work in progress

The letter T stands for TYPEFACE and is made of words that describe overall traits of a typeface. Let’s see if I can find those definitions again.

• typeface - a coordinated set of glyphs designed with stylistic unity (wikipedia, 25.03.2008). A typeface consists of shapes of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other symbols used in writing, such as the percent sign. These shapes share traits like size, weight, width, overall aspect, serifs etc., traits which make them part of the same typeface.
• kern - a verb that denotes the action of adjusting the space between certain letter pairs in order to achieve visual coherence inside a word. Wikipedia has a good article on kerning.
• descent - The distance from the baseline to the longest glyph that extends below the baseline. This is not always the same as the value of the descender line, as designers extend some glyphs slightly below this line, to achieve visual equality.
• contrast - “The ratio of thickness of vertical to horizontal strokes in letterforms.” (typenow, 25.03.2008)
• ascent - The distance from the baseline to the longest glyph that extends above the baseline. Same as descent, this is not the same as ascender line, or cap line for that matter.
• xheight - The average height of the lowercase letterforms. Usually, typographers adhere to the common rule that this is the height of the lowercase x - thus, the name xheight.
• track - When tracking, we equally increase or decrease the spacing between every letter. For example, the condensed style of a typeface has the spacing between letters reduced. Usually, readable typography means no tracking. Instead, designers make use of kerning and condensed variants. But this depends on context.
• size - The traditional unit of measurement for typefaces is the point. Nowadays, we consider a point to be 1/72 inches, but it wasn’t always like this. Again, wikipedia helps.
• character set - all the characters that a typeface has. Some are richer, some are poorer. For example, many typeface designers forget that certain languages use diacritic marks such as a cedilla or an umlaut, and consequently, their typefaces lack such characters, rendering them unusable in many of the Earth’s languages.

The first Y gathers terms related to page layout and bears the strict mark of the GRID. I didn’t choose paragraph as the outlining word, because somehow the grid is much more important visually (small words look better in caps :P) .

• grid - “Grid design is a fundamental skill of any designer. Understanding proportional relationships, white space and composition are all vital in constructing a grid for any delivery platform”. (Mark Boulton, 25.03.2008) Known to many as the grid guru, Mr. Boulton knows a lot more than I do on the subject, so go read him.
• whitespace - This one is simple. Letters are black, the space between them is white. Even if you replace the colours, the empty space filled with only canvas colour is whitespace. Whitespace represents all the portions of the composition that do not contain elements. Free space.
• orphan - When the last line of a paragraph contains only one word, that word is an orphan. Don’t be cruel, give that word a family by adjusting justification, hyphenation, paragraph size and/or word count.
• bleed - “An area of text or graphics that extends beyond the edge of the page. Commercial printers usually trim the paper after printing to create bleeds.” (proximasoftware.com, 25.03.2008) This operation has a neat result:
• grid -
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