THE TERMINOLOGY & ANATOMY OF TYPE

  We were spoken to today about the appropriate terminology to be used when working with typography. We were also shown a diagram that explained the anatomy of type and how these characteristics of letterforms can be played with or disfigured.

  
  We we're first introduced to some of the less attractive fonts and asked why they may be perceived this way. For example, "what is the point in a typeface that tries to look hand rendered... if you want a hand rendered look to your work, why not hand render it?..." which is referring to the typeface Mistral.



There are three main subtopics within Typography that are as follows,

1) Typeface - this is an artistic interpretation or design of a collection of alphanumeric symbols. i.e. a collection of relating fonts. Typeface is usually grouped together in a family

2) Font - A font is a collection of letters, numbers, punctuation and other symbols used to set text matter

3) Lettering - Lettering refers to illustrations of letters, words and phrases. This usually entails creating an image using only text. Normally, in any other order, the said lettering would look crappy and not make any sense.



Below is a diagram, drawn by myself, explaining the key terms involved in the anatomy of typography.

This diagram shows some of the constraints to which most usable fonts fit into. For example, the imaginary line on which all letters of a typeface sit on is called the Baseline. Any letters that contain an ascender will fall below this line but always meet an Ascender 
Line at an equal distance from the baseline.

The endless list of key terms also includes words such as Diacritic; a mark or sign added to a letter to change the sound of the letter/word, Strikethrough; a horizontal line through the centre of a typeface and Colophon; a short text describing typefaces, fonts etc. used in previous text (i.e. at the end of a book or journal).



One last little quote we were shown expressed that you should only use 6 typefaces (Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Times Roman, Futura and Helvetica) "and trash the rest".