The session began as our other design lessons previously have started – with a group discussion about various book covers and the design decisions that were made. I like how I am beginning to look more critically about the decisions that were made with design and I feel myself analysing book covers I come across in my spare time.

This week the focus was on typography. What does the typography mean to us and what is it saying to the consumer? Serif style tends to be used to convey a more serious, traditional mood, whereas sans serif can represent a modern theme. We specifically looked at series style and our thoughts. The example used was

Ness explained some key terms in typography that will be useful when working on our projects and when in industry:

• Leading: the space between the baselines.
• Kerning: the space between the letters.
• Tracking: can help to fit the text on a certain number of pages.
• Widow: one or two words that make a new line at the bottom of a page.
• Orphan: one or two words that are a linne of their own at the start of a page.
• Baseline grid: tool in InDesign that can be switched on/off to help align the text.
• Ligature: letters that can be joined together.

In the second part of the lesson Ness introduced us to basic typography on InDesign which I found very useful as I am still fairly unfamiliar with the program. Our task was to take the selection of images provided and add text that reflects the mood or theme of the image. For example, for Demon, I used the outer glow effect used in the image and chose a font that looked etched and handwritten. Here are the final images:

I found this task quite challenging as I have a vision for how I would like the text to appear but my limited skills in InDesign become a drawback to creating the desired text. I believe with more practice I will be able to apply my ideas more accurately. I also found that the fonts on the University computers were quite limited and a larger selection would be more beneficial for this task. It was good as a beginners lesson to introduce us to how typography expresses meaning and mood.

An interesting video I watched on typography was Matthew Carter’s Ted talk. He designs typefaces which I think would be a great job!