This week in class myself and others learnt about the use of ‘word marks’ or in simple terms, playing around with words to display double meanings.
Although in short this class was both a refresher and an extension of what I previously learned when it comes to typefaces and typography, we began shooting with each feature that makes up a letter, what they do, what they're called and how they should be built.
Typeface anatomy
Get familiar with Type Anatomy - Yes I'm a Designer
There was a lot to learn when it comes to the elements that make up the letters for a word, many of which I can't tell if I’d remember. However, that doesn't mean I’ll completely forget these elements.
Aside from this, I did find it both really interesting and helpful that all lower case letters are measured by what's called ‘the x-height’, which is fairly self explanatory, meaning the lower case ‘x’ is the main measurement used for the rest of the letters fro all typefaces.
Another thing I found really interesting was that the difference between a closed counter, open-counter and an eye. A closed counter would be the space found within ‘o, g, p, d, etc,’ as its completely encircled from the letter frames, whereas open counters, can be found in ‘y, u, a, h, etc’ which are similar to closed counters but they have gap and aren't completely closed off. Now to the interesting point, when researching I found out that the lower case ‘e’ which has a closed counter specifically in the middle is actually called ‘the eye’, mostly due to the face that it looks like an eye, but the interesting part is that ‘the eye’ title is specifically reserved for the lowercase ‘e’ nothing else.
I learnt a lot about type face anatomy within the lecture solely from just one image alone, that highlights all features within different letters and labels them to explain.
For the first task of the day myself as well as others were asked to identify and highlight the elements that are used to build up our chosen typefaces, creating the name for our Banking brand, in this case name was ‘Pluto’ and my chosen font for my brand was ‘Lexend’.
When I identified the elements of my name, I was lucky enough to have a short name of only five letters, aswell as having a very simple geometric based typeface, making it easy to pick out striking features that I found, using the previous image as a reference page.
As for the blue lines within this screenshot, they are there to point out the main line of where the letters rest on, you have the x-height next, followed by the max height of capital letters, and finally, the highest point for ascender base letters like the ‘L’.