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In this, teapots are like typefaces

Published: 30 July 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Few fields remained untouched by the advances in computer graphics since the 1970s, but hardly any were affected so profoundly as that of typography. As typography dissolves into the field of graphic design, many of the subtleties of letters are forgotten and ignored, especially when designers have myriad fonts to choose from, many of them illegible and over-stylized. I endeavored to make a teapot glyph that accentuates the spirit each in font I used, but also functions legibly and seamlessly within the text. I chose the fonts after much deliberation; they reflect the statements that the text makes and represent commonly used fonts that are archetypes of their class. Beaming with personality, Bodoni MT continues to be an extremely popular and elegant font. Adobe Jenson Pro based on completely pen-formed letters; its imperfections and inconsistencies recall the humanist calligraphy of the Renaissance. ITC New Baskerville is elegant in its modeled balance and uprightness, showing a true break in type and handwriting and Futura is the quintessential geometric sans serif. Lucida Console has its roots in early digital typography and is used in various other software applications. Adobe Garamond Pro and other interpretations of Garamond's type are the quintessential font for the setting of books and titles alike. The text itself tells a history of teapots in broad strokes, leaving it up to the viewer to make the connection to fonts. That said, the text is not intended to be the focus of the piece by any means. With the x-height measuring about a quarter-inch, the scale of the letters calls for the shapes of the letters to be seen as abstract shapes and for the rhythms of whitespace to be much more tangible. When seen at a distance, each typeface clearly creates a different color, as it's commonly referred to, on the page. When seen close up, the citation of each font calls attention to the juxtaposition of teapots and letters and symbols. Not only do the citations give credit to the designers whose creations account for more than 99% of my piece, but they are insights into the historical context of the letterforms. Because of their prominent position in culture and history, not to mention their anthropomorphic nature and symbolic status, teapots have unique personalities that operate within their given form. This piece asserts that, for the same reasons, typefaces have the same.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGGRAPH '06: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Teapot

Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from providing the full text for the Teapot exhibits
July 2006
ISBN:1595933646
DOI:10.1145/1180098
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 30 July 2006

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