Typography Basics for Artists. Part 1 - Broad Classification

major font styles
Major type styles.
Typography is a separate world in its own. It lives according to the myriad of rules - aesthetic, conventional, optical and technical. Few professions include understanding of this world in a job description, and they mostly contain a word “designer” in the name - like graphic designers or (suddenly) typeface designers. Among the artists however it is not uncommon to be way less familiar with the principles involved in creating, manipulating and judging fonts. Still it’s a valuable knowledge for anyone dealing with images, which I’d like to address here. By no means I claim myself as an expert in the field - I’m rather trying to draw some directions for further research, which from my own experience might take some time to establish. As in most of the cases, a great place to start is Wikipedia’s articles on Typography and Typeface. The trick is to keep digging further exploring the related links.

Couple of old works revived

While the article announced last week continues cooking itself, as an intermission here goes a couple of images which I found in the attic of a hard drive and tried to shake some dust off this week.

Masquerade - image by Denis Kozlov www.kozlove.net
Masquerade
Grande Pellicano - image by Denis Kozlov www.kozlove.net
Grande Pellicano

Three great books on color for artists.

In the beginning of the career I've often heard a comment “You've got the colors wrong” or just “Bad colors”. The problem was that more often than not my interest for “What exactly is wrong?” couldn't be satisfied by a distinct answer. Sometimes though, depending on a person, I would receive an explanation about the particular image and a related problem, but what I was hungry for was a more complete picture of how colors work and how to work with colors in images.

Books on color are many. And sadly enough, a lot of them barely scratch the surface or rather suggest a catalog of pre-cooked solutions printed on the very expensive paper. Thus I would like to share today those few which really made it for me – the books I keep recommending whenever someone asks what to read on color.