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The Salon/Poolside - Visual Literacy


Typography is the style, size and arrangement of the letters in a piece of printing. In grpahic design, it can work with images to create advertising, media pieces and web pages.



Faces - Serif vs Sans Serif

Weight - Black, Bold, Regular, Light

Point Size


Critical Issues

Meaning - "The meaning of a word can be changed dramatically by the typeface, case, size and spacing in which it is set. Lower case and small point sizes are less assuming but can harbor a certain viciousness if used effectively." - typoGRAPHIC

Legibility and Spacing - Tracking (the average space between characters in a line), Leading (the space between lines of text) and Kerning (the space between a single letter pair). Spacing determines the legibilty of the type, the word and the sentence.

Image Legibilty - the combination of text and pictures and the issues behind keeping both legible.

Type as Image

Dynamic Type - "Dynamic type is a relatively new concept, possible only in the digital medium. By making type dynamic, one can enhance the reading of a word with visual expressiveness, the chronological extention of the information/asthetic duality of type now." - typoGRAPHIC. e.g. movement, sound, color dynamics.



[Doug - We didn't have a lot of info for this topic, but the site typoGRAPHIC is a good source - it was hard to find glossaries/dictionaries for definitions and the like]