Exercise 2–4 : Intro to Typography

Rachel Luo

Exercise 2 • Typeface Tracing

Here, I traced the different fonts of the words “AMB garn” with tracing paper and a 0.7 pencil. The process hurt my hand, but it made me notice many interesting about these certain fonts: Adobe Garamond, Didot, Helvetica, and Futura.

Just by having to trace each letter for every font, it was surprising to notice, for example, how to think the fonts of Helvetica and Futura really were. The only difference noticeable is the letter “M”, and in Helvetica, the M is less sharp than in Futura. For adobe Garamond and Didot, the fonts are definitely but thinner, especially Didot. For Didot, some strokes of the letter were just a thin line rather than an actual outline. For the lowercase letters, I also noticed the different lower case “a’s”. Some of them are written the same way, then you have Futura who went with the conventional handwritten way of “a”.

Exercise 3 • Typographic Voice

In this exercise, I expressed how I believed different words would suit particular fonts. Below, is each of my interpretation for each word.

Just to speak shortly on a few, I thought melacony, organic, and tradition quite fit their fonts. I went with very conventional associations most would have with a word, such as tradition, I thought the medevil typeface would fit the effect of the word. My friend also commented how she liked the typeface I used for “Rebellion” because of it’s squareness and just geometric look it has. Overall, choosing typefaces were still quite difficult, because you realize how much a typeface can bring out the expression of the word, and you’re just stuck on trying to decipher the best one.