Saturday, July 7th, 2007
Day 4: Week 1 Ends
Another successful morning critique on Friday, along with some additional discussion about typography and typographic/visual variables with Karen Moyer.
Typographic Variables to Remember
- Structure
- The forms of the letters. Think one-story “a” vs two-story “a”.
- Proportion
- Height to width ratio.
- Shape
- The nuances that give typefaces their flavor. Serif vs sans, stem to crossbar transitions, etc.
- Weight
- Stroke weight, defines the min & max of strokes within the same (optical) proportion. Light, Roman, Bold, Black.
- Size
- The amount of area the type occupies. 8pt, 12pt, 24pt, 60pt.
- Tone
- Variation within one color. Grayscale, duotone.
- Color
- Hue, Value, Saturation.
- Texture
- Variation or pattern of an element. Different printing methods can add texture (mezzotint, different line screens).
- Position
- Where on the format the element is placed.
- Orientation
- How the baseline orients to the format
Alex also brought everyone up to speed on typefaces and type families and why all typefaces are not created equal. Overall a very successful afternoon.
Looking back on the first week I’d declare it an immensely successful beginning to my graduate school experience.
Just a note: This idea for documenting my CMU experience comes directly from Dan Saffer’s blog about his time at CMU. In tribute, here is Dan’s Week 1 Wrap-Up from 2003.