Type Exercise

Two type exercises for next week:

1. Work on your word representation if you have not finished it.
2. Compose the text provided below in a manner that expresses its meaning. Use Adobe Garamond and Adobe Garamond Expert only.* Use variations in alignment, leading, line length, orientation, and spacing. Avoid variations in weight or size. You may break the paragraph into smaller elements and distribute them within the square. Be sure to have a concept in mind as you work.

Text to compose in bold:

Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space. Control of position is everything in print. Printed texts look machine-made, as they are. In handwriting, control of space tends to be ornamental, ornate, as in calligraphy. Typographic control typically impresses most by its tidiness and invisibility: the lines perfectly regular, all justified on the right side, everything coming out even visually, and without the aid of guidelines or ruled borders that often occur in manuscripts. This is an insistent world of cold, non-human, facts. 

—Quote adapted from Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).

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Specs:
1. Layout size: 8.5 in x 8.5 in.
2. Type: Adobe Garamond Regular, Adobe Garamond Expert (will be provided*)
3. Color: Black only
AN IMPORTANT NOTE FROM ELLEN LUPTON:
The most common problem students encounter with this project
is what I call “swimming.”

This happens when you start changing the size, style, spacing, and/or orientation
of the type from word to word or line to line without having a sense of
structure that holds the composition together. Avoid swimming by sketching
ideas before you start working on the computer. Read the text; understand its basic meaning; break it into parts. How do those parts relate to typographic forms and structures? Don’t just jump in:
think first.

Examples

*if you are not on the mailing list let me know, else you won’t get the typefaces you need.

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For class next week:
1. Print out of word exercise and type exercise
2. Bring your process sketches as well. I want to see variation and thought process.