Type 02 This Means That Definitions

Sign: An act or gesture used to convey an idea, a desire, information, or a command. facial expressions, speech disorders, slogans graffiti, commercials, medical symtoms, marketing, music, drawings, paintings, poetry, design.

Verbal: Stop means stop, apple means apple, crown means crown

Visual: Stop means danger, apple means healthy, crown means king

Index: Something that serves to guide, point out, or otherwise facilitate reference.

Smoke is caused by a fire

Ticking is caused by a clock

Symbol: Often thought to be composed of two inseparable elements: the signifier and the signified. We can have a different signifier tied to the same signified, and vice versa. 

Verbal: Apple means temptation, healthy, or fruit

Visual: Scales = Justice, Bird = Peace, Rose = Beauty

Working PDF of my book choices

Questions from the Reading

What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph?

Indentions, small caps, bold or colored typeface

What are some things to look out for when hyphenating text.

Try to leave at least 2 characters on the line and 3 following, avoid hyphenating proper nouns.

Define font hinting. Why is it necessary?

Font hinting is using a rasterized grid to display letter forms that look right to the human eye. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing a clear, legible text.

What is letterspacing/tracking? How do you track in Illustrator or InDesign?

Tracking is the process of loosening or tightening a block of text by adjusting the size of the text height. To manipulate tracking in Illustrator or InDesign, type or select a numeric value for Tracking (looks like A over A) in the Character panel.

Define Kerning? Name 8 kerning pairs. How do you kern in InDesign or Illustrator?

Kerning is the process of adding or subtracting space between specific pairs of characters. You can automatically kern type using metrics kerning or optical kerning. Metrics kerning uses kern pairs, which are included with most fonts. Kern pairs contain information about the spacing of specific pairs of letters. Some of these are: LA, P., To, Tr, Ta, Tu, Te, Ty, Wa, WA, We, Wo, Ya, and Yo. To kern in Illustrator or InDesign, type or select a numeric value for kerning (looks like A V) in the Character panel.

What is wordspacing?

Word spacing refers to the size of the space between words.

Explain DIN

DIN, an acronym for the German Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization), and the name of an increasingly large realist sans-serif typeface family. The design was based on a 1905 typeface for the Royal Prussian Railway Administration and was originally used for schematics and blueprints. As the typeface grew in popularity, it was released as a metal type, made into stencils for use on vehicles and in train yards, and used for street and building signage. DIN's structure has been accredited as an early forerunner of the typographic grid and widely used by signage and corporate identities around the world.

What is a baseline grid?

A baseline grid is an imaginary grid upon which type sits. The baseline pf a piece of type can be forced to 'snap' to this grid to maintain continuity across the pages of a design.

How many characters per line is optimal? Is there a range?
Optimal words per line is between 40-80. 

Define aesthetic text alignment (optically hanging punctuation)

Hanging punctuation controls the alignment of punctuation marks for a specific paragraph. Paragraph alignment determines the margin from which the punctuation hangs. 

What is a typographic river?

A typographic river occurs in justified text blocks when the separation of the words leaves gaps of white space in several lines. A river effect is created where white space gaps align through the text.

What is a widow?

A widow is a lone word at the end of a paragraph.

What is an orphan?

An orphan is the final one or two lines of a paragraph separated from the main paragraph to form a new column and should be avoided at all costs.

Photographer Bios

Tim Walker



Timothy "Tim" Walker was born in England in 1970 and is a British fashion photographer. Walker’s photographs have appeared in Vogue, month by month, for over a decade. Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterize his style. After concentrating on the photographic still for 15 years, Tim Walker is now making film.

After graduating in 1994, Walker worked as a freelance photography assistant in London before moving to New York City as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon. On returning to England, he initially concentrated on portrait and documentary work for UK newspapers. At the age of 25, he shot his first fashion story for Vogue, and has photographed for the British, Italian, and American editions ever since.

Terry Richardson

Richardson was born in New York City, the son of Bob Richardson, a fashion photographer who struggled with schizophrenia and drug abuse. Richardson's photographs often contain graphic sexual subject matter. Richardson has shot advertisements for fashion designers and editorial photographs. Richardson has produced several award winning campaigns for Diesel, including the ‘Global Warming Ready’ which won a Silver Lion for Print at Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2007. Throughout the years he has also produced several private portraits for the company’s founder, Renzo Rosso. In September 2011, they hosted a mutual book launch together with fashion editor Carine Roitfeld, at Colette in Paris.

Alec Soth

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is an American photographer notable for "large-scale American projects" featuring the Midwestern United States. His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. His work has been compared to photographers such as Walker Evans and Stephen Shore.

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (born September 26, 1962) is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged scenes of American homes and neighborhoods.

In the mid 1980s, Crewdson studied photography at SUNY Purchase, near Port Chester, NY. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Cooper Union, Vassar College, and Yale University where he has been on the faculty since 1993. He is now a professor at the Yale University School of Art. Crewdson's photographs usually take place in small town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. The photographs are shot using a large crew, and are elaborately staged and lighted. He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.

David Hilliard

 David Hilliard, born 1964, in Lowell, Massachusetts, is an American photographer. He received his MFA from Yale University in 1994. Hilliard is a fine arts photographer that mainly works with panoramic photographs. He draws from his personal life and those around him for his subjects and records events through his work. His photographs mainly focus on the
 ordinary day life but there is a fictitious aspect to the work because many of the scenes are staged. Hilliard’s vibrant color photographs, usually triptychs or larger compositions, present elaborate narratives exploring a range of themes and situations, from the awkwardness of adolescence to masculinity disarmed.

Robert Doisneau

Robert Doisneau (April 14, 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne – April 1, 1994) was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris; together with Henri Cartier-Bresson he was a pioneer of photojournalism. Doisneau was known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes.


Influenced by the work of André Kertész, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in over twenty books Doisneau presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments Doisneau's work gives unusual prominence and dignity to children's street culture; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect. Robert Doisneau is one of France's best known photographers, for his street photography and the many playful images in everyday French life. His photographs over the course of several decades provide people with a great record of French life. He has published over twenty books with realistic and charming pictures of personal moments in the lives of individuals.

Ellen von Unwerth

Ellen von Unwerth (born 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany) is a photographer and director, specializing in erotic femininity. She worked as a fashion model for ten years herself before moving behind the camera, and now makes fashion, editorial, and advertising photographs.

Ellen von Unwerth found fame when she first photographed Claudia Schiffer. Her work has been published in top magazines likeVogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, The Face, Arena, Twill, L'Uomo Vogue and I-D, and she has published several books of photography. She won first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography in 1991.

Von Unwerth has also directed short films for fashion designers, and music videos for several pop musicians. She has directed many commercials and web films for top brands like Revlon, Clinique, Equinox and others, many featuring celebrities.

Letter Fountain Questions

What are small capitals? How are they different than setting something in ALL CAPS? Does your font have small caps? If not name a font that does.
Small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. They are used to emphasize something without using bold or italics, while making sure the text does not appear too large. My font, Gotham, does not have small capitals, but other fonts like Garamond do.

What are ligatures? Why are they used? When are they not used? What are common ligatures? Does your font have ligatures? If not name a font that does.
A ligature is a special character that combines multiple letters into a single character. Type designers create ligatures because they look better than setting the same character combinations individually, and also to solve the problem of characters that “crash” into each other when set in adjacent positions.Again, my font does not have ligatures, but the typeface Garamond does.


What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe?
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark used for three main reasons: to omit one or more letters, mark a possessive case, and mark plurals. A foot mark is a symbol for the unit of measurement, a foot.

What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)?
An inch mark is a two straight vertical lines making up the symbol denoting to the unit of measurement inches. Quotation marks are punctuation marks appearing at the beginning and ending of a quote. Smart quotation marks have a curve to them, to not be confused for inch marks. Smart quotes are usually curved in shape and have different opening and closing versions for use at the beginning and end of quoted material, respectively.

What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used?
A hyphen (-) is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. An em-dash (—)  is used in a sentence to indicate a break in thought. An en-dash (–) is traditionally half the width of an em dash and is used when denoting a range such as Friday–Saturday.

Made a simple .gif today for my wonderful font Gotham! To view it you need to click on the image. Still wondering if I should tweak it more.. For some reason the concept of making .gifs is so much easier for me than understanding how Flash works.

I am also planning on compiling all of my typography layouts into a single pdf and uploading them soon, so stay posted!

Information Graphics

I have just published my infographic project to Behance - check it out here! Today we presented our projects to the class and turned everything in - it feels so good to have everything completed. Now we begin our next project - re-designing a Criterion Collection DVD cover!