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.

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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.

Here is my second part to my ongoing series on artist in different mediums.  I will try to feature artist that I find to have influenced my career in the arts.  I have gone in a different direction this time from my previous edition which feature one of the most respected American photographers, Ansel Adams.  This time I will be featuring one of the most notorious street artists currently working in the UK and around the world, Banksy.

In August/September 2006, Banksy replaced up to 500 copies of Paris Hilton’s debut CD, Paris, in 48 different UK record stores with his own cover art and remixes by Danger Mouse. Music tracks were given titles such as “Why am I Famous?”, “What Have I Done?” and “What Am I For?”. Several copies of the CD were purchased by the public before stores were able to remove them, some going on to be sold for as much as £750 on eBay.

In August 2005, Banksy painted nine images on the Israeli West Bank barrier, including an image of a ladder going up and over the wall and an image of children digging a hole through the wall.

Thank you for continuing to provide us with great feedback! We hope these updates result in an even better experience for you and your learners.

We heard: “Can I have learners interview the stakeholders as pre-work and prevent them from implementing tactics?”

We created an ‘interviews only’ mode that locks the Tactics, Planner, Feedback, and Debrief tabs and automatically unlocks them on the day of your session.

We also heard:

• Some learners don’t implement the “Employee Interviews” tactic because they they confuse it with interviewing the stakeholders
• Some learners are surprised when stakeholder interviews expire
• Some learners aren’t sure if their games are being saved
• Some learners accidentally accept their choices for tactics with choices like “Appoint Core Change Team”
• Some learners get tangled up in the “Identify Problem” tactic
• Some learners find it difficult to map stakeholders during the “Stakeholder Mapping” tactic because of the font used
• Some learners feel the instructions for choices tactics could be clearer

We changed the name of “Employee Interviews” to “Walk the Floor” and made some updates to instructions, fonts, and pieces of the user interface to address these issues without changing how the simulation is played.