Journal 4

This article was extremely inspiring. I have always loved beautiful lettering with decorative flourishes and calligraphic elements. I am excited to begin practicing some hand lettering of my own. I was really drawn to the very decorative script-like hand lettering examples. Jessica Hische has been someone that I have followed for about a year now because she is such an accomplished letterer. I also really love Louise Fili's work.

I was really drawn to this hand lettered logotype because it reminded me of my own lettering. It was really in my comfort zone and felt like something that I could use as inspiration when practicing my own lettering. I love that it stays true to its x-height and that it creates a curved baseline for you eye to follow. It is very uniform and elegant and definitely serves its purpose. It feels very human. This is from Typographyserved.com

It was impossible to choose just one to post! I recently learned about ligatures in class and have kind of developed an obsession. I love how simple and beautiful they are. This one especially is just so fluid. The way that the letters terminals connect is genius! This post originated from the ID blog (identity designed), which I have also recently started following.

I LOVED everything that Simon Walker had in his portfolio. Sophisticated lettering with grunge textures are my absolute favorite. This one was also. Please send cheese, haha.

Type Safari!

Journal 3

1.The responsive typography face detection experiment was interesting but didn't impress me that much. It was a very innovative idea and probably took a lot ideation and testing to resolve it but I found it really hard to read. It didn't lend to the legibility of the text (even though it was only lorem ipsum). I didn't like how I lost my place in the paragraph as I moved my face forward and backward. (For example) If someone were using this in a real life situation and had to take notes while reading on their screen, they would lose their place every time they leaned down to write in their notebook. I also thought that being able to see my face in the screen below was distracting. I could see myself moving in my peripheral vision as the type was increasing and decreasing size. It was just too distracting for me. I could see old people or people who have vision trouble and find screens hard to read off of using this and finding it helpful. Instead of moving the screen forward and backward (as my not-so-tech-savvy dad does) they could just find the adjustment that was right for them. Also, this could be used to gage your computer settings if people have trouble determining what type size is best for them.

2.  http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/02/18/this-color-pickers-unique-minimal-interface-is-     surprisingly-intuitive-and-useful/

This article was AMAZING and so SO useful! It was about an interface that intuitively picks colors for web as you scroll your mouse along the screen. Once you've found a color that you like, you simply click your mouse and it saves that color as a column and moves you on to the next color. It took me a little while to get used to moving my mouse to figure out how the colors changed along the screen. I quickly figured out that by moving my mouse up the colors got darker, moving it down they got lighter, to the left they were warmer and to the right they were cooler. I loved that the color selections included the hex code.

This is what I ended up with after expirimenting with this tool. There was really no rhyme or reason to these selections, I was trying to figure it out. 

Okay so this one was a little prettier. I could play around with this tool all day!

3. http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/02/02/x-of-the-most-beautiful-typeface-designs-released-this-january/?fromcat=dd

The last article that I read was just about new typefaces that have been released within the last 30 days. I found this inspiring because we are in the process of designing our own typefaces for this class. I liked looking at the different interpretations of type and reading the small captions that explained where the designers got their ideas. 

After following the powerpoint instructions, my webpage turned out as it was supposed to. I was feeling pretty confused throughout the process though. The divs and margin adjustments weren't making sense to me at first.

The picture of my sketch is backwards in the photo here. It was supposed to be as I made it on my website. When I did the exercise myself It all clicked in my head and started to make sense. By the end, I was adjusting margins and divs without following the powerpoint instructions. It was pretty exciting!

Journal 2

http://machoarts.com/17-amazing-examples-of-kinetic-typography-with-video-tutorial

These kinetic typography videos were all awesome (well almost all). I really liked the aggressive ones that questioned our generation's stupidity. It is hard to pick just one!

The last one was probably my favorite, "Typography about language" by Ronnie Bruce. I thought that it was really effective because it was easy to follow with the audio. I didn't have any trouble reading the type as he talked and I loved how it reflected the infliction in his voice when he was making a point. He used different typefaces to reflect specific words like "nerd", "declarative", and "hip" He also italicized questions like "ya know?" and "like" to mock stupidity.

Oh YEAH! The one called "shop-vac" was hilarious. It really hit home for me because I can completely to relate to monotony of the suburban married life. My boyfriend has been pretty excited about setting up his "man cave" in our new house with all of his manly things while I've been spending time upstairs in my living room crying to chick flicks. Our trips to grocery store are about as romantic as our "dates" get these days. It was just funny and so so true!

There were maybe 2 that I just couldn't even get through because they annoyed me. Kinetically, they were all executed really well but visually and graphically some of them weren't very good. The designers obviously spent a lot of time making them but didn't spend a lot of time developing them to reflect the content. They just got it wrong.

"Cali Swag District" was probably my least favorite. The typefaces they used were just stupid in my opinion. They looked like a little kid picked them out. The colors were very vibrant and obnoxious. I also hated that song.


I found this example and thought it was very relevant for this class. I also like how the type looks 3 dimnesional. Enjoy!

Lesson 3 Bibliography

Professor: Nancy Mata

Art 244 Type II

Millersville University

Project #3: Bibliography

Part 1

At first glance, Verdana is much more legible on screen than Georgia. As I zoom out and the type gets smaller the same observation stands. Verdana has a larger lowercase x-height and counters than Georgia. Georgia's counter tend to get lost. The italicized version of Georgia looks almost like a script font when it is small. The serifs on Georgia also do not lend to its legibility. Verdana seems larger, and is just as legible in italics. The numbers in Verdana do no descent below the baseline like they do in Georgia. Verdana is also a sans-serif typeface which makes it easier to read. They both seem to be kerned pretty tightly. The capital letters of both typefaces are legible. Georgia's caps seem to have more contrast in the strokes than Verdana. 

We figured it out! I brought my failed attempt at this assignment into class and Emily helped me figure it out. It took A LOT of editing and tedious observation before we realized that the ONLY typos that I had were the quotations marks. The quotes on my css link were curly quotations instead of straight quotations because I had copied and pasted it from the powerpoint.