Type is clothing for words

For week 2, we went over Gutenberg and Moveable types. Gutenberg designed and built the first known mechanized printing press in Europe. Similar to Apple, Gutenberg did not make the printer but improved it to be more useable. The impact of the printing press left a massive impact on the world and helped spread knowledge in the western world.

Due to this growth of industrialisation, the need for more typefaces grew. Designers like Vincent Figgins invented a slab-serif typeface which is a style of typeface with thick "slab" serifs at the ends of the strokes. Which is a common typeface category. Serif typefaces are recognised by extensions of the letter, where Sans do not feature these extensions of the letters.

Type Properties

X-height is the height of the body of lowercase letters, exclusive of ascenders and decenders.

Baseline is the horizontal line upon which all the characters in a given line stand.

Monospace is a font in which all characters have the same breadth, simply all letters of equal width. This proportional font makes it easier and smoother to read.

Leading/line spacing refers to space inseted in between rows of characters by adding strips of lead.

Looking at BBC’s website they have used a great typeface which makes it easier for the reader to scan the text. There use of consistent layout and paragraph spacing is used very well and making it very clear to the reader what the titles, subheadings and important information is, due to the use of bold text, larger size of font, suitable spacing etc.

History of Typefaces

We also looked at the history of some typefaces, as our first project looks at this. I have gave a short description of some of my favourite typefaces.