In order to gain some more understanding of type, and all the different elements that make up a good piece of typography, Kyle asked us to perform a task around taking a piece of raw data and typesetting (or formatting) it appropriately.
Kyle showed us a few helpful resources for typesetting in our projects, such as type-scale.com, a website which shows a variety of type sizes and scales, which are appropriate for a web publication. I can look at these scales and use the pixels and sizes as a guide for typesetting my own data, in a way that would make it suitable to be published on the web.
Kyle also included a useful link to some websites that taught miniature courses on typesetting. I was able to learn a variety of information throughout reading these websites, such as Kerning, ligatures, and body and display text. This was a big help towards my understanding of type, and how even the smallest changes to things can make such a huge difference to the overall end product. For example, shown above, this little tiny change in the spacing between individual letters in a word has made the word such much more appropriate. The first ‘Try’ is too spaced out, especially between the T and the r, so in the next line the gap has been closed, creating a much nicer appearance.
In order to put this into practice, I used the data that Kyle gave us and began typesetting it using the research and information I had learned.
The text on the left is the text I have formatted, and the one on the right is the raw data that I used for reference.
Altogether, this task allowed me to put into practice typesetting, and help me to better understand what I need for my own text when creating my website. It was really interesting to see how so much thought must go into how all the little pieces of information are laid out on a page or screen, and how the format of this information has an effect on the user’s experience visiting the site or page.