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Tag: tobias frere-jones

Design Matters with Tobias Frere-Jones

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On the subject of typography, I missed type designer Tobias Frere-Jones on Design Matters with Debbie Millman at the end of last year:

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Typeface Mechanics with Tobias Frere-Jones

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You know when Tobias Frere-Jones starts discussing the mechanics of typefaces you should pay attention. In the first post of a new series, he looks at the “overshoot”:

Square shapes like H have a simple and stable relationship to the baseline and cap height. Their upper and lower edges coincide with these boundaries and stay put. But only a narrow sliver of an O is the full height, and the rest of the shape falls away. The parts that are too short greatly outnumber the parts that are big enough, so we conclude — wrongly, but very reliably — that the round shape is too small.

If the “correct” height appears inadequate, “too much” will look right. So the is made taller and deeper than the H, even if the most stringent mathematical reasoning would declare it incorrect. But we read with our eyes, not with rulers, so the eye should win every time. Typefaces from any period will demonstrate this compensation, often called “overshoot”.

 

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Kern Your Enthusiasm

Thanks to Jacob Covey for kindly pointing me in the direction Kern Your Enthusiasm, a new series of short posts at HiLobrow about typefaces.

Matthew Battles, author of Library: An Unquiet History (and co-founder of HiLobrow), kicked off the series on Friday with a fascinating post about Aldine Italic:

Aldus Manutius was a printer in sixteenth-century Venice, and he was looking to shake things up. The roman typefaces, based on manuscript letterforms the humanists thought dated back to Roman times (but which were in fact medieval in origin) had offered Italian counterpoint to the black-letter typefaces of the first German printers, but already they were old hat. When Aldus put the first version of a typeface we call italic to use in 1501, the printing press had been proliferating in Europe for half a century. In other words, it was about as old as the computer is now. It was a time of immense invention and swiftly spun variety in the printed book, and a time of new mobility and independence of thought and activity among certain classes of people as well — and the combination of new ways and new tools meant new kinds of books. Crucially, the book was getting smaller, small enough to act not only as a desktop, but as a mobile device.

There is also a rather lovely short piece by Mark Kingwell, posted today, on Gill Sans.

Jacob himself has contributed a post, scheduled to appear at the end of the series, about Gotham. Can’t wait.

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