Typesetting seminar and study task

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents.

orthography
the conventional system of a language

line reading process - movements are saccades

3 elements to typography

• letter - design of the individual character/ glyphs and anatomy
• word - how these glyphs fit together
• the line - combination & arrangement of words in a body or sequence

Hierarchy
Some messages are more important than others. Type size, style, weight, colour and treatment can add emphasis to elements that require prominence.

Alignment
left, justified, centred & right aligned (not commonly used because difficult to read)
rag refers to the irregular or uneven vertical margin of a block of type, often on the right edge

paragraph 
indented
full line break 

leading
distance between the baselines of successive lines of type.

tracking
amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of copy.

kerning & pairs
adjusting the spacing between individual characters/letter forms in a proportional font to achieve a visually pleasing result.

hidden characters (return, spaces, tabs etc)

line length
40 - 75 characters, or 7 - 10 words

widows and orphans
lines or words left hanging or separated from a complete block of text.

hyphen (-) function as formation of certain compound terms. also used for word division
en dash (–) indicates range distance or time
em dash (—) take the place of commas, parentheses or colons

reading: the punctuation guide

rivers
gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignments of spaces.


Page 1: Great Expectations is a book consisting entirely of the very first page of the novel Great Expectations, but typeset in 70 different ways by designers/ studios.
The variations between the design of the texts is massive and shows just how different people can interpret texts. Some are incredibly abstract and have next to no legibility.

Study Task: Typeset and lay out the text to communicate a particular idea or concept

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens — Chapter 1, Page 1
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip,
my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more
explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone
and my sister - Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I
never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either
of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my
first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived
from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me
an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair.
From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of
the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled
and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred
to the memory of five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get
a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle - I am indebted for a
belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs
with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out
in this state of existence.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad
impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained

on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.

main themes and words
— tombstones
— parents (mother and father)
— names (Pirrip, Philip, Pip)
— child, infancy

Blast magazine
Anthony Burrill - Letterpress
Experimental Jetset