What is typography?

Typography is everywhere we look. The arrangement of letters and text in such a way that it makes the copy legible, clear, and visually appealing to the reader is known as typography. It involves different typefaces, font styles, appearances, layouts and structure, whose aim is to create certain emotions and convey specific messages to the reader. In other words, typography helps us to put life into a soulless text.

What is typography?

Typography can be seen almost everywhere. The way your phone looks. When you see a billboard, or even your coffee cup, everything contains typography. Typography is so much more than just choosing beautiful fonts. The arrangement of every font, letter, and character plays an important part in determining how a message is conveyed. The selection of fonts can be seem a little difficult at times, but even the smallest change in type of font can impact the look and feel of your work immensely.
By good typography, a strong visual hierarchy can be established. It can provide a graphic balance to the website, and is very good to decide the product’s overall tone. A good typography will allow the user to read and access the content easily.
Typography plays an important part in building brands also. When a brand uses particular fonts, colours, graphics, it becomes it’s brand language. People will recognize the brand as soon as they’ll see that particular font somewhere. The best example for use of typography for building brand is “vogue”. It’s logo is also made of simple typography.

FONTS

The physical and graphical representation of text character or its collection is called font.

TYPEFACE

It is the group of similar fonts. For example – Clarendton is the Typeface. It’s variation in size, weight, style is font.

READABILITY

The first and the most important thing any reader will see in any kind of typography is the ability to read. One should use the easy to read and identify typefaces while reading a body text. Headings can be a little different than the body text and they are also big in size making the text more visible and easy to read.

ALIGNMENT

It is the positioning of text, graphics, images and other elements in the artwork. Every single element must be aligned in such a manner that overall artwork looks balanced and pleasant to eyes.

HIERARCHY

Hierarchy is a kind of ladder. To put into easy words, different styles and sizes of typefaces giudes the user, where to head first and which thing to read first, then the second, and then the third.

KERNING

Kerning is the space between specific characters.

LEADING

Leading is the vertical space between lines of text, also known as line spacing.

TRACKING

Tracking is the overall space between characters, sometimes called character spacing.

• Baseline
• Cap height
• X-height

• Serif
• Stem
• Stroke

• Descender
• Ascender
• Aperture
• Letter spacing

PAUL RAND (15 Aug 1914 – 26 Nov 1996)

Paul Rand was best known for corporate designs. Rand was educated at the Pratt Institute (1929-32), the Parsons School of Design (1932-33), and the Art Students League (1933-34). He was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design.

His career began with humble assignments, starting with a part-time position creating stock images for a syndicate that supplied graphics to various newspapers and magazines. In his early twenties he was producing work that began to garner international acclaim.

Rand’s most widely known contribution to graphic design are his corporate identities, many of which are still in use.

SAUL BASS (08 May 1920 – 25 Apr 1996)

He graduated from James Monroe High School in Bronx.
attending night classes with Gyorgy Kepes at Brooklyn College. He designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America. As well as AT&T globe logo in 1983.

He also designed Continental Airlines 1968 jet stream logo. Saul Bass designed emblematic movie posters that transformed the visuals of film advertising.

Bass’s film posters are characterized by a distinctive typography and minimalistic style.

ARMIN HOFMANN (29 Jun 1920 – present)

He began his career in 1947 as a teacher at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel School of Art and craft. He was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style.

He created work enormously for books, exhibitions, stage sets, logotypes, symbols, typography, posters, sign systems, and environmental graphics. He is well known for his posters, which emphasized economical use of colour and fonts, in reaction to what Hofmann regarded as the “trivialization of colour.

In 1965 he wrote the Graphic Design Manual, a popular textbook in the field. He was also an influential educator, retiring in 1987.

OTL AICHER ( 13 May 1922 – 01 Sep 1991)

Aicher was born m Ulm, the south-western state of Baden-württemberg. In 1946. after the end of the war, Aicher began studying Sculpture at the A.demy of Fine Arts Munich. In 1947, he opened his own studio in Ulms. In 1852 he married Inge Scholl, the older sister of Werner, Hans and Sophie. In 1953, along with Inge Scholl and Max Bill, he founded the Ulm School of Design), which became one of Germany’s leading educational centers for design from its founding until its closure in 1968.

Aicher was heavily involved in corporate branding and designed the logo for German airline Lufthansa in 1969. Otl Aicher also helped to design the logo of the Munich Olympics 1972. He has designed the logo of the University of Konstanz and Munich Airport, the latter consisting of the letter M in a simple sans-serif font.

MILTON GLASER (26 Jun 1929 – present)

Milton Glaser was educated at the High School of Music and Art and the Cooper Union art school in New York and, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. Throughout his career, Glaser has been a prolific creator of posters and prints.

In 1968 Glaser and Clay Felker founded New York magazine, where Glaser was president and design director until 1977. In 1983, Glaser teamed with Walter Bernard to form WBMG, a publication design firm located in New York City. They together have designed more than 50 magazines, newspapers and periodicals around the world. He received the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, for his profound and meaningful long-term contribution to the contemporary practice of design.

MASSIMO VIGNELLI (10 Jan 1931 – 27 May 2014)

He was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas ranging from package design through houseware design and furniture design to public signage and showroom design.

Vignelli studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and later at the Universita di Architettura, Venice. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates. He worked in a wide variety of areas, including interior design, environmental design, package design, graphic design, furniture design, and product design.

In January 2009, Vignelli released The Vignelli Canon as a free e-book. Vignelli died on May 27, 2014 in New York City.

Alan Gerard Fletcher (27 Sep 1931 – 21 Sep 2006)

He studied at the Hammersmith School of Art from 1949. He went to London to study at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956. He founded a design firm called ‘Fletcher/Forbes/Gill’ with Colin Forbes and Bob Gill in 1962.

Much of his work is still in use: a logo for Reuters made up of 84 dots, which he created in 1965.

Alan Fletcher also wrote several books about graphic design and visual thinking, like The Art of Looking Sideways (2001). The December 2006 limited-edition cover of Wallpaper* magazine featured one of his last works omitting his calligraphic signature.

He died of cancer in London.

PAULA SCHER (06 Oct 1948 – present)

Paula Scher studied at the Tyler School Of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1870.. the mid-1990 she made her landmark identity for The Public. Paul Scher has developed identities for clients like New York Times Magazine, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center etc.

In 1984 she co-founded Koppel & Scher.. 1991, after the studio suffered from the re.ssion and Koppel took the position of a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy.

In 1992, she became a design educator, teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

DAVID CARSON (08 Sep 1955 – present)

He went to Oregon College of Commercial Art in 1983. He went to Switzerland to attend a three week work shop of graphic designing as part of his degree. Carson made significant impact on the world of graphic design and typography

In 2010 Carson worked as worldwide creative director for Bose Corporation. Since 2010, he has lectured, held workshops and exhibitions across Europe, South America and the United States.

MICHAEL BEIRUT (1957 – present)

He studied graphic design at university of Cincinnati’s college of, design, architecture, Art and planning. Since 1880 he has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram. Beirut was vice president of graphic design at Vignelli Associates.

Beirut served as the national president of the American Institute of Graphic Arta (ALGA) from 1998 to 2001. Now Beirut is a senior critic . graphic design at the Yale School of Art.

NEVILLE BRODY (23 Apr 1857 – present)

In 1975 Brody went on to do a Fine Art foundation course at Hornsey College of Art In 1976, Brody started a thrall-year B.A. course in graphics at the London College of Printing.He created the company Research Studios in 1984.

Brody made his name largely popular through his revolutionary work as Art Director for The Face magazine. He was one of the founding members of wwwfontshopcom in London.

Neville Brody still also continues to work as a graphic designer and together with …ass partner Flea Richards launched his own design practice.

STEFAN SACABEISTER (06 Aug 1962 – present)

His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Pratt Institute in New York. In 1001, he moved to Hong Kong to work with Hong Kong Design Group.

He has spent many years designing for the music industry:
– 2000 Design Biannual, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York.
– 2001 Stealing Eyeballs, Kunstlerhaus, Vienna; Solo exhibition, Gallery Frederic Sanchez, Fans
– 2002 Solo exhibition, NIAK, Vienna
– 2003 Solo exhibition, Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland; Solo exhibition, DDD Gallery Tokyo

CHIPP KIDD (12 Sep 1964 – present)

Chipp first joined the Knopf design team in 1086, when he was hired as a junior assistant and later became associate .t director. He was beet known for his book covers.

In 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole. USA lbda.y also called him the closest thing to a rock star,. Author lames Ellroy has called .m “the world’s greatest book-jacket designer.

It was announced at New York Comic Con 2011 that Kidd would be writing Batman: Death Hy Design, an original graphic novel, which was then published in 2012.