Dorchester — May 9th 2017
If we were to take one underlying message from this fascinating subject it is that good style and appearance should enable the content and not divert attention away from it. The reader should be fully absorbed in the content and barely be aware of all the effort and care put into its layout on the page.
Before the interval, Euan took us through the gamut of font styles, some famous designs and designers, and how each font’s personality and weight, with leading, kerning and tracking, can be used to improve the overall effectiveness of text and pages. He showed where most of these options are available in Apple’s Pages, and we briefly visited Quark Xpress to look at complex style sheets. He discussed layout styles and settings, designing a glyph, font classification terminology, as well as Open Type ligatures, decorations, and Open Type–SVG font technology. Euan showed us several transparency effects. Part 1 finished with a brief look at applications for designing and modifying fonts, the (paid for) Robofont and the (free, open source) FontForge. Converting text glyphs to ‘curves’ by revealing the underlying vectors of their construction opens up many individual possibilities.
After the break we looked at the positioning of text on the page, the effects of runarounds, hanging indents, “rivers” and the “colour” of type. We then explored developments in typesetting through wood and metal type, Monotype and Linotype, with short videos showing these wonderfully complex mechanical devices in action. Digital pages and imagesetters followed, including today’s “Direct to Plate” technology.
Euan’s last slide left us with three thoughts.
1. The task is to let the content flow directly into the mind of the reader, who may even be hardly aware of reading the page, poster or whatever.
2. The first 80% of quality is easy, it’s the last 20% that takes serious time (and 80% of the cost).
3. If someone thinks “my granny could do that” the job is well done.
Comments
Page 1
Page 1