Myriad and Lining an Non-lining Numerals by Amy Wyatt

Made in 1992 Myriad is a humanist sans serif font created for the adobe systems. This font was the collaborative work of 2 designers called Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly, their aim was to create something generic and that wouldn’t show anyone’s personality too much. The font is most well known for being used for the iPod font in 2002, but has also been used for other big name brands such as the Rolls-Royce logo and the last 3 letters of the Gmail logo. The most distinguishing characteristic of this font is the ‘y’ descender and slanting ‘e’ cut. The characteristics of the font is that it has straight stems and flat endings, which is what makes it such a bold text but combined with how curved the text it makes it seem very approachable which is how it works for the iPod font.

 

Lining Numerals are numerals all of equal height and sit on the baseline. Non-lining numerals are numerals of different heights and have both ascenders and decenders, it is also know as ‘Old style figures’ and works well in a body of text as it flows with the letters because of their feature of ascenders and decenders. In this image the lining numerals are represented my the keys of equal size running straight down the keyboard and the non-lining numerals are represented by the keys of different heights and sizes such as the enter button and the space bar.

Clarendon by Kit Debuse

Clarendon is a typeface which captures the characteristics from a Roman typeface, It was published in 1845 by Robert Besley (Who was also the Lord Mayor of London in 1863) and was named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford. It was the first typeface to ever be copyrighted, under the Ornamental Designs Act of 1842, The typeface is often used alongside a serif font, or used to create a bold header. The type has been used in famous logos such as Sony and Wells Fargo, as well as being known for its use on Wanted poster of the American Old West, in Obama’s presidential campaign and in the famous “Love” Sculpture by Robert Indiana. My person response to Clarendon is a positive one, I enjoy the iconic look of the type, which while being distinct and striking, also possesses a very gracefull outline.

Zapf Dingbats by Oliver Surey

Hermann Zapf designed Zapf Dingbats in 1978. It began as a collection of over 1000 sketches of signs and symbols. A subset of 360 symbols was then chosen to create the typeface. Originally dingbats were used as spacers in typesetting and the term continues to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that have symbols and shapes instead of alphabetical or numerical characters. Zapf dingbats can be used to insert standard icons into your work, which can be resized with no loss in quality. The various ticks and crosses are commonly found in textbooks and educational worksheets. Also the stars could be used as bullet points to make a list more visually interesting. The typeface gained some notoriety in 1994 when David Carson printed an entire interview in Ray Gun magazine using the Zapf Dingbats font. He was interviewing singer Brian Ferry and said that because the interview was ‘incredibly boring’ he used the font with hopes of making it more interesting.

Brackets & Parentheses by Beth McLoughlin

Brackets are used to enclose explanatory or missing text, which has generally been added by someone other than the original author to clarify the situation.

Parentheses contain information that could be omitted without destroying or altering the meaning of a sentence. This means if you removed the material within the parentheses, the sentence would still make sense. They are also used to add extra information.

According to early typographic practice, brackets are never set in italics, even when the surrounding characters are.

Eurostile by Beth McLoughlin

Eurostile was designed in 1962 by Italian typeface designer Aldo Novarese as a development of one of his previous typefaces: Microgamma. The main change was the introduction of lower case letters, as the original font only included uppercase characters. Eurostile was originally created for one of the best-known Italian Foundries, Nebiolo.

It is a geometric, sans-serif typeface, which was popular in contemporary graphic design as well as science fiction artwork. It was used in a variety of media, including television, corporate branding, currency, video games and the music industry. Eurostile was often used in sci-fi or fantasy films and film merchandise: it was used in Star Wars, Dr Who and Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles.

Small Caps by Christiana Heckl

Small caps, as the word already says, are small capitals, which are mostly used to emphasize a certain word or multiple ones at once. They are used in long pieces of text so that the letters are still the same height as the body and do not seem too large for the page, which capital letters would enforce.You can use small caps to replace italics or bold type.

Small caps are usually the same height as the main body, but can exceed 10% of the “x” height in some circumstances. Small caps can make a piece of text look a lot more reliable if done correctly than by using italics or bold fonts. They are specially made so that they are the same weight as the capital letters. Typefaces such as Garamond, Didot, Gill Sans, Palatino, Trajan and Minion were specifically designed for small caps.

If you were to resize capital letters yourself it would not look the same, but rather out of place due to the damaged proportions. Nevertheless you can resize typefaces to a small caps size on most adobe programmes.

Frutiger by Christiana Heckl

The typeface “Frutiger” was designed by the Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger, between the years 1968 and 1975 when it was finally completed. It is a san-serif typeface serving the purpose of directing people to their destinations. In 1969, Frutiger was commissioned to design a typeface for the new “Charles De Gaulle” International airport in France.

Its main features are the modern appearance as well as the legibility, which enables people to read the signs whilst in a hurry, from different angles and from far away. Some characteristics this typeface has are that the ascenders and descenders stand out.

Another reason that makes this typeface legible is because of its wide apertures, which enable the viewer to see every letter more clearly.“Frutiger” proves to be an effective typeface when having to communicate several important messages in a fast and definite way.