My Typographic Reeducation: Part 2 of 11

The Assignment:
Four typefaces (Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, and Univers), 2 characters each-with no mixing-drawn into five compositions representing opposition, tension, overlapping, details, and scale. Twice. No repeats. No tracing. 2″ x 2″. Total of 40 hand-drawn compositions. And black on white type only.

Noticing the lack of an Egyptian typeface? This is true, but it is also only the first assignment of many (in other words: wait until next week).

Old Lesson 1: Typography is hard. Damn hard. Right at the top of the list of things I don’t spend any time doing today is making relationship-based designs using two letterforms only. This has got me thinking on my toes again; but quite honestly I don’t think there’s much difference in the work I did this week and the work I did coming into my first Typography class ever.

New Lesson 1: The upside to a few years as a professional designer/illustrator is efficiency. The care I had to put into each line years ago comes a lot easier now, and much quicker, to boot. I would be remiss, however, not to point out to everyone reading all of my little production mistakes, smudges, and over-drawn lines. Seriously, these look like a kintergardener did them in some spots.

Real-Life Improvement of the Week: Proper word-spacing hit me like a ton of bricks as I hurried this week to update an advertisement I had laid out three weeks ago. The project was a quick resize to fit a new publication, but I took what amounted to an extra three minutes and made that single paragraph of body copy shine. Comparing the old ad to the new ad makes me wonder what the hell I thought I was doing when I laid it out the first time.

The book is called A Typographic Workbook, and while it is a little unsightly in its layout, the information within is rock solid. I started out by reading Chapter 8: Character Characteristics and Chapter 9: Type Identification and Classification. To be quite honest, if all my students and I learn all semester is what is contained in these two chapters, I’d be satisfied. No longer is the difference between Modern and Transitional typefaces a mystery to me.

Now comes the fun part, where I ask you to take part in this undertaking. At the end of Part Eleven I plan to collect this experiment into book format, with my examples and yours side by side (don’t worry, I’ll only be grading mine). So complete the assignment outlined above and email me your work in either scanned or photographed form. Send your work in jpegs (350k each or less!) to podcast@beadesigngroup.com before noon on Monday, March 27. All work will be considered for inclusion in the book. A confirmation email will be sent back to you prior to inclusion, and everyone will receive proper credit for their work.

As for the delay in writing this story, it seems I underestimated the time involved in prepping lectures, creating assignments, teaching the class, doing the homework and finishing the reading would take; so when it came time to pull all of that together into a compelling narrative, I felt the strong need for a weekend. That, or a total collapse. Keeping that in mind, I’m moving all further posts to Monday

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Typography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.