Working with Type
Important References:
- Tutorials
- A Closer Look at Typography (ignore the pop-ups)
- Basic Typography Tutorials
- Type Fundamentals for Non-Designers
- Typography and Page Layout
- Principles of Design
- Tutorials for Learning Typography
- Advanced Typography for Desktop Publishing
- Web Typography Tutorial
- Type Talk
- Web Page Design for Designers - Typography
- History
- Odds
- The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible, by Beatrice Warde
- Clarety: Drinking from the Crystal Goblet, by Gunnar Swanson
- Bembo's Zoo - intersection of type and zoology
- Lorem Ipsum - All the facts - Lipsum generator
- Microsoft Typography
- typoGRAPHIC, an interactive experience informed by type and typography
- Counterspace, a web site dedicated to typography and its history
- Charles Poynton - Typography and Design
Information
Assignment
Your task is to set the Introduction of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin, in three different formats:
- Beautiful and easily readable, the sort of page where you fall right into the words.
- Compact, fitting into as small a space as possible, but still readable (I'll be using my reading glasses, but not a magnifier).
- Ugly, a travesty of typography, jarring and unpleasant to contemplate, much less read.
You may copy the text from the link above (it is in the public domain) and Edit / Paste special as unformatted text into Word or another word processor. You may not change any of the actual words (some of them will be flagged as misspellings, because they are technical, British, or archaic), the basic punctuation (except to substitute typographic marks for typewriter marks), nor the division into paragraphs, but you may change anything else. Use any typefaces you wish, modify size, line height, indentation, character spacing, margins, number of columns, or any other features. You may certainly look at other printed works for inspiration.
At the end of the manuscript, in 11 point Georgia, list the following information:
- Typeface(s)
- Line height(s)
- Character spacing(s)
(Other information will be apparent from the page.) Prepare a paper copy on 8.5" × 11" paper and hand it in.