Tutor Feedback
You were introduced to some of the ways typography can be categorized, asked to create your own sample book of typefaces, and identify fonts that you could use for a number of different design jobs. You have successfully understood the requirements of this project and overall your outcomes are very good. Your type sample book is well designed and informed by relevant research into historical and contemporary type foundries. I couldn’t find a PDF of the final sample book to look through, so I’m unable to offer precise feedback on the quality of typesetting. Looking at the mock-up images, each page is well designed with careful consideration given to colour and layout. For me, the spreads that are most successful are the ones that communicate the qualities of each font more efficiently, such as your Avenir and Rockwell spreads. Although I understand your reasoning behind the design of your Pixelmania and Firebox spreads, I feel they would have been more successful if they had considered the content as much as the aesthetic decision to use the type on a curved path graphic element. For me, as a working designer, I want to get a feel for all the characters in a typeface and how they work together when I look at type specimens. I’m also curious as to why you have chosen such a wide landscape format for the specimen? Is this a reference to the historical specimens you found? Try to tell us why you are making all design decisions. Thinking about how I use specimens in a contemporary professional context, I would find such a wide format quite infuriating. I would either be scaling it down to fit on my monitor or scaling it down to print it out — neither of which would be beneficial for communicating the characteristics of the typefaces.
My thoughts
I agree that the best spreads are the ones that clearly outline the fonts, displaying them in various weights, highlighting their characteristics and showing their use as body copy. This is of course not possible for the displays and fixed-width etc. but I agree that these need something else to show them in use especially so that anyone looking at the sample can make a more informed decision. I think using some words on the page would work better than the curved path that highlight them in use cases. Overall I think I went a little mad with the amount I covered so I may look to cut the length by removing some of these fonts particularly in the later section that is flooded with far too many. I will be focusing my efforts on reformatting the main sample book moving it away from the wide-format I decided on initially. For me, the wider format makes sense as I do tend to work digitally and with all new monitors, and laptops moving away from the 4:3 ratio many many years ago and everything tends to be either 16:9 or 16:10. I did find some examples of type foundries using wide profile spreads; Camelot, Colophon and Grilli Type were a few of the examples that were set in landscape A4, a more traditional format just set in landscape. My choice was not a standard format and this is its biggest failing just being far too wide. Looking at it now, I am not really sure what was going on in my mind when I set these dimensions.
Resetting the format
Above were just some example pages from the Camelot, Colophon and Grilli Type foundry sample books which were in an A4 landscape format which I would look to convert to with the spreads looking like the below.
Now I needed to start moving over the original design to this format starting off first with the “Masters” that I had set which applied the shapes to each of the spreads. I tried to replicate the format as best as possible so that it was not too far removed from the original. Tackling the Sans Serif and Serif spreads would be the first challenge getting the elements to fit and make sure that the four-column grid with 5mm spacing I had set would work.
I started with the cover and contents page making sure to adhere to margins and the columns as best I could. I took better care of kerning which on the original looks completely forgotten as well as changing the header from regular to medium. It just did not look right in the regular weight. As I started to re-build the first page I realised I had way more room than I initially imagined foolishly thinking I would have to shrink content down. In actual fact I could go the other way enlarging the total by 8pts and the different weights by 4pts. Dropping in the body copy was a good demonstration of this.
I had more room for the body and was able to increase the size to 10pts. The same was true of the second page of this spread. Changing this to 12pts made everything a little clearer and easier to read on the page.
This was looking better but there were still adjustments required. Mainly kerning in the Typeface header and the large letter elements in the lower right, particularly the two X’s that were almost overlapping. On the following spreads for the other Sans serif’s, I had to break the column widthways a couple of times as changing to 12pts left widows on the characteristics section and I did not want this to be the case. Also as I went through I changed the leading for the body pieces to 14pts giving all of this text more room to breath than it had before.
I reset all of the serifs and Sans serif omitting the Hoefler text from Serifs in an effort to make the book a little shorter than it was. Four columns was working I took extra care in making sure the size and leading of text was better and gave a little more room for the content. I now needed to rework the other pages removing the curved text and as per feedback use something else that demonstrated the fonts in use. I initially started out with this using some of the rules from the previous spreads for the characteristics and size of the header and ended up with the below.
I was not sure this was working using some “Lorem Ipsum” to display the font. There were weird gaps on the page and it just did not look right at all with all the aspects competing for the eye and no real hierarchy.
This felt better with the first piece of information after the header the characteristics of the font, leading into the H, O that Jonathan Hoefler points out to be the best starting point when construction a typeface, followed of course by the X. This gave me the rest of the lower part of the page to do something with, but I was not going to be using Lorem Ipsum only or at all. It was while looking some words I could use frantically searching for an article I remember seeing months ago that displayed the weird words some type designers used that I came across a sentence that is well known and has all 26 letters of the alphabet “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, and of course this was used in one of the exercises of the module. This seemed perfect!
This looked to be the best layout from the perspective of giving a better overview of these fonts. Not all would have lower case or even numbers but there was far better hierarchy on the page. The first few elements showing its use in a sentence, and then a break down of the characters from A to Z.
As I got further into this process I came across a slight problem. There were fonts that had no lower case characters that when placed across the top stretched over he three columns ending up taking up more vertical space on the page. This then caused a problem with content further down the page. The other issue was the some of these fonts were just larger than others which meant sizes needed to be adjusted to get them to fit across the page. These were not huge problems, it just meant I needed to set some rules for these pages outside of jut the four columns that worked on the earlier sans serif and serif typefaces. My best bet appeared to be to set the height limit of the H, O and X characters the same as the “Characteristics” section of 45mm. I then limited the “Quick brown fox” sentence to a height of 55mm spaced from the content above at 20mm.
These changes brought some order and more consistency to these pages. I also revisited the earlier spreads taking an idea that was reversed in the previous iteration as it just took up too much space. The randomised characters stretched across two pages. Switching to landscape A4 gave more vertical room so this worked better and make the second page for each typeface feel a little less empty without it feeling cluttered.
To finalise things before creating the PDF’s I set to looking for any obvious kerning errors as well as just making sure I was happy with the spacing. Just as well I did as I discovered an issue with the latter part where I had spaced content based on the header. This was incorrect due to the different heights of the headers despite the size being set the same. To fix this I placed some 18mm circles across the top of each of these to line up the characteristics so that the same spacing discussed earlier could be adhered to and there would not be content skipping around the page as it was looked through. Double-checking the PDF’s by page and by spread and the content was consistent from page to page.
Conclusion
This was a worthwhile re-work moving away from the terrible decision by myself to use format that I thought looked good (at the time) but had no real good reason to utilise, both from or theoretical or practical reason. Realistically if it would have gone to print, it’s highly likely a printer would have said it would not work. Switching to a standard format actually afforded me more room than I thought, and I was able to enlarge content and re-introduce an idea I had to abandon in the first iteration. One that I think makes the earlier spreads a little more fun to look at. I still made some slight errors by not taking into account the vertical space on the page instead of focusing on columns, so I must try harder to set grids whenever I start a piece of work like this, then potentially adjust as required. At least then I have set some ground rules at the beginning as opposed to having to return later.
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