Carrie Jordan

This book is an effort to seek a

deeper understanding of the world of

typography.

The experiments are designed to find

two typesfaces that are in harmony.

You may feel a spiritual change in your

life after reading this book. This is a

mystical experience, but it is not a

hallucination.

It’s all about EXPERIMENTING

ic

Table of Contents

Overlaying 3

Mixing fonts 5

Highs and lows 6

Line length 7

A Smokin’ New Typeface 8

All about Herman Zapf 9

My Groovy Self portrait 10

The Dove of Peace 11

A Hilarious Type Joke 12

1

M O H R (The most important word in learning about type)

~ M

~ O

~ H

~ R

M is the widest letter in the alphabet.

O is round on both sides and the axis can be straight or tilted.

H is wide and has strong verticals and horizontal lines.

R has round, straight, and diagonal aspects, as well as decorative elements.

2

HROM

OverlayingOverlaying

The bottoms of Optima have “bell bottoms.”

Lines in Optima are diagonal, as opposed to Palatino’s straight lines.

Palatino’s Rs (and Ps) do not connect, while Optima’s R does connect.

In this

experiment I placed

Palatino over Optima to find out

if the shapes of the letters were similar.

The white outline font is Palatino, while

the pink font is Optima. You can see that the

counters and shapes of the most important letters

of the alphabet in typography, MOHR, have have

almost the same overlap. One distinction is that

the axes on the Palatino Os are shifted to the

left while the axes on Optima are straight

up. The differences create compli-

mentary contrasts between the

types.

It’s all in the

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee FfGg Hh Ii Jj K k L lMm Nn Oo Pp QqRr Ss Tt Uu Vv WwXx Yy Z z

Notice the variations in details the letters for each type face.The differences create contrast.

4

My next experiment was mixing the Palatino and Optima fonts in a passage to find out if the difference affected readability. Upon testing my classmates, I found out that they did not notice the difference.

Yeah come on, flattophe come, movin’up slowlyhe gotjuju eyeballhe oneholy rollerhe got

over me.

hair down to his knees. Hold you in his armsyeahyou can feel his disease

right now

Here, I was interested in finding out if the ascenders and descenders of the letters are of equal length and shape. I did this by putting the letters side by side and making guide lines to check how large the counters were and if the ascenders and descenders extended the same lengths.

You can see that Optima letters are taller than Palatino, but the descenders are the same length. The counters in the different typefaces are very similar, but there are differences. For instance, the tails on the lower-case gs are different, and counters in Optima extend slightly past the line.

AaAa BbBb CcCc DdDd EeEe FfFf GgGg

OoOo PpPp QqQq RrRr SsSs TtTt UuUu

HhHh IiIi JjJj KkKk LlLl MmMm NnNn

VvVv WwWw XxXx YyYy ZzZz

the highest and lowest points

I think

are the most im

portant ones. Anything else is just...in betw

een. I want the

freedom to try everything. – Jim

Morrison

6

The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. The caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. Oh Juanita, I call your name. Oh, the snow will be a blinding sight to see as it lies on yonder hillside. The lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is. Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

The ideal line length for Optima and Palatino is two columns in size 9 font. I discovered this by laying out a passage at a variety of line lengths and asking my classmates which was most readable. They chose the length of a two column grid.

The grid for this book is based on the ideal line length.

L

7

JustGroovePro

After studying typefaces as shapes, I wanted to create a typeface that looks like smokey shapes, like the smoke forms from incense. I set my typeface to the lyrics of this song to test readability, and asked my classmates if they could read the typeface with different blurs and shades of grey.

Hermy Zapf is a typographer

who lives in far-out Germany. He once

traveled to Florence, Italy and saw

lettering under a rainbow that spoke

to his soul. After that, he designed

Optima which is the typeface used

on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Wall, and celebrated his genius by

partying with Jimi, baby. The people dig

Palatino. It is one of the ten most-used

serif typefaces, based on the humanist

fonts of the Italian Renaissance, giving

it a calligraphic nature (that’s deep).

However, Zapf’s world is not always

peace and love forever. Zapf resigned

from the Association Typographique

Internationale because he viewed some

members’ unauthorized imitation of his

typeface as hypocritical.

Hermy’s love Children

11

gotta have the funk.

This exercise requires you to open your

mind, man. Each letter’s form has a

specific movement to convey the figure.

The fewer characters, the better. It’s the

gestures, man. . . the GESTURES.

Yeah.

I chose this representation of myself

because through the movement that the

letters create, you can feel the music

and recognize I am dancing. You dig?

A Portrait in Type

12

!f ?:V )

v

r ~yyf vjt= lo

<3 468

&

p b I/ /

V ! o/ /

V !

The dove has been a symbol of peace

since...forever.

This is the first psychadelic illustration I

created out of type. Several of the letters

are italicized because they look more

graceful and the curves are more pro-

nounced. The curvatures of the letters I

chose to incorporate in the illustration

portray the main gestures and grace of

the figure and the message.

Peace, man.

Peace typein

13

!f ?:V )

v

r ~yyf vjt= lo

<3 468

&

p b I/ /

V ! o/ /

V !

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas. –Bob Dylan

If so

meo

ne th

inks

that

love

and

pea

ce is

a cl

iche

that

mus

t hav

e been left behind in the sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal. –John L

enno

n

Music is a safe type of high. It’s more the way it was supposed to be. That’s where highness came from...It’s nothing

but

rhy

thm

and

mot

ion. –Jimi Hendrix

The sixties was one of the fi rst times the power of music was used by a generation to bind them together. –Neil Young

The sixties were an amazing time.

–Pete

r Max

They won’t give peace a chance; that was just a dream some of us had. –Joni M

itchell