The Anatomy of Type - Part 3 and 4

Definitions;
Typeface - A collection of characters, letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation etc. which have the same distinct design. Different weights of the same font are all the same typeface. Could be up to 15 fonts in 1 typeface. Regular is the initial design for a font, its just the starting point for a typeface.
Font - The physical means used to create a typeface, be it computer code, lithographic film, metal or woodcut. One width, one weight, one style of a typeface with a constant stroke and weight.
Glyphs - Glyphs are individual elements which make up a full font.

Vocabulary;

• Font
• Typeface
• Font family
• Weight
• Stroke
• Uppercase / lowercase
• Tracking
• Kerning
• Serif
• Sans serif
• Script
• Blackletter
• Display 
• Monotype
• Symbol

Gill Sans;

• Regular/Italic
• Light/Italic
• Bold/Italic
• Ultra Bold Condensed

There are a variation of fonts in a typeface, for example, Gill Sans has 7 fonts in 1 typeface.

With this information, as a group we had to put our typefaces into catagories of; regular, bold, light, italic, ultra bold condensed.

Regular and Condensed

With this task it was quite simple to find which would go into each catagory as they were our fonts, and most of us chose regular. Although looking again at the different font's you can see the different weights of each font, whether they be bold or condensed it takes a lot to see which goes into which catagory. This was quite hard to do as a group as there are some strong opinions in there, which can't be argued with.

As there are a range of catagories which different fonts fall into, as a group we had to organise our typefaces into the four main catagories.
Gothic - Standard simple sans serif font.
Block - Display and header fonts.
Roman - Standard serif font.
Script - Hand rendered, Sable font.

Script, Gothic, Block, Roman

This was a lot harder to put into catagories as we found that some of them crossed over two. Although some of the catagories are easy to establish, such as script and gothic. Roman and Block were hard to tell apart, as some are both. Also it was harder to do as a group because some people disagree with others, although we came to a mutual conclusion. After putting them into groups we found that they should be difficult to organise as block is a tricky catagory as there can be script block, gothic block and roman block. This explains why we found it so difficult to establish the difference between some of them.

After this session, we were told to look at our typefaces, then we had to find every different font in that typeface.

Typefaces;

Gill Sans;

• Regular 
• Bold
• Bold italic
• Italic
• Light
• Light italic

Courier;

• Regular
• Bold
• Bold oblique
• Oblique

Copper std black;

• Regular
• Italic

Impact;

• Regular

Optima;

• Regular
• Bold
• Bold italic
• Extra black
• Italic

 Then using regular in each typeface we had to find what point size is the easiest to read.

Caps or no Caps?

Using Gill Sans I decided to experiment with using either capital letters throughout, lower case or all upper case, and to get the largest varience I decided to go with upper case throughout.
I started with each of my typefaces and tried out three different point sizes, 12pt, 34pt and 72pt. Then with chose the point size which looked best and took four off it, also added four onto it to see which looked more readable. 

Gill Sans;

12pt 34pt 72pt

30pt 34pt 38pt

38pt

With Gill Sans I chose 38pt size as I think it looks more readable at this size. This might be because it is a gothic font, sans serif, which a lot of the time looks better smaller.

Optima;

12pt, 34pt, 72pt

8pt, 12pt 16pt

16pt

Optima in my opinion looks best and most readable at 16pt, I think this is because it is very simple and clear so works at many different fonts, but works well at 16pt.

Impact;

12pt, 34pt, 72pt

64pt, 72pt, 80pt

80pt

Impact looks more readable and better at 80point size, this is because it is a bold font, therefore works better bigger, like a headline or title.

Courier;

12pt, 34pt, 72pt

30pt, 34pt, 38pt

30pt

Courier is most readable at 30pt. It does not work larger as it was designed to be a body copy font, for example typewriters. But I think it also looks readable at 30pt.

Copper std Black;

12pt, 34pt, 72pt

30pt, 34pt, 38pt, 54pt

54pt

Copper black is also a bold font which looks best and most readable larger. I thought that 34pt and 72pt looked good, so I thought about finding a point size in the middle of them, therefore I chose 54pt.