Bournemouth — Apr 18th 2017

April in Bournemouth saw 9 members gathered, including one new member (welcome Barrie). We were treated to a fascinating journey through the history of type, design and printing from Euan Williams with many an intriguing digression along the way.

Euan opened with a great quote from Adrian Frutiger (he of the typeface) who said that "Type is the clothing a word wears, so it must be subordinate to the content ... The whole point with type is for you not to be aware it is there". Euan then moved on to the optical (apparent) size of type and its layout, touching on kerning (making "WAVE" look good), bearings and measuring in ens, ems and quads.

Euan moved on to how to improve readability through line lengths and font choices, using examples from our road signs, London Transport and Charles de Gaulle airport. Euan closed with a description of traditional printing, including the wonderful Linotype machines, and their technological impact upon typefaces as the telephone directory creators incorporated ink traps in their typefaces to compensate for their use of cheap paper stock.

This was a fascinating miscellany built around a core topic that affects all of us, on our various computers and wider.

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