Book Cover Redesign

I am redesigning three memiors - The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, and The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók. All three books describe a childhood filled with neglect, longing, and odd family lifestyles, all while portraying the experiences in a somewhat positive light. My concept statement is the inevitable connections of family.



Here are some photos of inspiration
 

Initial book designs...

Refinements and direction

Project 4 Questions

Define font hinting. Why is necessary?
a technique for avoiding disturbing rounding errors in low-resolution digital type; the type designer pre-determines the position of points or dimensions of certain features, such as thickness of stems or of counters.

What is letterspacing/tracking? How do you track in Illustrator or InDesign
the distance between letters; increasing or decreasing the distance between the letters for an entire passage of text rather than between specific pairs; you can edit the tracking in the character palette

Define Kerning? Name 8 kerning pairs. How do you kern in InDesign or Illustrator?
the placement of characters in a typeface in relation to each other; this is different for each typeface and the designer must define the optimal distance between pairs of letters; can greatly influence the quality of a typeface; you can edit the kerning in the character palette

What is wordspacing?
the space between two words; a designer incorporates the default word space in a typeface; about a fourth to a third of an em-space

Explain DIN
fixed formats used for paper size; normalized DIN A sizes are usually the starting point for paper sizes for printed matter; the sizes of the sheets of paper that are supplied by paper manufacturers are based on DIN A sizes, with a bit added for trimming, the gripper margin of the printing press and the finish; DIN B ad C sizes are also used

What is a baseline grid? 
an imaginary grid upon which type sits; the baseline of a piece of type can be forced to 'snap' to this grid to maintain continuity across the pages of design

How many characters per line is optimal? Is there a range?
optimal words per line is 40-80

Define aesthetic text alignment (optically hanging punctuation).

hanging punctuation controls the alignment of the punctuation marks for a specific paragraph; paragraph alignment determines the margin from which the punctuation hangs

What is a typographic river?
typically occur in justified text blocks when the separation of the words leaves gaps of white space in several lines

What is a widow?
a lone word at the end of a paragraph

What is an orphan?
the final one or two lines of a paragraph separated from the main paragraph to form a new column, and should be avoided at all costs 

Great Photographers

Ed Burtynsky
Born 1955 Ukraine
Ryerson University
His work explores the intricate link between industry and nature and include remarkable depictions of global industrial landscapes. They are highly expressive visions that find beauty and humanity in the most unlikely of places. He is known as one of Canada's most respected photographers. His collections are included in over fifty major museums around the world including the Guggenheim in New York and Bibliotéque Nationale in Paris.

  

Todd Hido
Born 1968 Kent, Ohio 
Rhode Island School of Design
California College of Arts
An American contemporary artist and photographer, much of his work involves urban and suburban housing across the U.S. He produces large, highly detailed and luminous color photographs. They reveal isolation and anonymity that increase the effect of loneliness and loss.

Richard Prince
Born 1949 Panama Canal Zone
Works in Upstate NY

A maker of photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and writings. He is best known for his recycling of magazine and newspaper images that relate to pop culture. He uses frequent references to sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, alcoholism, and movies. His art continually questions definitions of art, originality, and technique.

Robert Doisneau
1912-1994
France
A renowned photographer, he was also a pioneer of photojournalism. He is famous for Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. He is known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes.

 

Stephen Shore
Born 1947
American
A photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the U.S. and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. At age 17 he met Andy Warhol and began to frequent his studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people around him. At the age of 24, he became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1972, he took to the road and took a collection of photographs of the American and Canadian landscapes.

 



Harry Callahan
1912-1999
Detroit, Michigan
An influential 20th century American photographer, his technical method was to go out every morning, walk the city where he lived, and take numerous pictures. He frequently photographed his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara. He shows a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. He also worked with multiple exposures. His work is a deeply personal response to his own life.

Letter Fountain Homework

What are small capitals? How are they different than something set in ALL CAPS?
Does your font have small caps? If not name a font that does.
Small capitals are smaller versions of capitals. They are not reduced capitals, but separately designed small capitals with an x-value that is generally higher than the lowercase letters. The stem weight is adjusted to suit the lowercase. They are used for texts containing lots of initials, abbreviations in capitals or words in capitals. Bodoni has small caps.

What are ligatures? why are they used? when are they not used? what are common ligatures? Does your font have ligatures? If not name a font that does.
Ligatures are fixed character combinations, used to avoid unattractive overlapping in normal print work of characters that could collide. If extra letter spacing is used in a text, ligatures aren't used and combinations of characters have to be set separately. Bodoni has ligatures.

What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe?
An apostrophe is similar in form to a comma but placed higher and used to indicate the omission of one or more letters in a word, to indicate possession, or to indicate plurals in numbers. A foot mark is used to indicate measurement in feet.


What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)?
 An inch mark is used to indicate measurement in inches. A quote mark is placed at the beginning and end of a word, quotation, piece of dialogue, or phrase use to indicate that the words do not originate with the narrator.


What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used.
A hyphen is used as a symbol to break words. It is used to prevent big gaps and ugly breaks in a block of text. An example is 'pre-school.' An en dash is longer than a hyphen and is used to demarcate a parenthetical thought or to indicate a sudden change of direction. An em dash is used to demarcate parenthetical thought in English texts and the dashes are unspaced.  

Mini Photo Project

roommate recreating a snapshot

the sun

holding hands

under my bed

 

 

 

view from a tree

 

my friend dancing like a weirdo

Typography Info

Oldstyle: 1435

• Axis of thick-thin contrast slopes slightly to the left
• Cross-bar of the lowercase 'e' is horizontal
• Top serifs are roof-shaped and have triangular form
• Base serifs have no or hardly any rounding at bottom
• Examples: Bembo, Garamond, Palatino, Plantin, Albertina

 

Transitional: 1750

• Axis of thick-thin contrast is almost vertical or slopes very slightly to the left
• Base serifs are only a little or virtually not rounded at the bottom
• Lowercase 'e' has horizontal cross-bar
• Top serifs of lowercase letters are roof-shaped
• Serifs sometime rounded, sharpened, or horizontal
• Examples: Baskerville, Concorde, Fournier, Perpetua, Times New Roman

 

Modern: 1775

• Typefaces that have a high thick-thin contrast
• Serifs sometimes rounded, sharpened, or horizontal
• Vertical stress axis
• Thin serifs
• Emphasis on vertical stroke, sharp contrast, symmetry, and sharp transition to straight serifs
• Examples: Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Linotype Centennial, Vertrina

Slab: 1800's

• Heavy, rectangular serifs
• Serif weight is almost as thick as the letter itself
• Terminals may be blunt, angular, or rounded
• Examples: Clarendon, Rockwell, Beton, Egyptienne, Courier

Sans-Serif Grotesk (and Gothic): 1920's

• Line thicknesses seem to be equal, but have a slight visual thick-thin contrast
• Ascender height is usually equal to the capital height
• The cure of the lowercase 'e' is pointed up towards the crossbar
• The lowercase 'g' has an open curve that ends pointing upwards
• Examples: Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica, Univers, Arial, Futura

 

Sans-Serif Humanist:

• No serifs
• Line widths are visually equal
• Extension on lowercase 'e' points to right instead of turning toward the cross-bar
• Lowercase 'g' often has classic form with two 'bowls'
• Characters have more distinguishing forms than those of other sans-serifs
• Examples: Gill Sans, Profile, Frutiger, Scala, Myriad

Sans-Serif Geometric:

• No serifs
• Axis of roundings is vertical
• Letters seem to have been drawn using ruler and compass
• Line thicknesses are only visually and minimally corrected
• Examples: Futura, Avenir, DTL Nobel, Erbar, Eurostile

Bauer Bodoni

Serif
Didone modern
Bodini typeface designer - Giambattista Bodoni (1798)
Bauer Bodini typeface designer - Heinrich Jost (1926)

 

Giambattista Bodini (1740-1813)
Born near Turin, Bodini was the fourth son of a master printer. He was made the director of the Royal Printing House of the Duke of Parma. He introduced a new, clear, simple type - the Modern typeface. No other printer was more acclaimed than he was during his lifetime. His four principles of type design are regularity, cleanness, good taste, and charm.


Heinrich Jost (1889-1948)
Born in Magdeburg, Germany, Jost was a typographer, type designer, and graphic designer. He moved to Munich in 1908 where he studied under Paul Renner (Futura's creator) and Emil Preetorius. He worked as a book designer and graphic artist until 1923, when he became the art director at Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt. Here, he added detail the Renner's Futura typeface. He also joined with Louis Holl to create the Foundry's version of Bodini.