What Is Typesetting?
Typeset is the way and form that the type has been arrange for printing.
We were then introduced to the 4 basic groups that typography can be placed in, these are:
San Serif
Serif
Decorative
Script
The first exercise that we looked at was Kerning. I remember kerning from high school, however I only remember the basic knowledge about the design. To start off with I used the kerning tool in InDesign to change the space of the letters, where I changed this from 0 to -100, so that the letters were so close together. For the next the one, I decided to change the spacing (kerning) between the letters from 0 to 150, this made the letters look quite far apart from each other, so I decided to change it from 150 to 100. The next one I decided to again make the spacing between the letters closer together, however not as close so I changed this from 0 to -50. The key is to make sure that the spacing between the letters look very equal throughout the word. So I had to make some adjustments to the first window as the I and D need to be closer together, but the letter S needed to be further apart.
What Is Kerning?
Kerning is the adjusting of the spacing between each letters/characters in a specific piece of text.
The next task was Tracking, I found that this one was a little more difficult than the kerning because I had to somehow move the words apart, however they weren’t moving properly. I then realised that you just need to just click and use the arrow keys or drag them with them with mouse. I found that this then became easier. For this it allowed me to change the spacing between the letters at the same time. I found this part a lot easier to do, so I decided to make on of the words quite far apart and the other really closer together. I then made sure that the tracking was the same so I change this from 0 to 300, however to make them look different I made the words further apart from each other.
What is Tracking?
Tracking is again the letter spacing between characters, however when using the tracking setting it will do this at one time.
We then moved on to leading, which is used to space the sentences or lines equally apart from each other, so to experiment with this I decided to make some of the paragraphs close together. However, I thought that this made the text harder to read and I also changed the spacing so that the lines were further apart. This allowed me to read the text a lot easier.
What Is Leading?
Leading is the distance between each of the sentences or the lines within a piece of text.
After this we move on to Rag, which is making the sentence look like there in a box, I found that this task was a lot harder than the others that I had completed because I could get to grips with what I needed to do. To move words from each sentence I used shift and enter on the Keyboard. However, to make the sentence fit well together with the other we had to use the tracking setting but not too much that the sentence or line looked odd, out of place and look completely different to the other lines and sentences.
What is Rag?
Rag is where the lines or sentences of a piece of text is irregular and it is ragged to make the piece of text look perfect.
We then moved onto cropping, where we used different shapes to crop out area of a letter of our choice to be very creative. The letters that I decided to use for this task was R, D, A and M. I really liked this task because I was able to be creative with the designs and I felt like I enjoyed it more when using several different letters to experiment with. I thought that this was a fun task overall because I was able to use my experimental skills, I am going to defiantly look at expanding on this task in my own time, because I also think that this is a great way to come up with new and creative logo types.
The next task that we were given was to choose between three type faces that would a word the best, I thought that this was also a fun task because it got us to think about which of the typefaces would suit the word the best. Some of the fonts I chose were quite obvious and relevant to the word, however some were different and stood out to me. I had to really think about which of the font style suit them the best because you want the word stand out, but after talking everyone in the group their different answers about which one they had used. It doesn’t really matter about which one you choose; however, you must always have reason for using it. I am going to keep this task in mind when selecting the right typefaces for my own project. I thought that this task was quite fun because you had to think about the task the typefaces a lot to get the design to work.
1. You can only use typography to articulate the words.
2. Do not add any illustrative elements to the words.
3. You can only use Helvetica Bold as the typeface, do not change it.
4. You can not use colour. Only the techniques we have covered.
I found that this task was quite fun, but also quite difficult because there were some words that I found very hard to change and think about. Although I am going to keep thinking about how I can move past my problem and create a creative design for each word.
Overall, I really enjoyed this process and production lesson because I found it very interesting and refreshing to look at the terms that I had learned before, after not looking at them for a few years. I think that this process and production lesson has defiantly expanded my skills and knowledge of typography and I will always consider these techniques for my own design work.
