OUGD403 - Studio Brief 2 - Visual Thinking - Vector Type

Today we were given our second studio brief which follows on directly from studio brief one, We must produce an alphabet based on one of the letter forms created from the Alphabet Soup task. From now on we are restricted to working in monochrome, however we may experiment with opacity and half tones. 

Simon delivered a presentation about the anatomy of type today which was interesting and informative

Anatomy of type:
Some key pieces of information I took away: 

• The difference between a typeface and a font: A typeface is a set of one or more fonts each composed of glyphs that share common design features. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicisation, ornamentation, and designer or foundry (and formerly size, in metal fonts). A font is a collection of letters, numbers and other symbols to set text. A typeface is what you see and the font refers to the physical embodiment. 
• Kerning: adjusting the spacing between (characters) in a piece of text to be printed.
• Tracking: refers to a consistent degree of increase (or sometimes decrease) of space between letters to affect density in a line or block of text. Letter-spacing can be confused with kerning
• Leading: refers to the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type. The term originated in the days of hand-typesetting, when thin strips of lead were inserted into the forms to increase the vertical distance between lines of type

In the afternoon we experimented with making grids for our chosen type face. I found this really challenging. Simon wants us to create a really watertight grid that can accommodate all 26 letters of the alphabet. I began to create grids for upper case A,B,C,D. I mocked up a grid that accommodated for the four letters with only slight overlapping, I will continue to develop this over the coming week.