This is my first article touching on the basics of typography.  I recently read the book “Thinking with Type” by Ellen Lupton.  This critical guide walks through all aspects of type layout and structure and is an excellent resource for anyone wishing to know more about type.

In the Beginning…

(Johannes ) Gutenberg, a goldsmith by profession, developed a complete printing system in approximately 1436, which perfected the printing process through all its stages by adapting existing technologies to printing purposes, as well as making ground-breaking inventions of his own.

Gutenberg’s printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring an image, typically a text. The invention and spread of the printing press is widely regarded as the most influential event in the second millennium.

Typesetting

Typesetting is the retrieval of the stored letters (called sorts in mechanical systems and glyphs in digital systems) and the ordering of them according to a language’s orthography for visual display.  The traditional storage of fonts in two cases, one for majuscules and one for minuscules, yielded the terms “uppercase” and “lowercase” still used today.

Terms

TYPEFACE is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet  of letters, numerals, and punctuation  marks.

FONT is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface. For example, the set of all characters for 9-point Bulmer italic  is a font, and the 10-point size would be a separate font, as would the 9-point upright.  After the introduction of computer fonts based on fully scalable outlines, a broader definition evolved. Font is no longer size-specific, but still refers to a single style. Bulmer regular, Bulmer italic, Bulmer bold and Bulmer bold italic are four fonts, but one typeface.

GLYPH is a property of a typeface. It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language.

LIGATURE occurs where two or more graphemes  are joined as a single glyph.  They are usually used to head off the unattractive collision of adjoining characters.

A WIDOW is a paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page/column, thus separated from the remainder of the text.

An ORPHAN is a paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page/column.
A word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans result in too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page.

Anatomy

The CAP HEIGHT is the distance from the top of the capital letter to its bottom. Some vertical elements (ascenders) may extend slightly above the cap height.

The X-HEIGHT is the height of the main body of the lowercase letter (or the height of a lowercase x ), excluding its ascenders and descenders. The bigger the x-height is in relation to the cap height, the bigger the letters will look.

The BASELINE is the most stable axis along a line of text. The curves at the bottom of letters such as a or c hang slightly below the baseline. Commas and semicolons also cross the baseline. If a typeface were not positioned this way, it would appear to teeter precariously, lacking a sense of physical grounding.
Layout

KERNING refers to adjusting the space between two letters. If letters in a typeface are spaced too uniformly, they make a pattern that doesn’t look uniform enough. Gaps occur, for example, around letters whose forms angle outward or frame an open space (W, Y, V, T, L).

TRACKING is adjusting the spacing across a word, line, or column of text is called tracking, also known as letterspacing.

LEADING is the vertical space of an individual line of text.  It is the space between two consecutive text or, in other words, the distance between the baselines of two lines of text.  To prevent descenders on one line from overlapping the ascenders on the next, giving generous leading is often necessary.
Size

HEIGHT – The point system is used to measure the height of a letter as well as the space between lines (leading).  It is the standard measurement for type.

WIDTH – The horizontal dimension of a letter is its set width. The set width is the body of the letter plus a sliver of space that protects it from other letters.

EM – Web designers can specify type sizes in percentages of an em. An em is the width of the cap height. Ems can be used in CSS to create typographic systems that enable users to adjust overall type size while retaining the relationships within the system.

X-HEIGHT – When two typefaces are set in the same point size, one often looks bigger than the other.  Differences in x-height, line weight, and character width affect the letters’ apparent scale.

Classification

A basic system for classifying typefaces was devised in the nineteenth century, when printers sought to identify a heritage for their own craft analogous to that of art history.
HUMANIST letterforms are closely connected to calligraphy and the movement of the hand. TRANSITIONAL AND MODERN typefaces are more abstract and less organic.
These three main groups correspond roughly to the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment periods in art and literature. Designers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued to create new typefaces based on historic characteristics.

Serif Fonts

HUMANIST OR OLD STYLE – The roman typefaces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries emulated classical calligraphy.  TRANSITIONAL – These typefaces have sharper serifs and a more vertical axis than humanist letters.  MODERN – The typefaces designed by Giambattista Bodoni in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are radically abstract. Note the thin, straight serifs; vertical axis; and sharp contrast from thick to thin strokes.   EGYPTIAN OR SLAB SERIF – Numerous bold and decorative typefaces were introduced in the nineteenth century for use in advertising.

Sans-serif Fonts

HUMANIST SANS SERIF – Sans-serif typefaces became common in the twentieth century. Note the small, lilting counter in the letter a , and the calligraphic variations in line weight.  TRANSITIONAL OR ANONYMOUS SANS SERIF – Uniform, upright characters makes it similar to transitional serif letters. These fonts are also referred to as “anonymous sans serif.”   GEOMETRIC SANS SERIF – Some sans-serif types are built around geometric forms.

Print vs. Screen Fonts

A computer screen displays fonts in pixels.  Type on the Web can be specified in numerous different units of measurement, including points, pixels, or ems.
While the Mac OS displays 72 pixels per inch, the default for PCs is 96.  To guarantee uniform presentation across platforms, some Mac web browsers such as Safari, Firefox, Mozilla and Internet Explorer assume the display is 96 pixels per inch.  They differ, however, in how they round off fractions when converting point values to pixels.

ANTIALIASING is a technique for making the edges of letters look smooth on screen by rendering some pixels in shades of gray. Antialiasing is generally helpful for presenting text on screen at large sizes (12 pixels and higher), but it can make small text difficult to read. Some designers prefer to use bitmap fonts, which are designed to be displayed without antialiasing, for small text on screen.

BITMAP FONTS are built out of the pixels (picture elements) that structure a screen display. Whereas a PostScript letter consists of a vectorized outline, a bitmap character contains a fixed number of rectilinear units. A bitmap font is designed to be used on screen at a specific size, such as 8 pixels, because its body is precisely constructed out of screen units

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

Big thanks to G4TV.com for recording the presentation.

20 million premature and low-birth-weight (LBW) babies are born every year. Of these, four million will die within the first month of life. Those that survive face severe long-term health problems like diabetes and respiratory disease.

99% of neonatal deaths occur in low to middle income countries. Why? The proven treatment – the infant incubator – is cost prohibitive. At $25,000 for a single unit, this life saving device is out of reach for the world’s poorest.

The solution seems obvious – design an affordable incubator.  In 2007, Linus Liang and his team at the Stanford d.School were tasked with the ambitious objective of creating an incubator for 1% of the standard cost – a mere $250.

I recently shared this story with a friend who is an accomplished engineer and his immediate reaction was one of excitement. “It actually might not be that difficult,” he claimed, “incandescent bulbs, analog, combined with appropriate insulation would be a starting point.” A talented, visual thinker, my friend appeared to be working up the schematics in his head.

And perhaps he’s right – it might not be that hard. However as Linus and his team soon discovered, hard to design or not, an affordable incubator would have little impact because it solves the wrong problem.

Lesson One: Solve a real problem

Linus comes from a programming background – he was a Product Manager at Microsoft, built and flipped a technology start-up here in Silicon Valley, and received his Masters from Stanford’s prestigious Department of Computer Science. Since co-founding Embrace, the company that formed around his team’s d.school project, life has changed dramatically. Now based in Bangalore, India, Linus’s focus is on the complex operational issues associated with the design, manufacture, and distribution of a product in the developing world. I reached Linus in Bangalore to discuss Embrace and the meaningful work the company has planned.

Their story begins in “Design for Extreme Affordability”, the d.school’s project-based course focused on innovating for social good. Of the assignments available, Linus and his team gravitated to the incubator challenge, a project sponsored by a Nepalese NGO (Note: Nepal has the highest percentage of neonatal deaths per babies born in the world). As good design thinkers, the team’s first step was to observe users, specifically the healthcare workers in Nepal responsible for treating premature and LBW babies.

Linus journeyed to Katmandu and immediately started touring hospitals, speaking with doctors and nurses about the issue of premature births. As he walked around, Linus noticed something surprising – there were already a number of incubators, primarily older units that had been donated. Even more surprising, most of the incubators sat empty.

When Linus asked why this was the case, a doctor shared that most problematic premature and LBW births occur in rural villages, up to a day of travel away. Sadly, because babies cannot regulate their body temperature, they often die en route to the hospital. It was a powerful insight and Linus immediately recognized his team had the wrong design challenge. To evolve it successfully, he would need a completely different data set.

He canceled his remaining hospital tours and arranged to visit surrounding villages, the areas where the true need existed. He spoke with local doctors and with mothers who had lost their babies as a consequence of premature or LBW births. He discovered that geographic proximity to urban hospitals was only part of the problem; in many cases families simply couldn’t afford the travel let alone the cost of hospital care. He also unearthed several realities that would inform the design of his team’s solution: no reliable source of electricity, rudimentary local healthcare, extreme cost constraints (It became clear that $250 would be far too expensive for local adoption).

With these factors in mind, Linus’s team reframed their task. Rather than focusing on affordable incubators, they endeavored to “design an ultra low cost, portable way of maintaining babies’ temperatures without the use of electricity.” By shifting and narrowing the challenge, the team increased the likelihood their final solution would indeed have impact.

—

Lesson Two: Solve that problem well

Once back in the USA, Linus’s team engaged in a flurry of activity. First, they gathered as much information as they could on incubator technology and its methods for regulating babies’ temperatures. They were fortunate to be at Stanford where access to expertise in medicine, engineering, and materials science was readily available. Their research revealed, among other valuable facts, that a significant portion of the expense associated with standard incubators had little to do with temperature regulation.

Second, focused on their revised design challenge, the team brainstormed possible solutions. Using the brainstorming principles advocated at the d.school (including deferring judgment, building on the ideas of others, and allowing for wild ideas), they generated a large volume of potential ideas, a subset of which would ultimately influence their final solution.

Third, after synthesizing and voting on their brainstorming output, the team evolved their ideas by engaging in rapid prototyping. Using a variety of sundry items available at the d.school, the team threw together various solutions, pushing their thinking in unique directions. In just a few weeks, the team built and broke over 100 prototypes.

The path was tortuous but necessary; the resulting solution was extraordinarily elegant. Resembling a miniature sleeping bag, the product insulated a child against the cold. A side pouch accommodated the real magic – a unique, removable heating pad. After a few minutes in boiling water, the pad releases just enough heat to maintain the perfect temperature inside the sleeping bag for over four hours. As importantly, the solution had no moving parts and could be built for under $25 (that’s correct, 1/1000th the cost of a traditional incubator).

In typical business scenarios, a prototype this polished would enter into clinical testing, production planning, and finally manufacturing and distribution. Linus’s team however was determined to make sure their final product would optimally suit the intended market. So with prototype in hand, the team returned overseas seeking evaluative feedback.

The learning was fast and furious. Because there was now a tangible prototype, users had little difficulty reacting with suggested improvements.

For example, the team learned that local doctors often accompany new mothers and their premature babies to urban hospitals. When in transit, a key consideration is observing chest movement to monitor respiration. To facilitate such observation (without requiring the opening of the sleeping bag and the consequent loss of valuable heat), Linus’s team designed a rugged plastic window for the front of the unit.

Another modification fit a cultural norm. The team discovered that it is fairly common for patients to use intuition when taking medication, regardless of a doctor’s instructions. Local doctors worried that the LCD temperature strip on the exterior of the sleeping bag, which showed temperature in degrees Celsius, would invite interpretation and result in bad decisions. Using paper mock-ups, Linus’s team quickly tested a temperature gauge that had two states – a happy face to indicate the temperature inside the sleeping bag was warm enough, and a sad face to signal the need for a new heating pad. This level of abstraction was well received and has been incorporated into the design.

The “Embrace Infant Warmer” is nearly ready for market. Interest in the product has already exceeded expectations. Indeed, healthcare systems around the world have been inquiring about the unit’s availability. By solving a real problem and solving it well, Embrace is poised to do more than introduce a popular product; they will be saving lives.

In the past week, my son and I made balloon animals on my phone. I checked in for my Vancouver flight online and, the next day, received a reassuring text message with updated departure and gate information. Thanksgiving was saved when I learned how to make gravy on YouTube. I discovered via a podcast that “Mutually Assured Destruction” kept us safe during the Cold War, and via Facebook that my Cold War era classmate is excited about her new flatware.

We all have similar stories. Yet we’re so immersed in this rapidly evolving modernity that we can lose sight of our time’s singular truth – our worlds have become hyper accessible and interactive in ways that none could have predicted.

When today’s leaders look forward into this complexity to divine the next breakthroughs, they do so with an alarmingly high assumption-to-knowledge ratio, one that effectively undermines traditional analysis and business thinking. To quote Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School, “it is increasingly difficult to plan by extrapolating from a platform of past experience.”

So how do we prepare for a future we cannot yet fully grasp? One approach is to learn “Design Thinking”.

The design profession is focused on creating innovative solutions that are by definition outside of our experience. As a consequence, Design Thinking (and its manifest methods and tools) is optimized for the purposeful discovery of possibilities amidst complexity. Designers don’t predict the future so much as they quickly learn their way into novel solutions that are simultaneously desirable, technically feasible, and financially viable.

Start here.

© 2009 IDEO

Design Thinking has helped deliver safe drinking water in Africa, create category revitalizing products for P&G, improve the quality and accuracy of patient care in hospitals, increase commitment among casual blood donors, and much, much more.

And what’s the best way to learn Design Thinking? One must experience it.

Therefore ExperiencePoint knew we had a role to play in the democratization of Design Thinking. We sought out the leader in the field, IDEO, a global consultancy that “creates impact through design” and over the past year have worked in partnership to create an energizing game that introduces the essentials of Design Thinking.

The result is “Design Thinker”. In this workshop experience, competing teams flex their Design Thinking skills to solve a realistic and complex challenge. In so doing, they engage with the terms, techniques, and thought patterns of designers. Participants leave ready and able to affect meaningful change back on-the-job.

We are excited to share Design Thinker with the world and will be making it available in January 2010. We hope you will be among those who join us in this re-think of thinking. The world will be the better for it.

Introduction

This is my first part of what I hope to be a ongoing series on artist in different mediums that I find to have influenced my career in the arts.  Following my second part of my introduction to photography, I thought it appropriate to start with one of the most respected American photographers, Ansel Adams.

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” -  Ansel Adams

A Brief Biography

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West and primarily Yosemite National Park.

Adams was born in the Western Addition of San Francisco, California to distinctly upper-class parents Charles and Olive Adams. He was an only child and was named after his uncle Ansel Easton.

When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup.

After young Ansel was dismissed from several private schools for his restlessness and inattentiveness, his father decided to pull him out of school in 1915, at the age of 12. Adams was then educated by private tutors, his Aunt Mary, and by his father.

Music became the main focus of his later youth. Possessing a photographic memory, Adams quickly learned to read music and play the piano.

Adams first visited Yosemite National Park in 1916 with his family. His father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie box camera, during that stay and he took his first photographs with his “usual hyperactive enthusiasm”. He returned to Yosemite on his own the following year with better cameras and a tripod. In the winter, he learned basic darkroom technique working part-time for a San Francisco photo finisher.

In 1928, Ansel Adams married Virginia Best in Best’s Studio in Yosemite Valley. Virginia inherited the studio from her artist father on his death in 1935, and the Adams continued to operate the studio until 1971. The studio, now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery, remains in the hands of the Adams family.

For the first two years of their marriage, he wavered between his two possible career choices, music and photography. After viewing the wonderful work of a new friend, photographer Paul Strand, Adams decided on his course.

In March 1933 he met the renowned photographer and patron, Alfred Stieglitz, husband of Georgia O’Keefe, owner of An American Place gallery. Stieglitz was favorably impressed with the young photographer and his work, and mounted an exhibition for him in November of 1936. Adams wrote in his 1985 autobiography “Steiglitz taught me what became my first commandment: “Art is the affirmation of life.”

Adams’s energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end.  Adams was a perfectionist, often spending hours or days perfecting a print to match what he saw with his “mind’s eye”.

Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium.  He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad.  He developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development.  This system enabled photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization.

He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject.

“The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score… and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.” -  Ansel Adams

“In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.” -  Ansel Adams

Links

Ansel Adams, Photographer DVD Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDY9j7UoWI

Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee8VsLYPJ6c

Master Photographers – Ansel Adams
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZND3eczqoIA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWhQGU2RYuM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7b6bH1gmmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGPsLx8aL8k