Blog Post 35 - Stage 2 - Adobe Illustrator - Typography

With the last Blog Post being in regards to the Text Wrap function I personally think that it is very much worth looking further into that of the Typography element of Illustrator. This is because a large part of the On-Disc label could involve around that of the typography element and it is important that I fully understand these elements so that I keep to the professional appearance that I am looking for.

Being that of the typography there is actually a lot more than meets the eye and the level of detail that is behind something of a piece of text is quite amazing. For example, here is an example of what different elements of a piece of text there are including that of Bracket, Crossbar, Stem and Terminal. These are elements that make each font different from another, for example a Cross Bar might be longer on one font, as opposed to being shorter on another leading to a totally different appearance of the font.

At this moment in time, however, the main difference that needs to be explained is that of the two main different types of fonts. In general, fonts are classified into two different categories which are Serif and Sans Serif. In regards to these two types of fonts they are easily distinguishable due to whether or not the fonts have small extrusions at the corners or egdes of the text. As an example, the image above of "Handglovery" is a Serif Font, whilst this font this very text is in is Sans Serif. The reasoning behind this is in regards to the wording - in French the word Sans means Without and the Serif's are the small extrusions. Therefore a font which is Sans Serif is Without extrusions, and a Serif font is with extrusions. 

Illustrator PostScript & Bitmap Type

Moving on from the style of the fonts, there is also the mechanics of how the fonts work too in Illustrator which is worth explaining. In Illustrator, unlike Photoshop, the use of Digital Letters (PostScript type) means that one can actually edit the different points that make up the letter (as they are vectorised they are made up of details of point locations, as mentioned in Blog Post 30 - Introduction). These points are visible in this image here, compared with a bitmap type that is made up of individual pixels which nicely highlights the differences. This is also very useful for creating type of a infinity large size, as utilising just a bitmap type would result in a blurred an unclear image at large sizes.

Kerning and Tracking

The subject of fonts and type is very large indeed, however at this stage is is worth mentioning a few more key elements to take heed of as they will no doubt come in useful in the future. Firstly, there are generally four main styles that Fonts can come in, which include Regular, Bold, Italic and Underlined. There are different official use for these different styles however as long as they are justified then they can be used for any element of the design. For example, the correct use of underlined is for emphasis which might not be what you were looking to achieve. Two more elements in regards to Typograph that are important to take into considering are that of Kerning and Tracking. Kerning is in regards to the special spacing between two letters - for example the first letter and the second letter of a word which could be used to promote emphasis. The other, Tracking, is the common separation between letters, which could be particularly useful as one might wish to slightly space the word out to fill an area, or thought that the word looked better with a slightly closer together appearance between the words.

Now that I have looked into and researched the subject of Typography I feel that this will certainly help me in regards to when I come to designing my On Disc label - namely I am sure that the Kerning and Tracking options will be put to good use to create an aesthetically pleasing end result. Now that I discussed this element, I will now look into the aspect of Guides in Illustrator.