Design Principles - Introduction to Typography

For todays session we brought in 10x10 cut outs of the letters Aa, Bb and Cc in Gothic, Roman, Script and Block fonts, and on a long piece of tracing paper we drew over the letter and adjusted different aspects of each to change the characteristics of the letter.

The first experimental attempt, where we simply traced our Roman A, B and C, with varied weights of one stem and the Gothic B with varied weights of the whole letter came out quite messy and brought to my attention that surprisingly, the most difficult part of this task was trying to draw a smooth curve free hand. I tried using a compass but it didn't do anything to help as the curves were not circular.

For the second attempt, I started using the Gothic font Aa and had to make the stem as bold as possible and the bowl as light as possible without adjusting the characteristics of the letter. Since there is no bowl in A the stem remained the same and this allowed the letters to look like they are of a different typeface to each other.

I reversed this rule for the Gothic Bb and these two letters ended up looking very similar as the bare the sam qualities to the adaptations were the same on each.

For Cc one letter had to be ultra light and the other ultra bold, which was the most simple change, but the ultra bold C did have to maintain it's characteristics so it didn't appear as bold as expected.