#projecteducate  presents: ABCs of Text Art & Typography.
#1: A - H.

Read and enjoy   And maybe even learn something

A

Anagram
If you saw The DaVinci Code or read the Harry Potter books you have stumbled over Anagrams. You use the letters of a word to form a new word; like Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort or Army = Mary.

ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It contains the letters of the english alphabet and is used for encoding. It is also used to create ASCII Art, which you can find at Digital Art > Text Art > ASCI

Ambigram
An Ambigram is a typographical design that when turned for for example 180° reads the same like before. Type is either edited or drawn (Calligraphy) to create the design.
Most letters in words have to be edited to create an anbmigram, but other words like "opodo", "pod" or "NOON" are already ambigrams from the start. Letters usable for Ambigrams are: b, d, l, m, n, o, p, q, s, u, w, x, y, z, H, I, N, M, O, P, S, U, W, X, Y and Z. Even numbers can form Ambigrams, for example "69", "808" or "1001".
Ambigrams are very popular for Logo Designs.

B

Blackletter
It is a scriptform, that first appeared in the 12th century and stayed popular well into the 17th. You may know it as Gothic Script or Fraktur as well. Books used to be hand-written in this script style during the middle ages. It survived the invention of the letterpress in the form of Blackletter fonts, but is hardly practiced with pen anymore nowadays.

Bold
Is a font style used to emphasize certain words or paragraphs of text. Bold font styles are designed additionally to the regular font style; examples are Helvetica Regular & Helvetica Bold. Sometimes a Black style of a font is avaiable as well, which is usually even "stronger" than Bold.

C

Calligram
A Calligram is text that is written in a way to form a visual image. This can be a poem, a quote, words related to the visual or just one repeated word. The text does not need to be Calligraphy, but the "style" derives from Calligraphy. Nowadays typefaces are used to form the visual imagey.


Calligraphy
Calligraphy depicts self-drawn characters or signs in an artistic and skillful manner using tools such as pen or brush. It is sometimes called Fancy Lettering and is still very popular in Asian or Islamic Art.

CamelCase
Is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter is either upper or lower case. The word itself is an example for this: CamelCase; others famous examples are: iPod, McDonalds and actually even deviantART.

Capital Letter
Are the "big" letters, like A, B, C etc.. They are also called capitals (caps) or upper case (uppercase). Way into the 14th century you would either only use Capital Letters or Lowercase Letters fro writing. Only with the invention of the letterpress arrived the writing system we know today.

Condensed
Is a style of a font. Like the Bold style it is designed additionally to the regular font. A condensed font is drawn narrower than the width of the regular version.

D

Dingbat
Is origingally an ornament, character or spacer used in typography. Nowadays it's mostly known as a font, that consists of shapes instead of the letters from a -z.

E

Emoticons
The Emoticon is a combination of different letters and [it is] used to display different moods, actions and situations. (Taken from The History of Emoticons by `mintyy for ProjectEducate).
You use letters or glyphs to create Emoticons; for example the combination of colon and bracket, known as . Other examples are ^_^ o_O xD  :S or =-o.

F

Font
A collection of all letters from a certain typeface in one size. Helvetica 9pt is a font, just as Helvetica 12pt is. However, the use of the word font like that is long outdated. It is still used in traditional typesetting, where you need a set of every font size a typeface can be set it. With setting type digitally, font has become a synonym for a whole typeface or style of a typeface, like Helvetica Bold.

Font Family
Is a synonym for Typeface. It describes the whole set of styles a font/typeface comes with. It is mainly used under this name in HTML or XHTML to define the font a text appears in.
A Font Family can contain a wide amount of styles: Hairline, Thin, Ultra-light, Extra-light, Light, Book, Normal (regular / Roman / plain), Medium, Demi-bold / semi-bold, Bold, Extra-bold / extra, Heavy, Black, Extra-black or Ultra-black / ultra.

G

Glyph
A Gylph is a property of a typeface, that defines a different version of a letter. Most known Glyphs are alternate versions of letter combinations, such as fi, ft or st. Those can be activated in many programs or come as seperate styles of a font.

H

Handwriting
Is also known as Penmanship and is the artform of writing with your hand a writing instrument. It is not to be confused with Calligraphy, as Handwriting is less illustrative or decorative. Handwriting fonts are known as hands or scripts. It used to be rather a craft, than an artform as it was used for documents or contracts before doing that by typewriters or digitally.

Helvetica
Is one of the most famous and controversy fonts. It was developed by swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger in 1957. It is a Sans Serif font, very popular for it's "universal" usage. However this is what makes it so controversial, as many designers just use Helvetica by default, knowing anything will look good using it.
It is even used on the New York subway system.

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#projecteducate  presents: ABCs of Text Art & Typography.
Today:  #1 //  I - R.

Read and enjoy   And maybe even learn something

I

Initial
Stands at the beginning of a copytext; a chapter or a paragraph. It is considerably bigger than the rest of the copy, usually several lines high. It can be a simple letter or an decorated character.
A fine example of creating initials is the Daily Drop Cap Blog by Jessica Hische.

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Italic
Is a cursive font style based on handwriting. The typeface is usually slanting to the right, on serif fonts serifs and vertical lines may become rounder and curvy; on sans serif fonts occasionally serifs are added on the italic style.
It is supposed to be the handwritten version of the typeface in use, therefore it is curvier and slanted.

J

Justificatiion
Describes the alignment of text in a column or text field, that is neither left or right aligned or centered, but forms straight lines at the left and right of the column or text field. Using this can lead to disturbing gaps in the text, which has to be adjustet by changing the properties of kerning and ratio of the letters. The last line of a paragraph is not stretched to the whole width of the column, it can be left or right aligned or centered, depending on the writing system.

K

Kerning
Defines the space between 2 letters. When creating a font you define that space character pair by character pair, and it is added to the font file. You can adjust it in any graphic program manually, to get better or wanted results. Kerned character pairs are: AV  WA  LV LT YJ where the negative space around each letter is overlapping the other one's.

L

Letterpress
Is the well-known synonym for Relief Printing. The type is on a surface, standing out from it, in its mirrored form. Basically
iInk is added to the relief and then the paper is pressed on it. Starting on plates and using vertical pressure, nowadays the relief is attached to drums using rubber and the paper is moving through them.
The letterpress technique was developed by Johannes Guttenberg in the 15th century. It marks the beginning of a new era of history, colliding with the Renaissance, the discovery of America and the Reformation.  

Ligature
A combination of 2 characters from a typeface. Related to Glyphs, a ligature is only a letter combination. Some languages contain ligatures per defintion, for example æ œ ü ä ß & (nordic languages).

Lorem Ipsum
The most famous placeholder text. It is derived from latin, but has been transformed in order to make it meaningless. You use it when you either havent received a copy text yet or the main focus in on the design and layout and not on the text.

M

Mean Line
Mean Line, Midline or Median defines the top end of lowercase letters in the structure of a typeface. The letter to measure this line is the "x". Round letters end slightly above this line, because it is more pleasing to the eye. If that would not be done, rounded letters would appea smaller then non rounded ones.

Microtypography
Is the technical term for improving the readability of texts. Especially justified texts need manual adjustment to avoid typographical or aesthetical mistakes. You can change many features of a text to improve it: Kerning, hanging punctuation, hyphenation or tracking are the most useful points of adjustement.

N

New or Neue
If you find a typeface that contains New or Neue (German) in its name, it usually indicates a new, modified and possibly improved version of a font.

Negative Space
This can both refer to the "empty space" on a page or the space around letters. Usually you refer to it when white type is displayed on colored backgrounds. In printing you do not print white on black, simply because it is impossible, but the white is left out from printing. The smaller the type, the higher the chances for ink to run into the type; so typographers try to avoid using it in Microtypography.
However each character of a typeface has a typical Negative Space. If you take the A and imagine a rectangle around it, you get Negative Space at the top corners of that rectangle. At the V it would be the bottom corners. The Negative Spaces of A and V can overlap if their Kerning is adjusted.

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O

Open Type
Is font format used for computer fonts. It has been developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft. You recognise a Open Type by its .otf or .ttf ending. Open Type fonts can be used on most computer systems.

P

Pagination
Simply is the numbering of pages. Traditionally it is added to the outside bottom corners of pages.

Pangram
A Pangram is a sentence that contains all letters from an alphabet. They are used to display the contents of a font.

Famous pangrams are:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (english; 26 letters)
Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den Sylter Deich (german; 26 letters + umlaute)

Q

Quotation Marks
Are punctuation marks to indicate speech or highlight a word or phrase. They are also called inverted commas and they come single or as pair.

‘…’   “…”

In most typefaces the opening mark is shaped like a 6 and the closing one like a 9. In the english language both are aligned at the top; for example French uses Guillemets « … » while German uses Anführugnszeichen „…“ , where the opening marks are 9-shaped and aligned at the bottom and the closing marks are 6-shaped and top aligned. You can find an  overview of quotation marks at wikipedia.com.

R

Roman Type
The name derives from ancient Rome and inscripted type. One of the main features of Roman Type are Serifs. Famous fonts are: Bembo, Baskerville, Caslon, Bodoni, Times New Roman and Garamond.

#projecteducate  presents: ABCs of Text Art & Typography.
Today:  #3 //  S - Z.

Read and enjoy   And maybe even learn something

S

Serif
Is a characteristic of a typeface. It is a style element added to the end of strokes on a typeface. It is characteristic for Roman typefaces.
Serif fonts on a copy text are easier to read in print publications than other fonts.

Sans-Serif
Is a typeface without Serifs, Sans being french for without. Sans-Serif typefaces can be referred to as Grotesque or Gothic typefaces.
Sans-Serif fonts ona  copy text are easier to read on online publications, because Serif fonts would blur too much when reading long paragraphs.

Specimen
A sample sheet of a font can be called Specimen. It shows the glyphs contained in a font and different style of the typeface. Often a Pangram is included to show the range of a typeface. Fontdesigners create Specimen when publishing new typefaces.



Swash
Is an exaggerated Serif. It usually appears on script fonts, but can be a single style, additonaly to Italic, on a typeface. Well known for Swashes is the typeface Zapfino.


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T

Typeface
A Typeface is the synoptical term for a set of fonts in different sizes and styles. Nowadays Font has become a synonyme for it.
For example:  Helvetica is a typeface, Helvetica Bold 12pt is a font.

Typesetting
The composition of metal types or sorts to form a mirrored version of a page, used in printing. Before digital layouting became possible, every newspaper or magazine had to be made arranging metal types in a forme.

U

Univers
Is a sans-serif typeace designed by Adrian Frutiger in1954. It is closely related to Helvetica, both coming from Switzerland and being used in modern typography. Univers uses numbers to indicate different styles of the typeface, currently consisting of 44 styles.

  

V

Vignette
A decorative element to seperate chapters or paragraphs in books or to decorate borders and corners.
Replacing words or single letters by a symbol is also a Vignette, as done i "L♥VE" or "I  ♥NY".

W

Web-safe Fonts
When creating a website it is good to know, what fonts are best to use. Not every browser supports all fonts and not very computer has every font installed. However there are some fonts that were created especially for web use and are avaiable on most systems (Windows, Mac & LInux). A simple rule is: the more systems have the font installed by default, the safer it is to use. It's all about statisitics.
The most common fonts are: Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Tahoma & Times New Roman.. More fonts that are usually usable are: Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, monospace, Georgia, Impact, Lucida Console & Lucida Sans Console.

Widows & Orphans
Are terms used in Typesetting.
A widow is a line in a paragraph, that only consists of one word. Typesetters justify paragraphs in order to avoid Widows, as it is seen as an aesthetical mistake.
An Orphan is the first or last line of a paragraph, that stands alone on a page, with the rest of the paragraph either appearing on the page before or the next page.

X

x-height
x-height a term used to describe typefaces.  It refers to the height of the letter x in a typeace. It has the same height as the letters u, v, w, & z. a, c, e, m, n, o, r and s are higher than the x-height, they overshoot, which is a visual compensation regarding the roundness of the letters.
If a letter is higher than the x-height, the part above is called Ascender; letters with parts below are called Descenders.

Y

Y(ellow)
Y, as used in CMYK, is the shortform of the color Yellow used in printing. Yellow is one of the 3 colors (Cyan, Magenta & Yellow; plus Black) that is used for printing. In order to print pages, each color is on a seperate layer or forme so the piece of paper that is printed on ahs to go through 4 pressings.
In order to get a better result in the color Black, you don't use K=100%, but a mixture of all 4 colors. This results in a stronger and more saturated print result for black.

Z

Zero
The use of Zero has been both a philosophical and mathematical matter in history.  Even in ages BC a term to be "nothing" when working with numbers has been used in Persia, China or India. It cannot be said with certainty who "invented" Zero, It has been seen as an arabic invention in Europe due to the fact that is was first brought there by Spanish Muslims (Moors) aside astronomy and other persian/arabic inventions.
The italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, more famous as Fibonacci, was the first western scholar to introduce the Zero and the 9 other numbers in the 13th century. Before that time, the roman counting system (I II III V X C M) was used alone.