Type Design and Typography Tutorial
Bennington College, Spring 2006

4 Credits
4 hours a week (one meeting with Joe, one meeting with students)

Patrick Davison
Jason Irla
David Perez
Charlotte Sullivan

DESCRIPTION

This tutorial is devoted to learning about type design. Through group discussions, show and tell sessions, individual font design projects, basic font quizzes, and letter duplication exercises, we will study the history, psychology, and aesthetic properties of letterforms. Hopefully we will have guest designers come to class to talk with us/we will go to visit them. Field trips will also be essential, to studios, type foundries, letterpress shops, and areas with must-see signage. Main questions that will be addressed in the class are: What is the history of different font designs? How has technology changed the type design process? Why are certain people font snobs? Why do certain fonts communicate better than others? By the end of the class, each student will have designed his or her own font, as a result of in depth research and ongoing letterform collections.

READING LIST

Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book
Ruari McLean, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography
Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger, Stop Stealing Sheep
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Donald Knuth, Computers & Typesetting, Volumes A-E
Donald Knuth, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
Scott Kim, Inversions: A catalog of calligraphic cartwheels
Ed Fella, Letters on America
Steven Heller, editor, The Education of a Typographer

PROJECTS/PAPERS/WORK

1. Weekly reading will be assigned, anyone is welcome to contribute reading suggestions.

2. Each student will keep a notebook to keep track of found letterforms (photos of signs, to do lists, found to-do lists, etc). These will be shown once a week to share any updates/interesting finds. Students will also practice drawing fonts freehand in their notebooks.

3. There will be periodical quizzes on font recognition, as new fonts are studied.

4. Each student will do a research project on a font design of their choice and present it to the class (midterm assignment?)

5. For the final project each student will design a font.