Specificity of Type
Letterforms should be designed to reflect
their purpose, audience
and context.
Cyrus Highsmith hit it right on. A typeface is designed for a purpose, or should be. Each letterform has a personality, or lack there of, to make all the characters work together to create an overall personality of the typeface. I think that for signage type each character needs to have some individuality while maintaining a similarity to the rest of the letters; each character needs to be easily distinguished at a glance so that legibility in a short time is not compromised. I think that when type is designed for body text there needs to be less individuality in the characters, this will allow for more even coloration of the type, as well as quicker reading at the small text size.
At the end of 2008 the Dutch company, Spraqt, designed a typeface called Ecofont. Ecofont was designed with ‘holes’ in the middle of the letters to allow for less ink to be used during printing. When it is used at small text sizes, depending on the paper and dot gain of the printer the ‘holes’ would not be noticeable.
“Four typefaces are enough to address any typographic solution.”
Wolfgang Weingart
It is not a uniformly thought of idea that there needs to be specialized typefaces, or for that matter, any new typefaces. Massimo Vignelli has long been known as the designer who needs only five typefaces, Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Futura and Helvetica. Vignelli wrote, “in the new computer age the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture.” I agree with Vignelli that there is too much visual pollution due to too much bad typography. However, I believe he is trying to fix it in the wrong way. Instead of being limited to a select palette, typefaces should be designed to reflect and compliment their use and their surroundings.
List of Possible Purposes of Typefaces:
Signage
Street
Wayfinding
Warning
Front Lighting
Back Lighting
Informative
Architectural
On Screen Use
Accompany another face
Body Text
Logotypes
Novelty
Captions
Image
Texture
Term Definitions:
Signage: A system of useful information to the viewer in regards to their location.
Body Text: Large amounts of writing, most often seen as articles, books, or essays.
Typeface: A family of fonts (i.e. Helvetica)
Font: A single cut from a type family (i.e. Helvetica Bold 12 pt.)
Point: A typesetting term to measure the height of typographic characters, 72 points in one inch.
Pica: A typesetting term to measure lengths of lines of time. 12 points in one pica, six picas in an inch.
Cap Height: The height of the capital letters.
X-Height: The height of the lower case x.
Base Line: The line in which the bottom of letterforms rest.
Ascender: Strokes of lowercase letterforms that extend above the x-height.
Descender: Strokes of lowercase letterforms that extend below the baseline.
Axis: The angle created by the contrast of stroke weight in letterforms, especially apparent in o’s.
Serif: The feet of letterforms.
Counter: The white space on the inside of an enclosed letterform.
Character: Any letter, numeral, punctuation mark, or symbol found in a font.
Foundry: A company that designs and / or distributes typefaces.
Ligatures: Special characters that are two letterforms combined into one.
Monospace: A font where each letterform has the same width.
Oldstyle Figures: Numbers that align either on the baseline or below the baseline to create a upper and lower case effect.
Alternate: A second drawing of a letterform so that when they are reproduced they are not identical.
Categories of Type
Serif
San-Serif
Black Letter
Old Style
Transitional
Modern
Slab Serif / Egyptian
Humanist
Type Foundries
Ascender Corporation
Berthold
Emigre
Font Bureau
FontFont
Hoefler & Frere-Jones
House Industries
T-26
Village Type Foundry
Terminal Design
Type Designers
Jonathan Hoefler
Tobias Frere-Jones
Matthew Carter
Hermann Zapf
Adrian Frutiger
Eric Gill
Christian Schwartz
Chester Jenkins
Carlos Segura
Zuzana Licko
Wim Crouwel
Cyrus Highsmith
James Montalbano
Chester Jenkins