Illustator basics

Today I was introduced to the basics of Adobe Illustrator. I always found Illustrator to be quite an irritating program to use because I could never get it to do what I wanted it to. But as I began to understand the layout and shortcut keys etc. I began to get the hang of it.

We were asked to create a poster using mainly type describing a famous typographer. I chose John Baskerville and these are two of the poster I have designed so far in illustrator:

Typography: A brief history

 Today I was introduced to the history of Typography. Specifically the most influencial peolpe in the world of Typography. People like John Baskerville, Claude Garamond and Giambattista Bordoni. Looking at the examples given of the evolution of their Typfaces, I realised that the older types were more intricate and complex; the more modern typefaces had less detail but looked clearer and easier to read. This typically meant that the older typefaces were serif-type whereas the modern types were san-serif.

San-serif typefaces have become very popular in todays industries because of the advancements in technology. Almost everything in todays industries use computers for advertisements and shawcasing work. San-serif typefaces are used a lot in technology because the letters look a lot clearer on monitors from a further distance compared to serif types. However serif types allow easier reading from books because the serifs create structure forcing your eyes to read horizontally.