Learning Summary #2

I started out wanting to make a miniature book based on microtypography. The more I learned about it, the more I realized that all the components that make microtypography are along the same lines of macro, or "normal" typography. I decided to move towards making an all around book on letter spacing and all of the different terms, or just a book about typographic terms.

This is some of my research on Microtypography that I am going to incorporate into my new book.

Microtypography is concerned with the more individual features of letterforms

Macro-typography is all about how typography is arranged on a web page. Macro-typographical techniques can be achieved on CSS but we must also bear in mind that the Web itself is changing rapidly. Macro-typography is all about how paragraphs and groups of sentences are placed together and how they appear on a page.

Microtypography has to do with the details; setting the right glyph, getting the appropriate kerning and tracking, and making stylistic choices such as when to use small-caps.
Micro-typography is the art of enhancing the appearance and readability of a document while exhibiting a minimum degree of visual obtrusion. It is concerned with what happens between or at the margins of characters, words or lines.

Microtypography deals mainly with legibility and can be thought of as the design of letters and words.

Microtypography has to do with small details like glyphs, kerning, tracking, and other stylistic choices. It deals mostly with legibility and is concerned with the design of letters and words. Macro Typography refers to how letters and words are arranged on the page. It’s concerned mainly with the readability of paragraphs on the page.

The shapes of letters and the way they fit together
The way letters combine to form words
Letter spacing
Word spacing
Line length (measure)
Line-height (leading)
Legibility and readability (more on this later)
Type face selection

These methods focus more on individual features of letterforms and improve the legibility and appearance of text:

Kerning
Tracking
Leading
Glyphs
Expansion
Extending
Justification
Hyphenation

Tracking is the space between groups of letters rather than individual letters.
Tracking is often used to make lines of type even in order to remove hyphenation or widows and orphans from paragraphs

A widow is a very short line – usually one word, or the end of a hyphenated word – at the end of a paragraph or column. A widow is considered poor typography because it leaves too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page. This interrupts the reader’s eye and diminishes readability. Fix them by reworking the rag or editing the copy.

Like a widow, an orphan is a single word, part of a word or very short line, except it appears at the beginning of a column or a page. This results in poor horizontal alignment at the top of the column or page. The term “orphan” is not as commonly used as “widow,” but the concept is the same, and so is the solution: fix it!

The following is my posters that I made, that were originally made for a book layout, but for the sake of the class I went ahead and printed just 11in x 17in posters.