Typesetting and Presentation

Process and Production - 28/09/2016

Aidan Nolan - Week 1


In this process and production, I looked at typesetting to build and sharpen my typography skills. Typography is an area that I need help with so I think this process and production will help me with my typography skills like which typeface to use and why.

What is typesetting?
- Typesetting is the arrangement of text, individual letter and symbols to visually display in an appealing way.

We started off looking at the different definitions and terms in typography to get an idea of what they are if I ever come across them.

There are 4 basic groups that typography can be placed into...

In this part, I learned the difference between 'Serif' and 'San Serif'. The difference is that 'Serif' letters has little strokes at the end of each letter but for 'San Serif', it doesn't, the end stops.

This is just a glossary of some type terminology...

The next step is where I thought helped me the most because it's something I could use when I'm using text in design and what each thing does to the text. 

This is called Kerning. It's the process of changing the space between each individual letter within a word, as seen below. This was a little task that I took part in, I altered the space of the letters in InDesign. This would be useful if I wanted to move just one letter away from a word. 

This is called Tracking. This process is similar to 'Kerning' but instead of just altering one letter each time, you can alter the whole word at the same time, as seen below.

This is called Leading. This process refers to the distance between the baselines of the type or line of text, as seen below. This could be useful if I had to write alot of text in a specific amount of space, I could use this technique to shrink the distance so I can fit more or I could increase the distance to make it easier to read for the viewer. 

In this part, cropping could be used to make a typeface look good. I experimented with this idea and created some samples just to see if I could improve the look of it. Some worked and others didn't, I felt like this technique only works with certain letters that has lots going on for them.

Task 1

In this task, I was given a word on the right and I had to choose a suitable typeface to go with that word, I was given three choices that were placed on the left. I feel like this task was useful because when I chose a typeface, I had to give a good reason why I chose it and why it was suitable instead of choosing one because it looks good. This is something I need to learn.

I think I did fairly good on this task because I chose the most suitable one for most of them and I actually had a reason for each choice I made.

For this one, I chose 'Helvetica Bold' because it's bold so it's right at your face to represent that it is important and it has that authority feel to it which I feel the other two lack.

I chose 'Futura Bold' because companies like Nike have used this so it's familiar when it comes to sport and this one feels more sporty than the other two.

For this one, I was undecided between 'Chalkduster' because it reminds me of the chalk and blackboard in school and 'Albertus' because it's serious like school.

I chose 'Avenir Light' because the typeface is clean, simple and modern which suits luxury because it relates to the look of luxury.

I went for the most obvious one which is 'Rosewood' because it reminds me of the old western and cowboys who hanged around in saloons.

I chose 'Learning Curve' because when I think of craft, I think of knitting etc and the typeface looks like a needle and string was used to make it which relates to what I was thinking.

I chose 'Gotham' because it was the most obvious one, it's clean, simple and very minimal.

For this one, I chose 'Six Caps' because when I think of Manhattan, everything is tall and big just like the typeface.

For the last one, I chose 'Farray' because the typeface has a feel of space to it like it's used by aliens which is what some people think of when they think of the universe.

Task 2

For this task, I was given words and for those words, I had to manipulate them into something that was relevant to that word e.g run could be changed to ruuuun, because the word looks like it is running.

I liked this task because I had to be creative about each word. Some were more difficult than others but once you get the hang of it, it becomes easier.