Typography - Task 1: Exercises

22.09.2025 -  27.10.2025 (Week 1 - Week 6)

Farida Joice Jayanti (0368061)

Typography / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

Exercises

---

LECTURE

LECTURE 1 (22.09.2025)

Introduction

    Typography is a fundamental aspect in any design studies. It is the creation of typefaces and typefamilies. It is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. 

    Typography has evolved over 500 years: originating from calligraphy, evolving to lettering, and finally to typography. Calligraphy refers to the writing style, meanwhile lettering is when we draw the letters out. Typography employs a number of terminologies, conventions, and unwritten rules (our own judgement) depending on our disposition or influences concerning style. Typography plays a significant role in how we present ourselves, convey information, and communicate effectively. It is practiced by anyone who arranges words, letters, numbers, and symbols for publication, display, or distribution. Until the digital age, typography was a specialized field. The digital era allowed more people to dabble in the field and hence resulted in the decline of typographic quality.

    Important terminologies include font and typeface. Font refers to the individual weight within the typeface, while typeface refers to the entire family of fonts/weights that share similar characteristics/style.

Early Letterform Development: Phoenician to Roman

Fig. 1.1 Evolution from Phoenician Letter 

Fig. 1.2 Phoenician to Roman

Fig. 1.3 Boustrophedon

    The early letterform development began with the Phoenecians, whom like other Semitic people, wrote from right to left. The Greeks then developed a style of writing called "boustrophedon" (how the ox ploughs), which meant that the lines of text read altenartively from right to left and left to right, also without any lettspace or punctuations. Later on the Greeks would move to a strictly left-to-right writing.

    Etruscan (and then Roman) carvers work in marble painted letterforms before they inscribethem. Certain qualities of their strokes - a change in weight from vertical to horizontal, a broadening of the stroke at start and finish - carried over into the carved letterforms.

Handscripts from the 3rd to 10th Century

Fig. 1.4 Square Capitals (4th/5th century)

    

Fig. 1.5 Rustic Capitals (Late 3rd-mid 4th century)

    Rustic capitals is the compressed version of the square capitals, thus it was easier to write but harder to read. Rustic capitals is allowed for twice as many words on a sheet of parchment and took far less time to write. The pen or brush was held a an angle of approximately 30 degree off the perpendcular. Although rustic capitals were faster and easier to write, they were slightly harder to read due to their compressed nature.

Fig. 1.6 Roman Cursive (4th century)

    Both square and rustic capitals were typically reserved for documents of some intended performance. Everyday transactions, however were typically written in cursive hand in which were simplified for speed. We can see here the beginning of what we refer to as lowercase letterforms. The development of the lowercase letterform is a result of writing uppercase letterforms quickly.

Fig. 1.7 Uncials (4th-5th century)

    Uncials incorporated some aspects of the Roman cursive hand, especially in the shape of the A, D, E, H, M, U, and Q. 'Uncia' s Latin for a twelfth of anything: as a result, some scholars think that uncials refer to letters that are one inch (one twelfth of foot) high. It might, however, be more accurate to think of uncials simply as small letters. The broad forms of uncials are more readable at small sizes than rustic capitals.

Fig. 1.8 Half-uncials (C. 500)

    A further formalization of the cursive hand, half-uncials mark the formal beginning of lowercase letterforms, replete with ascenders and descenders, 2000 years after the origin of the Phoenician alphabet.

Fig. 1.9 Caloline Miniscule (C. 925)

    Charlemagne, the first unifier of Europe since the Romans, issued an edict in 789 to standardize all ecclesiastical texts. He entrusted this task to Alcuin of York, Abbot of St Martin of Tours, France. The monks rewrote the texts using both majuscules (uppercase), miniscule, capitalization and punctuation which set the standard for calligraphy for a century. 

Blackletter to Gutenberg's Type

Fig. 1.10 Blackletter Textura (C. 1300)

    With the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire came regional variations upon Alcuin's script. In northern europe, a condense strongly vertical letterform know as Blackletter or textura gained popularity, called 'rotunda'. The romanistic script in Italy is based on Alcuin's miniscule.

Text Type Classifications

Fig. 1.11 Text Type Classifications

---

INSTRUCTION

For more details regarding the tasks in this module, please access the file below:

Exercise 1 - Type Expression

    For exercise 1, we were given a set of words to choose from, which are BLEED, BURN, GLITCH, NOISY, SHAKE, and SQUISH. From the given set of words, we were tasked to choose 4 words and sketch ideas to create their type expressions. We have to base our idea-sketches of the letterforms using the 10 fonts provided, which are Adobe Calson Pro, Bembo, Bodoni, Futura, Gill Sans, ITC Garamond, ITC New Baskerville, Janson, Serifa, and Univers. Graphical elements and colors are not allowed and we are only limited little to no distortion of the letters.

1. Sketching

    Before doing the sketches, I searched for each words' meaning/definition in the Cambridge dictionary and integrate it with my own perception of those words so that I can try to create an expression that can express its meaning well.

• BLEED: 
• BURN: 
• GLITCH: 
• NOISY: 
• SHAKE: 
• SQUISH: 

    From the definitions above, I created my sketches: 

---

FEEDBACK

Exercise 1 - Type Expression

Week 

General Feedback: 

Personal Feedback: 

---

REFLECTIONS

Experience

Observation

Findings

---

FURTHER READINGS

Week 1