KERNING pg. 102

When do you when to use optical kerning or metric kerning?

According to the book, when you select metric kerning you are using the spacing that was intended by the type designer. Designers apply metric kerning to text and this looks good at small sizes. On the other hand optical kerning assesses the shapes of all characters and adjusts the spacing wherever needed. This is good when applied to headlines and when a font has few or no built-in kern pairs, or when the overall spacing seems uneven. Designers suggest using optical kerning when you are combining different fonts or type sizes. So how do you know which kerning to use when formatting text? This depends on your typeface, and it should determine which of the two to use, “it’s a visual thing.”

http://www.creativepro.com/blog/typetalk-metrics-versus-optical-kerning

This cool bottle looking typography was designed by a Nominuss (user name) from “Deviantart.com” This designer clearly used variety of scale and size of types. If you only read the bold and biggest words, you can get a sense that the whole thing is about drinks. However, if you see the script from top to bottom the story gets more interesting. This design is indeed beautiful. The type is scaled both vertically and horizontally. Although the tracking between letters seem tight, because of the use of different sizes, it is still easy to read.  No wonder this design was also featured in “Typography in Design: 100 Brilliant Examples” at myinkblog.com.

Looking at Martha Stewart’s books and magazines, I realized that her face is in almost all publications. Her image is used almost as an icon. Just by looking at her face on the cover, readers may easily recognize that it’s Martha’s cookbook. In addition, in all of her publications, the graphic designer uses Helvetica typeface for most of her titles. Of course, there is a mix of typefaces but you can notice that most of her titles are in big bold sans-serif typefaces.Also,  the typefaces take a large amount of space, so they are easy to spot from far away. Colors of Martha’s publications are soft bright colors.

1. Good example of Mixing Typefaces

2. Bad Kerning and Tracking

3. Good Line Spacing

4.  Good Marking Paragraphs

Dead History typeface was created in 1990 by P. Scott  Makela, an American graphic designer. Dead History typeface combines the features of traditional serif font Centennial and the Pop Classic VAG Rounded creating something entirely new and unexpected. If you notice Dead History, this typeface is rounded looking and has serifs mostly on the left side of each letter (capital +lowercase) edges and the right side are just sans-serif font.   Unlike other typefaces , Dead History uses a mixture of serifs and san-serifs within one single letter which makes it a unique and innovative typeface.

Dead History was designed around the time when personal computers emerged in the mid 1980s. Makela was among the first to use the digital programs such as Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create this. Dead History typeface’s unique features become more visible when the letters are big and bold.

This documentary was a great reminder of how technology is changing our culture, in this case the book culture. Over the past years I have been noticing more people reading from an e-reader tablet than from a paper book. Is this evolution good? It’s evident that many bookstores are greatly affected by this resulting them to go out of business. However, from the consumer’s point of view, e-reader are much more convenient but it fails to give that unique feeling of the book. The texture, flipping each pages, and the scent of the book are aspects that make reading a book unique! Also that abundant feeling of being inside a bookstore filled with books with all the different sections of genres, noticing small to big sizes of books, and vibrant colors/designs of the books! These you cannot witness with a tablet. Nevertheless, this whole experience is more interactive and personal. Therefore, it’s important to preserve our paper books! Although more people may favor the e-reader form of reading now days, still there is another half that want to read from a paper book and keep the ultimate personal sensation! In defense of the paper books, I hope technology will not take that unique experience away from us.