THE ANATOMY OF A TYPEFACE - A Typographic Jigsaw Puzzle

This exercise is designed to help you to look at typefaces more closely. You will need a sharp pencil, some tracing or thin paper and a ruler. On the facing page the typeface Baskerville has been deconstructed so it only contains the strokes, serifs and bowls that are common to all the letterforms. Your task is to try and put it all back together again to read

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

This is a pangram containing all the letters of the alphabet. It is all in lowercase.

Start by drawing your baseline, determine the x height by identifying a whole letter such as x, e or n and draw your median line. This should provide a good starting point to try and piece together all the other elements. Remember that some parts will be used more than once, for example the same stem will be used in several letters. Try and account for all the parts without leaving any stray serifs behind.

Do not worry if you get this exercise wrong, it is just a way to get used to looking at and analysing typefaces, appreciating the finer detailing of it and recognising repeat patterns, such as using the same bowl shape throughout the typeface. If you do get it wrong then you might have ended up designing your first typeface!

Having spent some time looking closely at typefaces, has your appreciation of them increased? If so in any particular aspect? Do you think that understanding more about how typefaces are constructed will be useful to you in future? Make notes in your learning log.

The Baskerville jigsaw puzzle

I was looking forward to doing this exercise to see how the pieces would fit together. I started with drawing my baseline and from there selected the letter "e" to get my X height. When I started with trying to find the letter "t" pieces I realised that this was going to be a lot tougher than I thought!

I started looking more closely at the serifs to see if they had serifs on both sides of the stem in order to eliminate the other stems that might of had serifs missing. It started to becoming easier. As I was using the pieces of the jigsaw, I was marking off the pieces that I had used to try and keep track of the pieces that I had left. I also marked how many times I used certain pieces of the jigsaw.

I used a window to trace the outlines of the pieces onto a thin piece of paper.

I found it difficult to find the correct pieces for the letters "j" and "f" as the descender on the letter "j" didn't seem to be curvy enough.

This was my attempt below:

After I had completed the exercise I found that I had five pieces left over.

Doing this exercise I found that there was a pattern emerging in the anatomy of the typeface, some pieces I was using more because it was part of a pattern.

Reflection

Before I started part four, I didn't really know much about typography and how much detail went into a typeface. Now that I have researched and looked more closely at typefaces I do have much more appreciation for the anatomy, structure and uses of typefaces in design.

So far I have enjoyed looking at the serif typefaces like Didot and how it's used in fashion magazines such as Vogue or in logos that require sophistication and trustworthiness in a brand. I've learnt that fonts evoke an emotion and the type of font used in a design is important. If the wrong typeface is used it can give the wrong message or cause offense.

It has been a interesting experience and this will be vey useful in the future as I think that having a solid understanding of typography will only enhance your work as a designer.