4 Concepts That I Learned (DwT)
The first of the 4 concepts that I learned about was in chapter one. This was the concept of Pictographs. Pictographs were one of the first ways of communicating visually and were brought about by the early people of Egypt, Sumeria, and China. The pictographs were simple drawings that were easily understood by most of the peoples at the time. They were, more often than not, drawings of people, animals, tools, and weapons simply because those were the things that people would have to communicate at the time.
The following topic that I found most interesting was the topic of individual characteristics in different typefaces. These individual characteristics are things that enable people to identify specific typefaces. They are subtle differences within upper and lowercase letters in different typefaces. When someone is attempting to identify a typeface it helps to look at individual characters as opposed to groups of characters. By looking at individual characters one can see that there is more design information in certain letters than others. The uppercase letters of “R,” “T,” and “W” are a few characters that contain the most design information. This is also true when talking about the lowercase letters “e,” “g,” “h,” and “o.”
Optimal Spacing was a concept in chapter three that I found to be interesting as well. There has to be a desirable amount of spacing between words and characters or else it will cause the reader to have a hard time discerning what is being said. If the type is too close together it makes the reader work harder when trying to distinguish one word from another. However, if the words are too far apart then it creates vertical spaces or “rivers” between words and characters that can cause the readers eye to become distracted from moving left to right.
Finally, I would like to talk about the concept of Tints. A tint is a color that is printed less than its full density which causes it to appear as a lighter shade of the same color. This effect is created by “screening.” Otherwise known as converting the image into a pattern of dots that vary in size. If the dots are made smaller than the tint is made lighter, and if the dots are made larger than the tint is made darker. Tints were originally created in values of ten. This meant that 10% tint was the lightest tint available and 100% tint was the solid color. However, nowadays any percentage of tint is available between 0% and 100% Tints are an asset that is very much necessary when a specific project is limited to only one color. The tints add much more depth to a project when limited to a single color.
