Other Media + Quiz

DUE Wednesday, Oct 13 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)

We talked about some of technicalities with fonts and typography on the web back in Week 9, but I think it is also important to look at fonts from the perspective of design.

  • Typography For Lawyers
    This resource is written by Matthew Butterick, a practicing attorney with a background in graphic design. He provides good information about typography targeted at people who are not designers. The entire site has useful information, but the quiz questions will come from the following three pages:

  • 6 Ways To Improve Your Typography
    This article by Michael Owens provides a good overview of important terms in typography plus some discussion of the various technologies used for displaying fonts on web pages.

  • Get Stoked on Web Typography (0:00-29:33)
    This is a recording of a presentation given at South By Southwest Interactive in March 2010. “Typography can make or break a design, but are there big differences between what makes jaw-dropping type offline from what makes great type online? In this presentation, Samantha Warren will evaluate interesting offline lettering and discuss how you can create engaging online typographic experiences.”

    You’ll want to follow along with the slides she posted on her personal web (gotta love her domain name!) to see the examples she mentions:
    Audio     | Slides

Once you have listened to this material, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … “:

  1. T/F? Matthew Butterick describes a script font on a road sign as nice looking but as inapt for the function of a road sign.
  2. T/F? Of the three examples of typography on resumes that Matthew Butterick provides, he indicates that Anastasia K. Johnson’s has the best typography.
  3. T/F? Keyboards typically have keys for all four types of curly quotes that Matthew Butterick mentions.
  4. T/F? There’s no easy way to replace straight quotes with curly quotes in Microsoft Word.
  5. T/F? Hyphens and dashes are interchangeable.
  6. T/F? Matthew Butterick describes two types of dashes, em dashes and en dashes.
  7. T/F? “Leading” (which rhymes with “bedding”) is the height of spacing between two lines of text.
  8. T/F? Line height is equivalent to the sum of the font size and the leading.
  9. T/F? The optimal measure, the width of a given line or column of text, is almost always 125 characters.
  10. T/F? All browsers render fonts on web sites identically.
  11. T/F? Replacing text with background images is a brand new technique for showing text in a particular font on the web.
  12. T/F? sIFR (which is pronounced “SIF-fer”) is a technique for creating PNG images that are graphical representations of text in a particular font.
  13. T/F? At the time of Michael Owens’ writing, most foundries support CSS3 font embedding.
  14. T/F? At the time of writing, Michael Owens estimated that 90% of users would have font embedding in their browsers soon.
  15. T/F? Samantha is obsessed with uppercase Rs.
  16. T/F? There are very few examples of beautiful typography and letters out there, mostly in design textbooks.
  17. T/F? Typography is primarily about what font you use.
  18. T/F? Samantha Warren noticed that most of the posters she saw at one poster show used web safe fonts like Georgia and Arial.
  19. T/F? Samantha Warren believes that typography serves the same purpose in posters and on the web, to be part of the artwork.
  20. T/F? Samantha Warren believes legibility is the key for typography in great designs.
  21. T/F? Display copy can be in a creative, less-legible font because visitors don’t need to read it every time they visit the site.
  22. T/F? Samantha Warren compares choosing a font to choosing a particular flavor of ice cream.
  23. T/F? Samantha Warren mentions Archer as an approachable font.
  24. T/F? Samantha Warren mentions Veer and FontShop as places to preview text in specific fonts.

DUE Wednesday, Oct 13 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)