For this exercise, I was asked to print off a page featuring the typeface Baskerville which had been deconstructed so it only contained the strokes, serifs, and bowls. I then had to use tracing paper to piece back together each letter and write out ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ – a commonly used pangram containing all letters of the alphabet. The idea was that doing this would get me to look closer at the typeface and features of each letter and how they all fit together.
I was really looking forward to this exercise right from when I saw it back when I began the unit. I am a jigsaw fan in general and combining this with my love of typography sounded super fun! I decided to use my lightboard for this as I felt it would be the most accurate and easiest way to complete the exercise. I printed off the page given and stuck it in place so I could work on top of it. I chose some drafting paper and two pencils to use for the exercise – a 2B for the lettering and a red Faber-Castell Polychromos pencil for the guides.
I then measured the provided strokes in order to identify a baseline and x-height. I frustratingly took the concept of ‘x-height’ a bit too literally here and tried to figure out exactly how tall an X would be, without realising there was an E and an S on the page which I could’ve used as a guide. This unfortunately meant my x-height was a little too small for my first guide. I also only drew out one guide to start with, as I figured I would need to measure the ascender and descender lines to draw out the remaining guides.
Once I had my first set of guides, I jumped straight into tracing out each letter. As I was so excited, I forgot to take photos during each step of the process, but I ensured to get some showing my work before I shaded it!
The unit PDF gave an example of the sentence written in a serif font within the exercise brief. Frustratingly, this did not actually match the deconstructed type given. It was a good reference point, but for example, the text shown in the PDF has ball serifs and the jigsaw pieces do not. It was a little annoying not being able to accurately recreate what I was looking at, but I feel I managed to figure it out the best I could. I spent a lot of time referencing the ‘anatomy of a typeface’ section of the unit PDF throughout, checking how my recreation matched the outline of how a typeface looks.
It was so much fun looking at each letter and figuring out where each bit goes, and also learning from the previous letters I had done. Having just completed the research using the identifont website the day before, I was already tuned in to what sort of serifs go on which letters, how things might look, and what to pay attention to when trying to recreate the font. I wish I could repeat this exercise using a variation of typefaces, as I had so much fun! I think doing this really improves my appreciation of the typeface too.
I definitely made a couple of mistakes, but I think overall I was accurate and did a good job completing the sentence. It was nice arriving at letters I had already completed and intuitively being able to trace them out. I would love to do more hand-printed lettering in a similar way to this – it’s almost meditative in its process. Once completed, I shaded in each letter using the 2B pencil to give it the completed Baskerville appearance.
This exercise got me thinking a lot about designing my own fonts, especially ahead of Assignment 4. A line in the exercise brief says ‘If you do get it wrong then you might have ended up designing your first typeface!’ which stuck with me throughout the process. I began to think of how I could deconstruct and work from existing fonts in the process of creating my own, and what aspects of fonts I would like to include in any I create. I will likely use an exercise like this – along with the identifont website – to identify how I want my own font to look.
All of the exercises in Part 4 so far have deepened my appreciation of typography hugely, and this is no exception. I am really excited to see where the rest of Part 4 goes and what I end up producing in the Assignment!
Learning Log 