This exercise is designed to help you to look at typefaces more closely. You will need a sharp pencil, some tracing or thin paper and a ruler. On the facing page the typeface Baskerville has been deconstructed so it only contains the strokes, serifs and bowls that are common to all the letterforms.
Your task is to try and put it all back together again to read
“the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”
This is a pangram containing all the letters of the alphabet. It is all in lowercase.
Start by drawing your baseline, determine the x height by identifying a whole letter such as x, e or n and draw your median line. This should provide a good starting point to try and piece together all the other elements. Remember that some parts will be used more than once, for example the same stem will be used in several letters. Try and account for all the parts without leaving any stray serifs behind.
Do not worry if you get this exercise wrong, it is just a way to get used to looking at and analysing typefaces, appreciating the finer detailing of it and recognising repeat patterns, such as using the same bowl shape throughout the typeface. If you do get it wrong then you might have ended up designing your first typeface! Having spent some time looking closely at typefaces, has your appreciation of them increased? If so in any particular aspect? Do you think that understanding more about how typefaces are constructed will be useful to you in future? Make notes in your learning log.
The first thing I did was I used the the letter ‘e’ to figure out where I should put my median lines. My median lines were spaced out by 2cm, so I placed my ascending and descending lines 1cm up and 1cm down.
Once my lines were in place the only other task was to figure out which letter stencil goes where, it took me a lot longer than I thought the task would take but I was happy with the end result.
Reflection
When I was younger I always had a keen interest in different types of fonts, I used to analyse different fonts on the internet which I then used to copy with pen and paper. This exercise felt like I was taking part in an old hobby of mine, only difference was that this task was more informative in teaching me the names of the specific details such as the strokes, serif and bowls. Overall I found this exercise enjoyable, brushing up on old skills was great fun and learning about the actual names of the ‘strokes, serifs and bowls’ was very informative.
OCA Graphic Design 