Vernacular typography can be very well crafted but it can also be crudely created signs done in a hurry. Either way it is using typography and lettering to create visual communications. Take a look around you and identify some vernacular typography that you find interesting. Document it through drawing, photography or by collecting examples. Remember to ask permission if you are photographing inside train stations, markets, shops, museums or shopping centres for example. Getting permission is usually straightforward, especially when people know you are working on a student project. In your learning log note down why you selected the examples you did.
Vernacular meaning
Adjective: (of language) native or indigenous (opposed to literary or learned). Expressed or written in the native language of a place, as literary works: a vernacular poem. Using such a language: a vernacular speaker. Of or relating to such a language.
Noun: the native speech or language of a place. The language or vocabulary peculiar to a class or profession.
Wherever you go – from around the corner to around the world – examples of local, “vernacular” typography and lettering can be seen in storefronts, street and address markers, circuses and carnivals, posters, billboards, graffiti, and a lot more. This vanishing art consisting of handwriting, hand lettering, as well as commercially typeset images is an important form of urban communication.
I’ve collected some boards from Pinterest, because of the current situation and couldn’t go out to take any photos myself.
What I liked about Vernacular typography is randomness of shapes, creativity, inconsistency used in lettering. Also there is an endless in variety of letter forms around us and there is always something new to be inspired by. I would like to try to make some of my own Vernacular typography design.
This exercise is designed to help you to look at typefaces more closely. You will need a sharp pencil, some tracing or thin paper and a ruler. On the facing page the typeface Baskerville has been deconstructed so it only contains the strokes, serifs and bowls that are common to all the letterforms. Your task is to try and put it all back together again to read the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog This is a pangram containing all the letters of the alphabet. It is all in lowercase. Start by drawing your baseline, determine the x height by identifying a whole letter such as x, e or n and draw your median line. This should provide a good starting point to try and piece together all the other elements. Remember that some parts will be used more than once, for example the same stem will be used in several letters. Try and account for all the parts without leaving any stray serifs behind. Do not worry if you get this exercise wrong, it is just a way to get used to looking at and analysing typefaces, appreciating the finer detailing of it and recognising repeat patterns, such as using the same bowl shape throughout the typeface. If you do get it wrong then you might have ended up designing your first typeface! Having spent some time looking closely at typefaces, has your appreciation of them increased? If so in any particular aspect? Do you think that understanding more about how typefaces are constructed will be useful to you in future? Make notes in your learning blog.
Primary research
Research about anatomy of typefaces
Research about anatomy of Baskerville
Anatomy of typefaces
Anatomy of Baskerville
Writing process
I have used Procreat for this exercise. I have put a copy of the type parts on one layer and brought the transparency down and made the letters on the layers above.
Conclusion
This exercise gave me a good insight of the anatomy of typography and typeface design. It’s interesting that by having the certain elements of the typeface, you are able to rebuild the whole typeface. I should say l had some difficulty to rebuild some letters, like “a”. Also the round part for “b, d, p and q”.
The alphabet is only part of a typeface that contains lots of different characters such as numbers, punctuation, mathematical and monetary symbols and ligatures. Ligatures are where two letters are combined together to make printing easier. Explore you computer keyboard to find some of the other characters. You will need to use your shift, alt and cntrl keys. Choose a magazine, for example the Big Issue or Heat, and look at the main typefaces they use for the body text and headlines. Go to http://www.identifont.com and use the programme to identify the fonts. Look at the ranges of typefaces all around you and try to identify their distinguishing characteristics. Make notes in your learning log.
First Part
For the start I have tried using Alt/ Shift/ Ctrl with different keys on my Lenovo Laptop on Microsoft Word. The outcome is:
Alt + any key
No result
Ctrl + any key
No result
Second Part
For the second part of this exercise, I chose three of the magazines that I have online subscription for: Vogue, 25 Beautiful Home, Practical Photography.
I then used Identifont.com to identify the fonts used. With this site, we could search for fonts by appearance, name, similarity, picture (descriptive keywords of a picture), or by designer; however I found these options not very useful. I felt that If you are familiar with the names of the fonts or know the designer, then it would be very easy to quickly identify the font.
So, I have used Adobe Capture to find closest fonts to the fonts, which used in those magazines.
I didn’t expect to find all the fonts on Adobe Capture. It probably contains the fonts which are available on Adobe Typekit.
I cannot say that I was able to find all the fonts. Through Adobe Capture, I found very similar examples, not exactly the same. At least I had some place to start.
Types are everywhere! It’s interesting that I am not just looking at types, but the differences in details between them that fascinates me.
Reflection
I found this exercise very useful. In the second part I had this opportunity to learn how to identify any font anywhere I find it. It was the first time that I was looking for the name of the fonts, the details in each font, which have used around me.
Using the following words create typographical representations that present both the word and a suggestion of its meaning. Sad, Safe, Sardonic, Saucy, Scholarly, Serious, Sinking, Skimpy, Shadow, Sleek, Speed, Swagger, Shattered, Snowy, Squeeze, Shy, Sodden, Stiff, Short, Silly, Soothing, Smart, Squat, Sweet, Sordid, Sophisticated, Stodgy, Stoned, Style, Supine Start this exercise by working on A4 sheets of paper. Set the words in 48pt Helvetica Bold, print and cut out the words and then arrange them and stick them to a sheet of paper trying to capture the meaning of the word visually. Think about the composition, using the white space of the page to help you construct your meanings. Then work digitally using any of the software you have available. Explore how you can set text at a slant, at different sizes, in different colours and fonts. Try using filters in your software for other effects. Make notes as you work explaining your choice of representations and which ones you feel that you were most successful with.
Step 1:
For this exercise, I started by finding the meaning of the words that I didn’t know. Then typed them in Photoshop using 48pt Helvetica and printed them off, cut them out and started to put them on a piece of paper to convey the meaning.
It was easier with some words like, sinking, shattered,short, sad, silly, stiff, squeeze, speed, shadow and stoned, since I could think of the position for the letters to convey the meaning. I think the white space helped a lot in conveying the meaning of some of the words like, shy and sinking.
My favourites in this section are squat, speed and shy.
Step 2:
For this section, I used different typefaces in photoshop as well as filters and effecttools.
Throughout the design I had the meaning of each words in mind to help me to convey the meaning by the available tools.
I tried to use different range of fonts, seri, sans serif and script in my designs, related to their meaning.
For some words, I added some elements to make them more interesting. For example, snowy, sad, soothing and safe.
With some words I had this opportunity to change the position or swap some of the letters like, sardonic, silly, serious.
I found the word sauce by searching online and the change it to saucy.
Overall, I am happy with the final result. However I was struggling with some words like swagger, and couldn’t find any way rather than a serif font to convey the meaning.
The history of typography, printing and reading are all linked; what else can you find out about this history that you find interesting? Perhaps you are interested in a particular era, form of typography or particular area of reading. It might be a wide subject such as the history of the alphabet, or something very specific such as the use of typography in Film Noir, comics or American crime novels. Undertake some secondary research to find out more, taking notes along the way and collecting examples for your visual diary.
I am always fascinated by different types of fonts and how they can be used to convey a particular emotion or a message.
I think we usually take types for granted. After studying about the history of typography, which I really enjoyed, my view towards different typefaces has changed. By knowing about the history of each type, I can better understand the way in which they are being used in different concepts.
I decided to dig more into the history of calligraphy, since it is one of my favorite subjects.
Calligraphy versus typography
Writing can be a form of art: a playground for human invention, ingenuity and skill. This applies both to writing by hand (calligraphy) and to letters and characters designed in printed or digital form (typography). As calligraphy is a gestural art, it incorporates more variation in form than typographic writing which is made mechanically and often within narrow technical constraints.
If we picture this on a sliding scale, on one end is typography, where legibility is primary (e.g. notices on a motorway sign or someone’s name on a form), and down at the other end is calligraphy – writing that is produced primarily for its decorative or expressive qualities – where legibility is less important (e.g. architectural friezes, lettering in paintings or the ornamental lettering engraved on a banknote).
But all letters and characters – handwritten or typographic in form – have been ‘designed’ by someone, and are a means of artistic expression.
Lettering design: the basic principles
Ideas on beauty have changed throughout history. Behind much Western art and writing lie notions that come from Ancient Greece. When the fifth century Greek sculptor Polykleitos wrote his Canon on beauty, he declared that beauty lies in the proportion of one part to another and of all the parts to the whole.
Similar ideas led the Greeks to think in a modular way about their alphabet, and this kind of thinking lies behind the design of many scripts. We have also come to think of the roman alphabet we use today not as a random collection of 26 letters but as a system of interlocking proportions based on squares, rectangles and circles. For example, in 18th-century France, at the time of the Enlightenment, there was work on designing roman alphabets against gridded backgrounds; these became models for future type designs.
Geometric types
Proportional thinking has also run through Arabic calligraphy ever since the time of Ali Ibn Muqla (885/6-890), vizier to three Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. When political rivals had his right hand cut off, legend has it that he continued to write with a pen fastened to his arm.
Ibn Muqla composed an overarching system of proportions for Arabic script, perhaps Pythagorean in inspiration. He took as its basic element the rhomboid dot, one of the simplest shapes a square-nibbed pen can make. His concepts allowed Arabic calligraphy to develop and extend formal structural thinking even to cursive (joined-up) shapes.
While Arabic calligraphy puts an emphasis on proportion, brush calligraphy (practiced in China and Japan) seeks out balance. Many characters have complex structures, while others are simple in form. This means that:
allowance needs to be made for variety of scale or weight between forms within a piece of writing
characters need more space around them
in less formal writing, the calligrapher has to balance the tone and density of ink across the piece as they write.
What matters is the overall appearance of the composition rather than a focus on replicating individual units.
There is also a deep appreciation of the performative aspect of brush calligraphy; it can be viewed almost like a dance. Each character is written as a flowing sequence from beginning to end. Even if the ink runs out, the calligrapher will coax the last remnants from the brush, rather than break that flow midway through writing a character. The traces left by the brush on the page leave a record of movement that the reader can follow and enjoy.
This all produces a very different set of aesthetic considerations compared to those operating in the world of moveable type where every character is identical and harmony comes from a sense of uniformity and repetitive pattern.
The impact of moveable metal type
Moveable metal type was in use in Europe from the 1450s, and in Korea since the 13th century. The type is made up of small pieces, each one representing an individual letter or character. These pieces are composed into larger masses, clamped into a frame, placed in a press, inked and printed. The type is then broken back up into individual pieces and reused.
Letterforms for the Latin alphabet
Let’s take the Latin alphabet as an example. In the 15th century the first printers in Europe used the common black-letter gothic textura forms for their books. These letters were already to be found in the larger handwritten prayer books of German printer Gutenberg’s day. At the beginning the printed forms followed the calligraphy very closely.
In the 1460s, when printing spread to Italy, new upper and lowercase roman forms became popular. These lettershapes were already being written in manuscripts by scholars and scribes immersed in a revival of classical learning. Scribes such as Bartolomeo Sanvito (1435–1511) had become an expert in writing the roman capital letters he saw carved on ancient Roman architecture.
Cicero’s De Officiis (1498)
Sanvito also became an expert in writing the new cursive form of roman lowercase writing we call italic. The script had been developed in Florence in the early 1400s. Italic was first introduced as a type for printed books in 1501 by Aldus Manutius, a publisher in Venice.
First book in italic typeface
These four scripts: gothic black-letter, the roman upper and lowercase letters, with italic, are the principal styles of letterforms for the Latin alphabet that have come down to us today. All these letters depend on carefully-related stroke thicknesses and spacing to give the even colour to a page of text – a feature that is less tiring to the eyes and aids legibility.
Non-Latin typefaces
Early European attempts to produce non-Latin typefaces often failed to appreciate details of the stroke formation of the scripts they were transforming into metal type. From the 16th century this was true for many Greek and Arabic typefaces; later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was also true for many of the types introduced by Europeans in Central and Southeast Asia.
Calligraphy continues
Although Europe had entered the age of printing in the 16th and 17th centuries, calligraphy and handwriting continued to flourish. Engraved handwriting manuals in all the major European languages show elaborate visual displays of penmanship and flourished decoration. They also show that roman letters and italic continued to develop in the hands of these writing masters.
Meanwhile, during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in Iran and Central and Southern Asia new calligraphic styles continued to be elaborated. The nasta’ liq style (a variation on Arabic calligraphy developed in Persia) became more streamlined, swiftly written and linked, giving us the shikasta, or broken nasta’liq style. The sense of distinct lines of writing is weakened in favour of an overall pattern, with short verticals and flattened curves and units of text that seem to drop diagonally across the page.
Persian Qur’an
During these same years, in the Ottoman lands of Anatolia, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, the thuluth style of writing in Arabic script was widely used. This form is characterised by a strong vertical emphasis with long ascending lines. It came to be used for large-scale panels that could be employed architecturally or framed and hung on walls. The designs could also be transferred over onto other materials such as tile work and textiles.
The Industrial Revolution
The time of the Industrial Revolution was a period of reassessment for European type and typography. Amongst the innovators of that time was the British printer John Baskerville (1707–1775). He cast new type designs, which were wider bodied and with clearer contrasts between thick and thin strokes. He re-engineered the printing plates of his presses to give a crisper image. No part of the production process escaped his attention.
His work won admirers across Europe, particularly in France and Italy where his types seemed to embody the spirit of a new, more dramatic and exacting age.
Baskerville type designs
19–20th century calligraphy
The end of the 19th century saw a revival of interest in calligraphy across Europe. This was brought about in part by British calligrapher Edward Johnston (1872–1944), who began teaching writing, illuminating and lettering at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1899. He was self-taught, having studied calligraphy by researching the manuscript collections of the British Museum.
He focused on the historical tradition of calligraphy in the West. The manuscript that inspired his basic calligraphic teaching hand (he called it his ‘foundational hand’) was the 10th-century Ramsey Psalter.
Ramsey Psalter
In 1906 he published a handbook Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering, including chapters on calligraphy, type, painted lettering and letters cut in stone. Later he taught at the Royal College of Art and is most famous today for his type designs for the London Underground.
Initially Johnston’s work was encouraged by followers of William Morris. Morris, one of the founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement, wanted to reform many areas of the arts. He felt the design of products deteriorated the more manufacturing became detached from traditions of handwork. So when he turned his attention to typography, he believed a revival of handwritten calligraphy should also be attempted.
Johnston’s work was shaped by this thinking: he focused on the historical tradition of calligraphy in the West and scripts for books.
Elsewhere in Europe, such as in Austria and Germany, calligraphy was seen as part of other new art movements: the Jugendstil and German expressionism.
In China and Japan meanwhile, the 20th century opened with a revived interest in styles of calligraphy which were preserved in rubbings of stone inscriptions from the fourth century. However, following the World War II, an avant-garde calligraphy movement swept Japan, paralleling the development of American expressionism and action painting.
Today in China, alongside an interest in researching calligraphy from previous eras, conceptual art has also begun to influence the way it is used.
New English calligraphy
In the Arab world it was the de-colonisation in the mid-20th century that saw a revival of interest in calligraphy. Calligraphy was one of the few areas of the arts that had been left untouched by imported European systems of art education. It was thought that from this root, new artistic traditions might grow.
Modern calligraphy
Today new typefaces continue to be designed as the uses for type multiply across different media and platforms. We have seen the arrival of type families that incorporate characters from many writing systems within one overarching design, a useful feature in today’s global marketplace. BBC Reith, for example, is a new typeface family produced for the British broadcaster by type designers Dalton Maag.
Digital typeface for the BBC
Calligraphy, handmade lettering and signwriting flourishes, both at the local level and sometimes with a conceptual twist that places it in the context of an art gallery. The creation of an art market for calligraphy and fine typography is now affecting all the world’s major writing systems.
One of the most innovative developments in recent years has been graffiti. For the first time we have seen a new style of writing develop within youth culture, an unanticipated side-effect of a century of effort to provide universal education. Beginning in the eastern United States in the 1970s, graffiti has become a world-wide phenomenon spreading to many of the world’s writing systems.
Overall Comments Part three of this module has focused on the importance of being a visually literate graphic designer by exploring visual dynamics. Overall your response to part three has been very good, stronger in some places than others. Illustration work is developing well, using Illustrator and Photoshop with confidence, next use InDesign for graphics work. Great to see exercises being utilised throughout. Great progress, well done
My respond to the feedback
Thanks for the positive feedback. I really enjoyed working on this part and glad to see that I am doing fine.
What I need to do next:
I need to test my ideas on others Also, make notes on what I have learnt from the exercise; what went well and what could I do differently next time.
Next time I need to use InDesign when using text and grid structure.
I need to use traditional methods such as paint/pastels/pencils or cut colour paper more to help me make spontaneous decisions, then use drafts to develop further using digital techniques.
I need to collect images and words from magazines and newspapers as well as my own photographs.
Need to question my work to ensure communication works as I intend.
Through my research, I need to critically analyse examples and state how they have informed my own work.
Following websites have been visited to study about the artists and designers, who have mentioned on the feedback:
Maryam: OCA Graphic Design 