Assignment Week 2 (Due 9/17)

Readings

• pg 114–124

• Skim Grid Systems chapter (pg 178+)


Kerning, Tracking, Leading Assignment

Objective:

You goal is create a beautifully composed rendering of the sentence, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog using a text font of your choice, that demonstrates your knowledge of good kerning, tracking, and leading.

Due: Sept. 17th, 9am

Specs:

• Your choice of a legible text typeface, not display type (see distinction here)

• Your choice of a font (italic, bold, condensed, etc.)

• Size 50pt. or larger

• Must be in two lines, but your choice of line length

*NOTE: This isn’t an assignment in layout design, you aren’t experimenting with composition of words and therefore exaggerating any kerning for taste. Instead, you are experiencing the challenges a designer faced when typesetting for readability with handcrafted materials.

Supplies:

• Tracing paper

• Sharp pencils

• Ruler

• Printed Font Set

• Markers (at the end)

Steps:

1. On tracing paper, use a ruler to create a baseline

2. Place printed font-set under the tracing paper

3. Begin tracing the first letter of the word on baseline to compose the sentence (filling in the letters too)

4. Use your kerning knowledge to continue with the word

5. Use your tracking knowledge to continue with the sentence

6. Once you finish the first line, use your leading knowledge to judge where the next line should go taking into consideration the descender of the past line, ascenders of the new line, and a line space that would balance well with the font qualities.

7. Do this activity at least twice, adjusting your judgement on kerning, tracking and leading so that you can critique between the better of two options.

8. Draw in the one sentence you feel is the better designed one with the fine marker/pen.

9. Lastly, flip your tracing paper up to create a new layer (filter) above your sentence. On this layer, label as many type anatomy parts as you can think of.

Submit in ePortfolio

1. Scan/photograph your best sentence, and post the image on the page

2. Scan/photograph the second layer of your sentence with the anatomy parts

2. Either before or after your image, include the specs:

• Typeface

• Font

• Size (in point units)

3. In a paragraph, summarize how you changed your approach designing between the first and second sentences.

Construct your paragraph by considering these questions:

• What specific letter combinations were challenging?

• How did your judgement of kerning change in the evolution of drawing one word, then words, then an additional line?

• What did you change about your thinking before beginning the second attempt?