For the name tracing assignment the typeface that I used was Baskerville and my descriptive word was Charming. It was interesting using Baskerville for the first time as there were two key things I noticed about this particular typeface. The first thing that I noticed was the transition from straight line to curves at certain points of each letter. In other typeface when needing to draw up from left to right a lot of letters will allow you to just create a straight line up creating something close to a 90 degree angle. However with Baskerville in order to draw up the transition must be a curve rather than a straight line. The second thing I noticed was the difference in the thinness and thickness of the lines in the letters themselves. For example in the letter “N” the two line that are drawn going vertically is very thin compared to the line that goes diagonally connecting the two vertical lines is much thicker, maybe about 2 to 3 times thicker than the vertical lines. I also noticed that with certain letters more line spacing was involved to keep the letters from being scrambled together, for example I felt I had to push the V in Nova more to the right to give the upper left line going across more room to keep it from being too close to the O, by doing that the rest of the V looked slightly to far apart from the O.

This was definitely a much more difficult assignment then I thought it would be at first but I definitely learned something from it. I learned more about how important it is to pay attention to detail and how things like curves and thinness and thickness of line can separate one typeface from another. I also learned how thicker lines provide a much bolder, stronger presence with the thinner line have a much softer, smoother presence and how the transition from thinness to thickness and vice versa can affect a person feeling on a letter or word. Doing this assignment definitely makes you think and respect how at one point people had to create these letters on blocks by hand and how much time and precision it must have took for them to do it as close to perfect as they can. This was definitely an interesting and enjoyable assignment.