Wednesday, September 15, 2010

How to impress your typography teacher.

Word-of-the-week: This week, I thought I would give you a few words with which to impress, and “dazzle,” your typography teacher, and your peers. Try them out in class.
Dazzle: A colloquial term describing the visual effect caused by exaggerated differences between widths of strokes in a letterform.
Full Face: (No this is not when you have just stuffed your face with “Pie” after lunch, creating “Fat matter” around the waste.) It is a headline type, always in capitals. Also called “Titling.”
Pie: Traditionally, composed type that has been inadvertently mixed up.
Fat matter: A traditional term for typeset copy that is easy to set because it includes a large degree of spacing. Dense — thus difficult — copy is known as lean matter.
Have fun with these. I will have more typographic terms throughout the semester. 
 

2 comments:

  1. haha I love these words!!! They are hilarious! I think its great that typographers come up with these unique and silly term-names because its memorable. If they were just very technical terms people would have to spend hours just memorizing these terms to remember them, but in this way, fun words connected with the meaning make it easy to remember! So dazzle those letters!

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  2. while reading these words are fun and interesting, it would be nice if I actually heard profs using them.

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