Type Workshops.

I never really considered myself a type based designer, it's something that doesn't come naturally to me at all. That doesn't mean, however, that I do not appreciate it's worth, or admire when it is done well. The type workshops are already beginning to make my head hurt, and it hasn't helped that I have missed a few. So this is me trying to make sense of what I have been told, and filling in the gaps of that which I have missed.


The first session.
We looked at how different aspects of a piece of typography can change, however subtly, how it is interpreted. We started off by picking typefaces to reflect out voices, I chose Curlz, just for a giggle, but it proved to have some interesting results. We managed to pick out exactly what kind of voice someone who spoke in Curlz might have, and it certainly wasn't mine!
We also looked at how we can portray emotion using type. Using the word 'dog', we tried to change how the dog was feeling using different typefaces. The results were all relatively similar, but it was the minor changes in positioning, size, and weight that really made the word seem 'happy' or 'sad'.


For the 'sad' dog, I chose Baskerville - regular. This serif font is more formal than most of the sans serif fonts out there, and the lowercase letters are less attention grabbing than if I had chosen uppercase. However the real reason for me choosing this is because the 'ear' on the G, actually looks like a dogs ear, lowered like it has just been told off. The loop of the G also looks similar to a tail. 
The positioning of the word on a page also has a huge baring on how it is read. For instance, I've made this image bigger so that you can see it, but I would've made it very small, and positioned it somewhere towards the bottom of the page, possibly to the right hand corner, or central. Both of these create a feeling of loneliness or solitude, adding to the dog's unhappiness.. :( 

The second session.
This session I missed, though I have tried my own experiments based on what others have told me. They were looking at sentences, and how the problems faced in the previous session are duplicated by the presence of more words! 

The first problem being, how to break a sentence up without destroying it's readability? Sometimes what looks good, doesn't always read good, and therefore this should be one of the first things to consider when laying out a piece of type. After a while of playing around, these are the two variations I chose for my proverb. The first example reads almost like a line from a poem, there is a slight rhyme in the words 'cannot' and 'spots' which I quite like. But then the second example totally breaks that. It reads slightly disjointed, but seems to have more impact this way. 

Interesting stuff. These are the things that go totally unnoticed, 

unless you spend a bit of time trying to decode them

Finally, there was a mention of kerning. The way to do this properly, so I have been told, is to take the biggest area of negative space and  reflect that across the entire word. As you can see using my name, the biggest area of blank space is between the L and the A. Using that as a base, I spaced the rest of the letters to reflect that area. Simples. 

(the top example is the newly kerned version)

The third session.

(will be posted as soon as I recover the work from college!)