Typography | Task 1: Exercises
Typography | Task 1: Exercises
22.09.2025 - 2025 / Week 1 - Week 4
Dave Christian Moniaga / 0385630
Typography / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Task 1: Exercises
Table of Contents
LECTURES
Week 1:Type_0_Introduction
Mr. Vinod explains into detail about the importance of typography and
how it develops certain skill sets that is useful as a designer.
Typography can be: the act of creating letters, creation of
typefaces, it can be animations in the form of titles or gifs,
implemented in website & app designs, signage designs in daily life,
books, posters, label, and logo designs.
Oxford Dictionary : "the style and appearance of printed matter"
Wikipedia: "art and technique of arranging type to make written
language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed..."
Typography has evolved over 500 years:
calligraphy (writing style) > lettering (drawn by hand) >
typography
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| Figure 1.1 Black letter calligraphy |
Good penmanship / writing in the 1920s-30s reflect a person's education, class, and background.
There are two terminologies mentioned, font and
typeface.
Font: the individual font or weight within the
typeface
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| Fig 1.2 Font examples |
Typeface: the entire family of fonts/weights that share a
similar characteristic/styles
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| Fig 1.3 Typeface examples |
Type_1_Development
Early letterform development: Phoenician to Roman
It started from scratching wet clay with sticks and carving into stone with chisels. The form of uppercase letterforms were done because of the tools and materials which creates combinations of straight lines and circles. (the tool influences the type of writing)
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| Fig 1.4 4th century B.C.E |
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| Fig 1.5 Evolution of Phoenician letter |
Greeks developed a style of writing from right to left and left to right called 'boustrophedon' (how the ox ploughs). Changing the direction of reading also changed the orientation of letterforms.
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| Fig 1.6 Boustrophedon |
Etruscan (then Romans) would paint the marbles before inscribing them. Their strokes & line weight carried over into the carved letterforms
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| Fig 1.7 Augustan inscription, Late 1st century B.C.E |
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| Fig 1.8 Development of the letter "A" |
Hand scripts (3rd - 10th century C.E.)
Square capitals can be found in Roman monuments. These letterforms had serifs at the end of the strokes and were done using a reed pen at 60 degree angle.
Rustic capitals, a compressed version allowed for twice as many words and less time to make, but they were harder to read. The pen/brush was held at 30 degrees.
Cursive hand were done for everyday transactions, the forms simplified for speed. the start of lowercase letterforms.
Uncials (12th of anything), incorporated Roman cursive hand and are more readable than rustic capitals.
Half uncials were the start of formal lowercase letterforms, a formalization of the cursive hand.
Charlemagne, the first unifier of Europe, standardize all ecclesiastical texts. The task was given to Alcuin of York, and the monks rewrote the text using majuscule, miniscule, capitalization and punctuation. Setting the standard for calligraphy for a century. The example of this is Caloline Miniscule
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| Fig 1.9 Hand scripts from 3rd - 10th C.E. |
After the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire, there were variations to Alcuin's script. In Northern Europe, a vertical condense letterform called Blackletter gained popularity. In the south, a rounded open hand style called Rotunda.
Gutenberg developed a mechanism of printing where metal matrices are put together to form words and sentences to paragraphs, in hopes to produce more books faster for people (i.e. The Bible).
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| Fig 1.10 Timeline of typography development after Gutenberg |
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| Fig 1.11 Text type classification |
Lecture 2:
Lecture 3:
INSTRUCTIONS
Task 1: Exercise 1
FEEDBACK
Week 1
General Feedback: This week I have set up my personal
e-portfolio blog for Typography, including my links, labels,
and jumplink. All of which are divided and sectioned nicely.
Week 2
General Feedback
Specific Feedback
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