Type Anatomy

We began looking at type anatomy by choosing a typeface and replicating it to write our surname. I chose Baskerville as it is quite a simple serif typeface so it would be good to replicate. When I was copying the typeface I was using the guides in InDesign to see which parts of the letters lined up and also to see the different thicknesses, this was useful as it showed me how different heights in letters can line up and also how the sizes can corrolate. Once I’d replicated it I labelled some parts of the anatomy that I recognised, the part of the anatomy which I think is the most important and I will definitely be focusing on when I’m looking at typography is the X height as I believe it is important that all lower case letters line up as this makes it look consistent, I struggled slightly with this as I found with the Baskerville typeface that in curved letters such as ‘m’, ‘a’, ‘n’ etc they go over the midline slightly making it difficult to make them look consistent, however, next time I will use more guides when drawing the typeface out to make sure that they all follow the same guides.

We had to choose a wooden letter press letter to draw an exact drawing of and label parts of the anatomy. I chose a letter E which is a serif letter. I found this task easier than the previous one where we had to copy our last name as the box around the letter made it easier to get measurements so that it could be in proportion. I think if I had done this task first it may have made the previous task easier as I could have drew a box around each letter so that I could measure it or be able to see the proportions easier, this is something I will keep in mind of I have to do a similar task in the future. 

After drawing the letter we then had to scan it in and create a version in Illustrator. This wasn’t too difficult to do as the letter is quite angular so there isn’t many curves, however, when it came to do the curves I noticed that after I’d taken the image away the curves didn’t flow very well, so I had to go back in and convert some of the anchor points so that the curves flowed better. I am quite happy with the way that this turned out as the curves do work well together. I flipped the letter to test whether it looked alright the way that the letters meant to be and it looked ok.