Typography, Referenced: A Comprehensive Visual Guide to the Language, History, and Practice of Typography - Hardcover

Tselentis, Jason; Haley, Allan; Poulin, Richard; Seddon, Tony; Leonidas, Gerry; Saltz, Ina; Henderson, Kathryn; Alterman, Tyler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592537022 ISBN 13: 9781592537020

Publisher: Rockport Publishers, 2012

Synopsis

Typography, Referenced was named to the 2013 Outstanding Reference Sources List, an annual handpicked list from the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA, a division of the American Library Association) of the most noteworthy reference titles published in 2012.

Typography, Referenced is the single most comprehensive volume covering every aspect of typography that any design student, professional designer, or design aficionado needs to know today.

In these pages, you'll find:

—Thousands of illustrated examples of contemporary usage in design

—Historical developments from Greek lapidary letters to the movie Helvetica

—Landmark designs turning single letters into typefaces

—Definitions of essential type-specific language, terms, ideas, principles, and processes

—Ways technology has influenced and advanced type

—The future of type on the web, mobile devices, tablets, and beyond

In short, Typography, Referenced is the ultimate source of typographic information and inspiration, documenting and chronicling the full scope of essential typographic knowledge and design from the beginnings of moveable type to the present "golden age" of typography.

About this title

About the Authors

Jason Tselentis teaches graphic design and typography at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He is the author of Type, Form, and Function by Rockport Publishers.

Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging, based in Woburn, Massachusetts. He is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs, and editorial content for the company's type libraries and websites.

Richard Poulin is co-founder, design director, and a principal of Poulin + Morris Inc. (www.poulinmorris.com), an internationally recognized, multidisciplinary design consultancy located in New York City. His work has been recognized by major design organizations, competitions, and publications, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Communication Arts, Graphis, Library of Congress, Type Director Club, and the New York Art Directors Club. Richard is a Fellow of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, the organization's highest honor, and is a past President and board member of the New York Chapter of AIGA. He is the author of Design School Type (Rockport Publishers, 2017) and Design School Layout (Rockport Publishers, 2018). He lives in New York City.

Tony Seddon's longstanding career as a graphic designer has taken him from his native Cornwall, via London and several publishing companies, to East Sussex where he now works as a freelance designer and writer. He has authored and co-authored multiple books, including Graphic Design for Non-designers; Art Directing Projects for Print; and Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans. Visit him online at http://www.tonyseddon.com.

Gerry Leonidas is a Senior Lecturer in Typography at the University of Reading, UK. He teaches typographic design and typeface design at under- and postgraduate levels.Ina Saltz is an art director, designer, and author of numerous articles on design and typography. She is the author of Typography Essentials by Rockport Publishers. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Language of Letters

Typeface design, type design, or font design? Letter or glyph? Letterform, perhaps? Designers often use terms interchangeably, but it is helpful to have a good grasp of the nuances, if only because they reveal different aspects of the design process.

Think of a word. A sequence of letters should spring to mind. Write that sequence on a sheet of paper and these letters assume a concrete form made manually: They have been translated into letterforms. Any representations of letters made manually, regardless of the tool and the scale, are letterforms. Their maker controls their sequence and size and knows the dimensions and properties of the surface on which they are rendered. A hasty shopping list, Trajan’s column, John Downer’s brush-made signs. They’re all meaningful collections of letterforms.

On the other hand, any representation of letters intended for mechanical reproduction is a collection of typeforms. The sequence in which a user places them and the size he or she will use remains unknown at the time of their making. Their maker also cannot predict the specifics of their rendering environment. Crucially, typeforms represent formal relationships in two dimensions rather than a specific way of capturing and rendering a shape. In other words, a Univers lowercase a is a Univers lowercase a regardless of the type-making and typesetting technology. Although there are differences in the visible forms produced with handset, hot-metal, and digital type, for example, the differences reflect the influence of the encoding and rendering technology. In other words, a typeface is a snapshot of the designer’s intentions for a collection of typeforms.

To use these shapes in a specific typesetting environment, the typeforms get converted into glyphs (the term for digital formats), precise encodings in a machine-readable language enriched with information about the space surrounding the shape, its relationship to other glyphs, and its behavior. This machine-specific implementation of a typeface is called a font. To return to our Univers example, the typeface can be represented by a Linotype matrix or bits in an OpenType font, but the essence of the design survives, hopefully with fidelity to the designer’s intentions. Typeface design and font making are nominally sequential processes, even if design today closely interweaves typeface design and font production. One person may embody both roles, but often the typeface designer and font maker are separate members of the same team.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rockport Publishers
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1592537022
• ISBN 13: 9781592537020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400