Ch 4 & 5 Reflection

Legibility & The Typographic Grid

I was interested in the section in chapter 4 dealing with capital and lowercase letters. I've never put much thought into the recognizable shapes that lowercase words make, ones that we sometimes instantly recognize. Previously, I thought that words in all capitals were a bit easier to read because they are more eye catching and are very uniform. However, their letter height is all the same, which makes their "word shape" non-existent, slowing down our reading time. I also thought it was interesting that some of the most used letters like a, e, i, o, and u are among the most illegible. It made me wonder whether other languages have similar problems with illegibility. Chinese and Japanese for example mainly consist of characters that represent a whole word, rather than letters that makes up words. I'm curious to know whether English has more problems with illegibility than, for example, East Asian alphabets.

I've always been fascinated with the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence, and I wasn't surprised to see that it is utilized in typography as a natural standard of proportion. Nature-based proportions like the golden section are often used in art and sculpture to make oversized statues look proportional, or large scale paintings look realistic.

In typography, I think that classic means of proportion are useful to give viewers a subconscious familiarity with whatever you're designing. I also found it important to note that while "the modular grid appears mathematical, repetitive, and unimaginative... the grid [is] a system for organizing information... not as a physical, inpenatrable fortress" (105). Without the careful mathematics of a grid behind articles, magazines, and books, it would be almost impossible to design creatively, yet still retain unity in your composition.