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THEESSENCEOFTYPOG-RAPHY.

DESIGN MUSEUM

“TYPOGRAPHY IS WHATLANGUAGE LOOKS LIKE”.

CONTENTS

About

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About

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Brief history

Fancy

flesh

fresh

Blood

anatomy

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Skin, BodyTHE BASELINE is where all the letters sit. This is the most stable axis along a line of text, and it is a crucial edge for allighning text with images or with other text

OVERHANG The curves at the bottom of letters hang slightly below the baseline. If a typeface were not positioned this way, it would appear to teeter precariously. Without overhang, rounded letters would look smaller than their flat-footed compatriots.

x-HEIGHT is the height of the main body of the lowercase let-ter (or the height of a lowercase x) excluding its ascenders and descenders.

Ascender height some elements mayextend slightly abovethe cap height.

cAp HEIGHT

The distance from the baseline to the top of the capital letter determines the letter’s point size.

DEScENDER HEIGHT

The length of a letter’s descenders contrib-utes to its overall style attitude.

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Influential typeface

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BASKERVILLE

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“Baskerville quote Baskerville quote Baskerville quote Basker-ville quote Baskerville quote.”

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ClarendonNamed after Oxford’s Clarendon Press, the popular slab-serif was created in 1845 by Robert Besley for the Fann Street Foundry. Notable as one of the last new develop-ments in nineteenth century typography, the letterforms represented a significant change from the slab-serif An-tiques and Egyptians that were so popular in that time.

“The reason it was so widely copied is simple: it was extremely useful. It provided the attention-getting bold-ness to highlight a word or phrase, yet at the same time was compact and easier to read than the fat faces and antiques of the period,” says HiH Retrofonts.

“Clarendon is one of the greatest success of British Typefounding.”

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&

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a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

helvetica

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Wim Crouwel

1. Why do you use Helvetica?

There are many reasons why we use Helvetica. Each is very different and sometimes seemingly contradic-tory, and they slowly but constantly change. Some of these reasons may be hard to follow, but we like to believe that it is exactly the complicated nature of our reasoning that, paradoxically, makes our designs so practical and clear.One of these many reasons involves the neutrality of Helvetica. Of course, we fully realize that no typeface is neutral, and that the objectivity of Helvetica is a myth. But it is exactly this myth that turned Helvetica into one of the most widely used typefaces in the first place. So it is fair to speak of a myth that created its own reality. In that sense the neutrality of Hel-vetica resembles a self-fulfilling prophesy.The neutrality of Helvetica, real or imagined, enables us and the user to fully focus on the design as a whole, neutralizing the typographic layer as a way to keep the concept as clear and pure as possible.There are however cases where, for specific reasons, the concept demands a less neutral typographic layer. In those cases we never hesitate to use other type-faces. But those cases are rare.

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“The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface, and that is why we loved Helvetica very much.”