| The print media has long been the way that | | | | balance of typefaces. This person, in years gone by, |
| advertisers, newspaper proprietors and the general | | | | was called a Compositor. Because of his training, he |
| public have communicated with each other. Printing is | | | | was skilled in the craft of composing types to look |
| only the end product of this continuing process. The | | | | attractive in the printed word. I think today we call them |
| pre-press area of printing is really the preparation and | | | | either typographers or graphic designers - the principle |
| design part before an page has "been put to bed" and | | | | is still the same though. |
| before it comes anywhere near a printing press. | | | | Fonts were made in type foundries - in the lead era of |
| I mentioned the print media in my first paragraph. This | | | | printing - for centuries. One of the major influences in |
| has become a slightly overworked and generalised | | | | type design was the Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s. |
| term, but with the advent of the internet and other | | | | They made an incredible contribution to all forms of |
| electronic forms of communication, the title is, in fact, | | | | design at that time - including wallpaper design. One of |
| reasonably accurate. | | | | the more famous typefaces of that era was Gill Sans |
| The attraction of a page of type is obviously | | | | - a quite beautiful non-serif font. |
| determined by what is on it. This usually takes the | | | | The age of digital fonts is with us now and there are |
| form of typefaces - collectively known as fonts - they | | | | many fonts which are just as beautiful as their |
| used to be called founts in their early days - and | | | | old-style counterparts. Digitised fonts in my opinion |
| images (pictures). The design of these usually | | | | though, do tend to carry too much space to the left of |
| determines how much the page is going to be read. | | | | the figures, particularly the figure one. This tends to |
| Though it probably isn't something the reader thinks | | | | unbalance the look of a page. There are differing |
| about consciously, the designer most certainly would. | | | | styles of fonts, which seem to stretch both horizontally |
| Fonts broadly fall into two categories, serif and sans | | | | and vertically whichever takes your fancy. Naturally, all |
| serif. Serif typefaces are the fonts that have the | | | | these type of fonts may be changed and altered |
| squiggly bits, a good example of these are the | | | | electronically with the software available through the |
| typefaces which are usually used to produce wedding | | | | design industry nowadays. |
| invitations and the like. Sans serif typefaces mean | | | | Our target, whether two hundred or two years ago is |
| "without serifs" the French word for without being | | | | still the printing press and, although we appear to have |
| "sans". We used to call this "block writing" in | | | | revolutionised the way we prepare our pages, the |
| schooldays if memory serves me correctly! Enough of | | | | methods in their time and place, were equally practical. |
| the history lesson, let's move on!! | | | | It is a matter of opinion - depending on your age group |
| To make a page look attractive, it is responsibility of | | | | - which you think is the more efficient. |
| the person composing the page to use the correct | | | | |