Reading notes from Essential Principles
I'm reading the Essential Principles of Graphic Design by Debbie Millman as an attempt to:
-prep myself for pivoting into graphic design
-get around to understanding things I had a fuzzy intuition for in years, but don't really quite have vocabulary to describe and verbalize
-trying to develop a habit of reading a little bit everyday
Anyhoo I'll be using Tumblr to keep track of my progress. Almost all my notes are hastily written without much deep reflection, most of the bullet points are information verbatim from the book + my own off-the-cuff impressions about what I just read. This is scratchpad-level stuff, definitely not meant to be very sophisticated. Anyhoo. I shall start now. Below are the notes from the first section I read today, on typography.
-graphic design has the unique ability to reflect the culture in which we participate (note to self: this is a generic statement that can be applied to any humanities-related thing, elaborate a bit more on what's unique to graphic design that makes it a barometer for cultural norms)
-Wow! I learned that primes are different from quotation marks! Primes should be straight marks like how Tumblr displays ' or ", but quotation marks are generally like 6's and 9's... Primes should be used to denote inches and feet e.g. 5'2"=5 feet 2 inches. Quotation marks should be used to...indicate quotes. I have never heard of this distinction until now so I checked the year of the book's publication, which turned out to be 2008. Now this baffles me slightly because it appears that web typography conventions today treat primes to be the same as quotations, or at the very least the typography used in Tumblr's body text. In this section, the author specifically said she will only spell out typography disasters that should be avoided, not best practices to follow. Many, many websites today are guilty of committing this major typography sin, if it is correct that primes are indeed a separate punctuation from quotes.
-Hyphens at the end of sentences to connect a word broken by lines is fine! Apparently the corporate world has an aversion to this
-Default justification should be zero percent, i.e. the spacing between your letters should neither squeeze nor wander, should be consistent
-Using shorter line lengths can cause problems with word spacing. If you're getting gappy lines in justified (?) text, increase line length, reduce type size, add hyphenation. When in doubt, set text ragged
-Excessive leading (?) is bad. Look like stripes, according to the author
-The text block should be cohesive, with just enough room to breathe between the lines
-Bullets and hangs: don't use bullets, numbered lists without making sure the hang aligns correctly under the first line. Set a tab on the right so your numbers align to the last digit/punctuation. Set a tab an en or em (?) on the left
-Capitals: use a little letter spacing (50-100 units?) if body text, more if it's a header
-On header text: if very large, most type needs some adjustment, usually overall letter tightening. Fuss! Fuss over it! Add space if letters are too close!
