Typographic Letterform Compositions
These two compositions were created by randomly choosing three different typefaces and overlaying them within an 8x8in grid in Adobe Illustrator. The left composition uses a more pastel/Easter style color palette, while the composition on the right has a color scheme more akin to the Kansas City Royals baseball team.
This exercise was actually really enjoyable for me. I found it really interesting to just play around with different typefaces and overlaying letters on a page to create unique compositions. I released, while creating these compositions, that each typeface has their own special characteristics that make them look different from each other, and when combined with others, can create attention grabbing displays. Creating 15 different compositions also was good practice for me to learn how to classify different typefaces and learn how to recognize them. I also began to notice that a lot of the letter anatomy didn’t change all that much from typeface to typeface. Along those same sorts of lines, I made a small observation that the different classifications of sans-serif, or serif typefaces didn’t necessarily differ that much from each other in their respective classification categories. For example, Futura and Helvetica are different fonts but share some of the same characteristics.
This exercise really forced me to look outside of the resources of the book and do some deeper digging through online resources. The book really only had a small selection of anatomical features, so in order to keep naming more parts of the letters, I utilized the good ol’ world wide web. I found a few new features of typeface anatomy this way, one such feature being the terminal. I found that the terminal is just the ending of a stem/stroke without a serif on it. I also learned that the apex is the topmost connection point in a letterform, whereas the vertex is the lowest connection point in a letterform. One other thing I found, and sort of found a little strange, was that the center of an O or just a center space of an enclosed area in a letter is called a “counter”. I kind of find that a strange term to name it because when I hear that and see what it refers to, it doesn’t really correlate and match up in my head.
Overall this was a fun little exercise. I liked being able to use different aspects of graphic design to fuse typography into making little infographic compositions. It was also a neat way of beginning to learn about type classification and different letterforms. This style of learning definitely is much more enjoyable because it’s hands on experimentation instead of just reading and memorizing textbook information.
