Bridgette Goes to College

     A couple of weeks ago I talked about the “vibes” of type and how different typefaces have completely different feels to them. The ones I covered were mainly display types, such as what would be used in titles, or headlines, or logos etc. Those are the ones you’re allowed to have fun with. Those are the ones I find myself “oohing” and “aahing” over as I scroll through lists of fonts for five hours.      So yes, finding the right font for your title is immeasurably important.      But what about the rest of the piece?      I’ve been laying out a short story in InDesign for the last week or so and for the main text or body of the story I decided to use Garamond. Garamond is probably one of the oldest typefaces on earth, and it’s reliable and non-distracting. Fun Fact: Harry Potter uses 12 pt Garamond.      Non-distracting is the goal. If you have large quantities of text, and you want people t...

     Leading is the space between the lines of text. It’s a term that comes from Ye Olde days of printing presses and the strip of lead that was placed between the series of metal letter stamps above and those below.      Kerning deals with the spaces between individual letters. This shouldn’t be confused with tracking (sometimes called plain old letter-spacing) which distributes the space between letters evenly and uniformly.      And as far as I’m aware the space between words is just called word-spacing. How original.      These things are very important because if the letter-spacing or word-spacing is not adjusted appropriately there can be some unfortunate results. These unfortunate results (fortunately) have resulted in some very amusing memes.      So if you’re not looking to become the next big meme, please pay attention to how close or far apart your letters and w...

     You’re probably familiar, at least vaguely with the invention known as the printing press. 1450, Johannes Gutenberg, all that. So I needn’t tell you about the importance of that machine and the resulting boom of printed materials.      But the predecessor to type was lettering. Lettering is, essentially, fancy handwriting, but is so much more than just fancy handwriting. Think imperial scribes writing artful and precise characters on scrolls, or monks copying the bible by hand. And then Johannes strolled up and said “You know what? I think I’ve got a cure for carpel tunnel.”      Ok, obviously it didn’t happen like that. But type, being machine produced, saved a whole lot of time and hand cramps. Even still, the individual metal letters had to be placed by hand, and they were backwards. This was necessary to transfer it on to paper, but can you imagine if that was still the case with digital type? Honestly I can’t come up wit...

  I hemmed and hawed, of course, over what to blog about this month.      I ’ve settled on type.      Typography.   We almost had a textbook on typography, and then we didn’t. I was mildly disappointed.   I can’t claim to know anything about type (although I was looking for a specific kind of serif typeface the other day and my mother had no idea what I was talking about, so I at least know enough jargon to confuse the common-folk), but I find it highly interesting and I’m very committed to using typefaces and fonts that have the right vibe and play well together.   Vibe is probably not the Professional Designer’s Way™ of choosing a typeface, but if the vibe is off, jiminy crispies the results could be disastrous.    Let’s see if I can explain my point with visuals. And unnecessary humor. I want you to take me seriously.   Of course, Mr. Roman. Oh, Mr. Roman was your father? Alright, Ti...