BRIEF
This exercise is designed to help you look at typefaces more closely. You will need a sharp pencil, some tracing or thin paper and a ruler. You have been provided with a page of Baskerville typeface, which has been deconstructed so that it only contains the strokes, serifs and bowls that are common to all 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.

Draw your baseline, determine the x-height and draw your median line. Remember that some parts will be used more than once, for example the same stem will be used in several letters.

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

I used layout paper to trace the letter forms. The result can be seen below. I used an A3 sheet and I was unable to scan at that size, which explains the line in the middle.

Once I started, I quite enjoyed this exercise as I really had to look carefully at which of the parts were correct – I think I got most of them correct. However, there were a couple of issues such as not all of the provided parts being of equal size; for example the ‘n’ ended up looking far too small as the x-height did not match the others. Also, I used Font Book on my Mac to look at the Baskerville typeface more closely and it looked different to the typeface provided, so I’m not sure which was incorrect, but it was slightly confusing.

Since beginning this course, and in particular this unit, I have gradually deveoloped a much greater appreciation of typefaces and the differences between them. I find myself taking note of typefaces used in magazines, adverts, etc and consider the reasons for their use in that particular situation and whether, in my opinion, they are effective. I definitely feel that learning about typefaces and their construction is beneficial for me as it means I can incorporate text more successfully in my work and, hopefully, produce more effective results.