Type & Grid

We had our first workshop with Lorenzo on Type and grids, it was really interesting, although quite confusing to start off with.

The main make up of type is:
-Points
-Picas
-Em's
-Linefeed
-Interline spacing
-Leading

Leading
The term leading comes from when there was no digital design and everything was done using type blocks, to get a bigger leading using blocks they used to put a piece of lead between the blocks, hence the term leading.

In the industry when you are using type you need to know how to describe what you have done on a design or article in the terms of the type. The language is very precise and mainly used when sending things to professional printers.

The image above shows how linefeed is worked out. For this image above you would say it was 10pt with 4pt leading or 10 over 4

The 10 refers to the point size - ascender to descender

The 4 refers to the leading

The linefeed is both added together, basically how often a line comes in, in an article.

Measuring Type

To measure type you can use a type scale, its basically lots of scale for different point sizes. To measure a point size you measure from the ascender to descender. Using the scale you have to go through each point size until it fits to the 1, this means it is that scale. We tried this ourselves in the workshop.

12 points = 1 pica M

1 point = 0.35 mm

Line length

10 pica M = 24 characters

average line = 6 words

48 characters in 20 Pica M

=

8 words per 20 picas

Even though you can set type at the same point, not every font is that same point size.

Ligatures

Ligatures are where there is no spacing between the letter forms and they join to become one letterform, normally seen in serif fonts

Using type

A readable line length is between 9-12 words

A bigger linefeed makes it easier to read body text

Hierarchy of text:

-heading

-subheadings

-running heads

-folios

-intro

-body

-captions

A breakout is a quote or image that is pulled out of the normal body text. It usually runs across more than one paragraph.

How the hierarchy and use of text can change the look of a design

Grids

Grids are used for page layouts, mainly in magazines, books anything to do with publishing. A grid is a baseline guide that you use to line up and layout out the components of a article/design. There are mainly variations of grids, some can be really simple with just 3 columns others can be 20+ coloumns.

The use of grids can create more than one design. Just because the grid is there, it doesnt mean you have to stick to it, you can experiment and create interesting layouts, even with simple grids!

We looked at trying to decide what grids were on certain pages within magazines, then we had a go for ourselves.