letterpress studio, you might see little bits of metal type. Their earliest forms were ceramic. And you can take out the piece that you wanted to say, print it into the page as much as you wanted. And it was reusable. And then you can put the ceramic piece back violet away until you need to use it again. Now back to the Buddhist. This example about 700 years old from Korea is called the selected teachings of Buddhist sages and Sian masters. So this is the earliest known book that was printed with movable type. Now we're gonna switch time periods and geographical. So we're gonna go to about the year 1400, roughly 600 years ago. And we're gonna go to Central Europe. So this guy here is a scribe and basically his job was to copy books. He did some administrative stuff, but again, his primary purpose was to copy religious texts such as the Bible. So these Bibles, they would get decorated with illustrations and they would gold leaf them, and they were called Illuminated Manuscripts. At the time, this was a very respected profession. But clearly as printing came along, they kinda got pushed out by the technology. We saw that in the Industrial Revolution. And now we're seeing it again with You know, autonomous cars taking the jobs of Uber drivers and truck drivers. Now these monks used to work in these rooms specifically for writing called scriptorium. This example here is a handwritten Bible from the year 1407, written in Latin. You can see the decoration there in the second column. Again, all handwritten, both incredible and beautiful. This is a close-up of that same bible. And in this decoration here, this is what we call an initial cap or a drop camp. Basically that guy is standing inside of a giant letter p. And that's to start off the paragraph and the handwriting around him in the typical black letter style handwriting. And that style points to that Germanic area of Europe. Now from the time this Bible was printed, we're gonna fast forward just a couple of decades to this gentleman Johannes Gutenberg. He's generally credited as the inventor of the printing press. He would've been invented his first press around 1439 above five hundred, six hundred years ago. Now when he first started praying, he was still using that old black letter typeface. An example would be factor. Factor is considered one of the earliest typefaces. And he based that typeface design off the handwriting of those scribes. Now Gutenberg's working out of the Germanic area. He's using metal type, which is mostly made out of lead and tin. That's why in a letterpress studio they refer to those bits of type as toxic Legos. And here's a replica of one of Gutenberg's early presses. Off to the right here you can see these trades. Those are for the individual pieces of type, so you can arrange them. And fun fact, this is where the terms uppercase and lowercase came from. A lowercase letters were physically kept in the lowercase and uppercase letters in the upper case. And this is an image, one of the Gutenberg bibles. Now today only 48 original copies survived, and they are considered among the most valuable books in the world. If I can brag for a minute, I actually got to hold a page of an original Gutenberg bible at a museum. I mean, it was in a plastic sleeve, but I got to hold the plastic sleeve that held the page from the Gutenberg Bible was very exciting. So let's move from Germany. Let's talk about Italy a little bit. If there is one geographic region that really spurred modern typography, It's Italy. Rome was a very vibrant modern city. And just like any other metropolitan city we have nowadays, it attracted outsiders to come there for the culture and maybe to set up their business. Now people were coming from Germany to go to Italy to set up their shops. And Bennis, another big modern city, attracted a Frenchman by the name of Nicholas Jensen, who would go on to create the first Roman typeface. Called Jensen in the year 1470. So this is only a couple of decades after Gutenberg's Bible. Now this column we're looking at is called Trajan's column. It's about 2 thousand years old. And it was a war monument, of course, that was put up in Rome and inscribed with these Roman capital letter forms. These are the primary letter forms that inspired these typographers, even 1400 years later. So Jensen, who was living and working in Venice and taking a trip to Rome, walking around, seeing Trajan's column. And that's inspiring him to create his typeface Jensen. Now this image on the left is a selfie of Jensen and the one on the right is his typographers mark or as printer's mark. This would be something that he would print onto the page as sort of a logo or signature to identify him as the printer of that page. You know, having your printers mark on a printed page is like having the Cadillac logo on the back of a car. Now, Italy was really the place that advanced topography. In fact, the word tau x comes from the word Italy. This is an example of one of the earliest forms of metallic type at the time it was called Corsica humanist dukkha. And this really sprung out of the Renaissance. Again, we're in the 15 hundreds. Now the interesting thing about it, italic type is it was originally designed just as a space saver. Printing was expensive and you're basically paying by the letter. So they took these letter forms and they sort of slanted them, fend him out a little bit so you could fit more on the page. So topography came out of Germany, had started to blow up in Italy. And now it's starting to spread out to Switzerland and into Spain. And it's eventually going to make its way up into England. But on its way it's going to hit France. And this guy right here at clade Garamond Hume, who you may know from the typeface. Garamond, was commissioned as a typographer by King Francis the first in 1541 to create his typeface. I mean, imagine we're living in a time where the Kings of these countries see the value in language and communication and they're commissioning typefaces. So chairman actually got a lot of fame from designing his typeface. And even today's considered one of the greatest type designers. And we're still using his typeface in digital form on our computers. And here's an example of Garamond in Italica form from the year 1540. Let's move up to England, because now we're getting into the 17 hundreds. And there's gonna be a lot of type development in England. This example here is a type specimen page by William Castle. Type specimen page is basically a sample of what a typeface would look like. And this would be something you'd show to your clients or you'd use to sell your typefaces. William cows line was originally a gun engraver. And it was that skill set of working with metal and carving. Led him to become a typographer. Now, chasm, we know of the typeface catalog or it's probably listed on your computer as Adobe cows on meaning Adobe took the chasm font and sort of made their own computerized version of it. So Kathleen is a pretty famous designer and he would also influence another Englishman named John Baskerville. And in the late 17 hundreds, it would be Baskerville who would create what we call the transitional typefaces. Where he would sort of push the thins and fix up the letters. It's not what we would consider a modern typeface, but it was definitely an evolution in advancement in the type forms. Now moving forward into the early 18 hundreds, we see the evolution into what we call modern typefaces. So this is a type specimen of the donates typeface known as Bodoni. You probably have it on your computer today. Now Bodoni was Italian and it had a French counterpart named DDL. And these are great examples of what became the modern typefaces. So extreme variation between the thicks and thins out the letters. Very straight cut serifs. A lot of times you'll see modern serif typefaces like this in the fashion world. Think of the mast head for Vogue, Magazine, decor. These are all using these modern serif typefaces. The Looker has a headline, but it's not necessarily something that you'd want to use as body copy, as these modern serifs shrink down and the thin lines become SO razor thin that sometimes they get lost in the printing and it breaks down the letters. Okay, so we're in the early 18 hundreds, roughly 200 years ago. You're never gonna guess what happened. They cut off the serifs and created the first sans-serif font. In fact, the guy who created the first sans-serif typeface was William Castle on the fourth, who was the great grandson of the William Castle we just mentioned here to be kidding me, that's crazy. Now I had a little trouble finding the earliest examples of that sans-serif. This example is only about a 100 years old, but you get a sense of how those early ones were used. Now when these typefaces came out, they were originally referred to as grotesque because they were such a radical departure from the traditional serif topography and funding thing, we still use the term grotesque today as a classification for sans-serif typefaces. A great example of that is accidents task, which would later evolve into Helvetica. So the sans-serif, not very popular at the time when they came out, but they will catch on. So now we're in the 18 hundreds. We have industrialization, we have mass printing up newspapers, we have advertising, we have posters. And this is going to bring a lot of new variations of topography, such as bolder faces. Things out will capture the readers attention. We see the advent of slab serifs scene here. And we see fonts like Rockwell, which were specifically designed for advertising and newspapers to get people's attention. So the slab serifs have these. Thick blocky serifs and they're primarily used in headlines, not so much in body copy like we see here. So also around this time we are seeing the advent of typewriters. And typewriters had these mechanical considerations for how they could function. So we had to develop this new type of font called monospaced or fixed width, in that every letter of the alphabet was essentially the same width. Now this is the opposite of 98% of all the fonts out there, which we refer to as proportional fonts. Nowadays, the most famous common monospaced or fixed width fonts would be courier or Monaco. Of course, there are also less readable and take up more space on the page. So that's why we typically don't use them much anymore. Okay, so then we hit the 20th century and that's when typography really starts to take off. So in 1927, Paul Renner designs Futura, and he designs it based on simple geometric forms. So the a is the triangle, that n is the square, the o is the circle. And few Tara has these really even weight strokes, right? There's not much variation. The thicks and thins. Now Futura is the favorite typeface of the director Wes Anderson. So as you watch his films in the future, keep an eye out because it's always in there. Now. Fast-forward, mid-century 1957, MAX messenger designs Helvetica. Here's an example we see from the New York subway system. Helvetica just says that clean stand up. Almost, slightly ambiguous, almost generic look to it. But this is an example of one of these great typefaces that comes along. It stands the test of time and it communicates very well. And therefore it's adopted by all kinds of designers systems. Also in 1957, universe is designed by Adrian Frutiger. Now he also designed one of my favorite songs serifs, Robin year, and universe was notable in its release because he came out with so many weights, so many font family members when fruiting or put him out. He was one of the first guys to put these numbers at the end to classify their weights. So the smaller the number 45, the lighter the typeface, and the bigger the number 93, the heavier the typeface, the bolder the typeface. Now this system was adopted by other type designers. And you can still see this used in some of the. So on your computer. Next up, you're never gonna guess what happens. Computers. This is the next radical shift in topography, the advent of computer-based fonts. Now this example here has become quite famous. It's called Chicago. It was installed on all the original Macintosh computers. And these first computer-based fonts were essentially pixel arrays that were called bitmap fonts. And they were designed specifically for the screen and the low resolution screens that we had at the time. Each letter is basically an image that scales up and down. There are a lot of limitations on what you can do with sizing and format. They are very simple, but they're also not very legible. It's not even fair to compare the legibility of Chicago to say castle alone on a printed page. Now fun fact. You may see this sentence a lot when you're testing out different typefaces. The Quick Brown Fox jumps over a lazy dog. This is called a pan Graham. Basically it's a sentence that includes every letter of the alphabet. So when you're testing out a font, you can use this little sentence and you can really get a quick overview of that entire type. Now moving away from these old pixelated bitmapped bonds, we developed what we use today, which are vector-based typefaces, which means they can be scaled up or down in size without resolution. There are essentially based on a mathematical formula as opposed to a pixelated image. And then you'll never guess what happens next. In an ironic twist of fate. Remember where we started with the pictographs and the hieroglyphs? Well now we've come full circle and we have our emojis. 7. The 1%.: Alright everyone, congratulations. You are now in the 1% of people who know more about typography than anyone else in the world. So please use your powers wisely. And don't forget to check out the activities and projects and see what you can come up with. Thanks so much. 8. BONUS VIDEO: Types of Type: The Family Tree of Typography: With so many different typefaces, it's important to understand the different categories and the different time periods that they came from. So you can think of typography has a big family tree. We're going to look at the individual branches and see how these different categories of typefaces make up that tree. When you're looking at a typeface, there's a few different things you can look at to really help you decipher what it is and where it came from. First thing I look for is the thicks and thins of the letters. There are few different letters that always point you in the right direction of what this typeface is. The first one is the letter a. Lowercase a is a great example because there's so many different versions and variations that can go into a lowercase. A lowercase g would be another example. So as we go through these typefaces, keep an eye on those unique letters. Think of it as forensic typography. So we're gonna start by going way back to a typeface called factor. Factor is considered a black letter typeface. And these are one of the earliest typefaces that were used in printing in the Western world. Factor was designed nearly 500 years ago in the 15 hundreds. And it was actually commissioned by the Roman Empire. Now on the metaphorical family tree of topography, if we were to break this down into two main branches, those branches would be serif and sans-serif. So the serifs are the little beat or the little accents on the edges of each letter. Whereas the term sans-serif, which is a French word, SON, meaning without. So it means without serif. Those little accents and those little feed have essentially been cut off into more streamlined letter forms. So let's start by going through the main categories of the serif type faces. Three here, and you'll see how the letters sort of evolve over time. So the first serif typeface we're going to look at is Garamond. Garamond is considered an old style or sometimes called a humanist. Sarah Garamond was designed by a guy named Claude to Garamond, Of course, in the 16th century. So we're talking about the 15 hundreds here. At the time it was pretty breakthrough is really great for readability. He really pushed the variations between the thicks and thins that aligns. So pretty amazing. I mean, this typeface is over 400 years old a day and we still use it. Other examples of an old style serif typeface would be Adobe Jensen, or gobbledy, sometimes seen as gawdy, old-style, easier to remember right? Now as we move forward through time and the typefaces begin to evolve, we move into what's called the transitional phase of typography. So our example here is Baskerville, which is sort of crossing between the old style that we just saw into what we'll see next, which is called the monitored. How Baskerville as a transitional, was designed by a guy named John Baskerville in the year 1757. So about 250 years ago. More definition here. Thicks and thins are the lines versus Garamond. Another example of a transitional serif would be one of my favorites, Times New Roman. I do feel that Times New Roman is much more refined though, whereas Baskerville, Baskerville has more of that old school, sort of crafty handmade look a little less refined, but still very nice and reads variable. Okay, fast forward through time. And now we've hit the modern serifs. So this modern serif here, the dough, was designed in the late 18th century. Now this example here is a French typeface and it was designed in the late 18th century. So after baskerville, and this is considered our modern serif. So now what you're seeing is very extreme variation between the thicks and thins. And you see very defined serifs, almost like straight little lines. Now it's a little less readable. And it's not something you'd want to use in body copy. Because when you really shrink down that type, those thin lines are almost going to like get lost in the page, right? They're gonna kinda wash out. But these are great for headlines and the modern serif is still being used. You see it a lot in fashion magazines. I want to say Vogue or L decor are both using modern serif typefaces as they're masked heads. A more well-known example of a modern serif that you probably have on your computer would be Dido's italian counterpart, but Donny. Okay, now let's look at a line up of these three categories of typefaces. So from left to right, we have the old-style, the transitional and the modern. And here you can really see those variations and the thicks and thins and how the letters were essentially cut or designed. You know, the old style looks a little more curvy and handmade, whereas the transitional is a little more refined. And the modern is a very sleek, Barry hard lined, very refined. Now before we jump ahead to the sans-serif typefaces, I want to talk about a couple other branches of the Serif tree. The first example that you probably seen is a slab serif Rockwell is a very well-known, well-designed Slab serif. These can also be referred to as Egyptian typefaces. But basically you can identify them by the really thick, blunt, block-like serifs that stick out the edges of these letters. You know, at the time that this was designed in 1934, there were so many mainstay fonts that advertisers wanted something else that could kind of pop off the page. They wanted something new or that people hadn't seen. So they came up with these slab serifs. Now Rockwell was developed by the mono type phone injury. Now these foundries are essentially the organizations or companies that would design and develop new typefaces. So a lot of times when you're going through your list of fonts on your computer, you'll see the name of a font with a couple of letters next to it. For example, curls empty. So that empty represents the foundry that it came from, in this case mono type. Now another famous example of the slab serif would be career. We've all seen courier sort of looks like a typewriter right? Now. Courier is unique in that. It's also considered what we call a monospaced or fixed width typeface. That means that all the letters are the same with, you know, a monospaced or a fixed width typeface is the opposite of 95% or 98% of all other typefaces out there, which are called proportional fonts in that individual letters are proportional to one another. Now the reason these were designed is because this was the age of the typewriter, right? And there were so many mechanical limitations to the typewriters that it made more sense to keep all the letters the same width. Courier specifically was designed by a woman named Susan Nebraska in the year 1955. Now if you're interested in this idea of a fixed width typeface, there's actually a more modern Sans-Serif version on your computer called Monaco. So you can check that out and play with it. Generally speaking, I avoid monospaced typefaces. Unless there's a really unique project or use that I can apply it to. They just don't read as well as the proportional fonts. Okay, let's move on to the sans-serif branch of the tree. Now the first sans-serif I want to show you is the humanist. Now, just like with the serif typefaces, how we had the old style and the transitional and the modern, we have the same set of categories and evolution in the sans-serif typefaces. We have a humanist, We have a transitional, and then our modern slash and jam option. So starting with the humanist, we have Gill Sans. Gil Sans is considered the British Helvetica. It was designed by a gentleman named Eric Gill in the year 1926, so about a 100 years old. This is considered humanists because it almost has that slightly calligraphic feel to it. Like, like maybe a hand could have written or drawn this out. And again, let's go back to that lowercase a, see that little loop. See that little hook on the bottom. That's what helps us define this as a humanist typeface. The other thing we always want to look at again, remember, is the variation between the fix depends how you look at that capital letter G. You're not really seeing any variation in the thick and thin. But then again, you go to that lowercase a and look where that bowl kind of attaches to the greater stem of that a. It gets much thinner at the connection points, doesn't it? Alright, Helvetica. Helvetica is a great typeface, whether you like it or not. And it is the perfect example as our transitional sans-serif. So what does that mean? There's a little less line width variation. Again, let's go to that a, at the end of the word. The connection points we signed Gil Sans are much thinner than the connection points were now seen in Helvetica. There's not a whole lot of thick and thin variation in this typeface. And that's what's kinda great about Helvetica. But I think that helvetica strengths are also its weaknesses. Its sort of the pseudo generic typeface that's used in all these sort of corporate brands. And, and you know, it has its level of ambiguity to it. But that's what I like about it, is you can apply it to things and the other elements of the design will really define the tone of the project. You know, Helvetica is just this very straight plane stand up kinda typeface. And if you haven't seen the documentary about it, I believe it's on Netflix. It's pretty interesting. So just for the record, Helvetica was designed by a gentleman named Max messenger in 1957. So, so it's essentially a mid-century typeface, right? Another classic example of a transitional serif and other beautiful typeface would be Universe spelled without any 0s. Okay, evolving and moving on, we're now going to the geometric sans-serif. This is moving into the modern evolution. The sans-serif typefaces. Now it's a little bit of a trick here because few was technically designed in 1920, seven. So even though it was designed earlier on than one might expect, it was really ahead of its time. So thanks to Paul Renner, who was the designer for that. Now we refer to these as geometric typefaces because the letter forms themselves are based on simple geometric forms. You can see a triangle in the capital a, you can see a square in the capital F. You can see a circle and the capital O, et cetera. Now another very famous example of a geometric sans-serif typeface is centered, which you might recognize as the Weezer font. All right, let's go to the lineup. So here on the left, humanist to transitional, to geometric. Clearly we see something different in the geometric typeface. This isn't to say that all humanists and transitional sans-serif typefaces necessarily have that bowl war that we call it that open space. Before the examples I showed you, this really does tell a lot, again, lowercase a. So on the left with the humanist, again, look at the variation of the thicken that then see the little hook, the little tail on the a gives it that little humanists touch. Moving into the transitional, less thick and thin. Look at the tale. It's a little less accentuated. It's a little more flat k, a little, little bit less of that human touch. And then onto the geometric, the tail is essentially gone. And there's even less variation on the thick and thin. Easy right? Now as you know, there's a whole lot more out there than what I've shown you here. And I think for the purpose of the class, I think we should just show a couple of those other branches that are on our topography family tree. So this is Verdana. And Vedanta is unique in that it was specifically designed for electronic display. So when computers came out, if you remember the old ones, that very low screen resolutions, right? Very low pixel resolutions. Now, that became an issue when you're loading up fonts and displaying typefaces on screens. Because they became harder to read and understand, especially on smaller scales. So the designers tried to combat this by doing a couple things. Number one, they increased what we called the x-height, which is the space between the baseline and the top of the lowercase letters. This added a little bit more readability. And they also work to open up the balls and the open spaces within the letter so that more of those negative space pixels could really shine through the letters. L Verdana is a relatively new font. It was designed in 1996 by Matthew Carter as a commissioned by Microsoft. Simpler curves, more open forums. Okay, then we have script bots. Now a script is kinda like it sounds. A handwritten casual, cursive style typeface. Brush Script has been around for a long time actually since 1942. And it was designed by Robert Smith, not the lead singer of the cure. Then we have this whole category of what we simply call display type phases. These are all those weird gimmicky ones that you see out there on defined or those other sites that you can download typefaces. Cracked is pretty well known. It's preloaded on a lot of computers. These display typefaces are, you know, ornamental and decorative or novelty. Definitely not the type of typeface that you want to use for body copy. Unless you're trying to do something really experimental, then by all means, break the rules. Last but not least, I want to mention that ding bat typefaces. This one in particular is web meetings. These are also referred to as printer's ornaments. And that name came from actual printers ornaments that were used in letterpress studios as a way to identify who the printer was. It was essentially their logo or signature that they would plant on a page or used to decorate before they and technology to print photos. But at the end of the day, these symbols are glyphs, just like individual letters are glyphs. Their symbols that represent some, something that needs to be communicated. Now I don't use these a whole lot, but one tip I have for you, they can be handy if you need a little icon or something. So looking here, maybe need a little of bicycle icon for some project you're working on. You know, I can drive that bicycle, but it might take me 20 or 30 minutes. Whereas if I keep a cache of Ding bats and web things, you know, I can pull from these. So I can use them for low buttons if I need to. Alright, easy. So the main things to remember here are when you're playing forensic topography with your friends at your late night dinner party. Don't forget to look at the lowercase a is. And really consider the thicks and thins up the different typefaces you're seeing that will help you determine the category they're in. And maybe even the timeframe that they're coming from.