typography blog: two

in regards to alphabet variation...

• weight: Most typefaces contain bold and bold italic typestyles which are much heavier in stroke weight than the Roman. Many typefaces offer a broader range of weights in addition to Roman, including light and medium (or book) and in addition to bold, including semibold (or demibold), extrabold (or heavy), and black.
• width: Some typefaces include typestyles with character widths which are narrower than roman, called condensed, and wider, called extended. These typestyles generally include accompanying weight variations.
• style: A typeface usually includes several design variations called styles. The available number of typestyles, which varies among typefaces, is based on the following visual characteristics: character angle, character weight, and character width.

in regards to measuring type...

• point: Measurement used to measure height, such as the type size (height of the character) and the space between lines and paragraphs.
• pica: measure width, such as the width of a typeset column (length of line) or the space between columns. Picas are more convenient than inches because smaller spaces can be measured in whole units instead of fractions.
• x-height: the height of the main body of the lowercase letter (or the height of a lowercase x ), excluding its ascenders and descenders. The bigger the x-height is in relation to the cap height, the bigger the letters will look.
• cap height: The distance from the top of the capital letter to its bottom.
• leading: the amount of added vertical spacing between each line of type.

Points and picas are used to measure type, rather than inches and mm, because they are smaller increments so they can be more accurate.

There are 72 points in an inch.

There are 6 picas in an inch.

There are 12 points in a pica.

If a letter is set in 36 pts, it is about a half inch tall.

foxy foxes.

came across this flickr gallery of some beautiful photos of foxes. i didn't realize they were such expressive animals, so it will be fun to attempt to capture their energy in my sketches. my favorite's gotta be "freddy on the porch".

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opal-in-the-rough/galleries/72157622301297387/
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and of course, fox sketching wouldn't be complete without a little fox-themed inspirational music.

typography blog: one

grid: a pattern of regularly spaced horizontal and vertical lines

• designers use a grid to organize text and images in a rational, balanced, and visually appealing way. a grid allows information to be easily read by the viewer and creates a harmonious composition.
• a modular grid is a grid that creates negative space between the columns and rows, forming boxes or modules.
• margins: the negative spaces between the format edge and the content, which surround and define the live area where type and images will be arranged
• columns: vertical alignments of type that create horizontal divisions between the margins
• grid modules: individual units of space separated by regular intervals that, when repeated across the page format, create columns and rows
• flowlines: alignments that break the space into horizontal bands
• gutter: the blank space between two facing pages

hierarchy: any system of things ranked one above another

• typographic color: apparent blackness of a block text resulting from the combined effect of the relative thickness of the strokes of individual characters, their width and point size, and the line spacing used in setting the text
• one can achieve a clear hierarchy through spatial organization (grouping, aligning objects along an axis, singling one item out, etc), distributing material at intervals across the surface, scale, distance from other objects, and stroke weight.