Other Media + Quiz

DUE Tuesday, Mar 09 – 4 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)

For this assignment we will be looking at the essentials of typography on the web, reading slides from a presentation on the topic and listening to a podcast about fonts on the web.

  • Typography: Beyond the Font (PDF) – 5-9, 15-51, 62-68, 85-107, 114-128
    When many people think of “typography,” they think first of fonts. This is a presentation given by Jeff Croft here in Dallas a few years ago, discussing some of the other essentials of typography. There are a lot of slides here, but they read pretty quickly. The quiz questions will come only from the slides listed next to the title.

  • Read Between the Leading #18
    This is a podcast run by two students at SCAD who are passionate about many things, including web typography. (Did you get the name of the podcast after looking at the presentation above? Clever, huh?) In this episode, Matt and Aaron talk about new developments concerning fonts on the web.

    (This episode is from June 2009 and some progress has been made on these techniques, but this is a good overall discussion of the issue. They talk about this topic again on Episode  #25 from December 2009, if you are curious. They speak somewhat negatively of The League of Moveable Type, but Matt has since started working with them to create new typefaces.)

Once you have watched or listened to or read these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you the full 3 points.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … “:

  1. T/F? Typography is the art of picking a cool font.
  2. T/F? Jeff Croft considers The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst to be an important book on the subject of typography.
  3. T/F? All browsers implement the same default typographical settings.
  4. T/F? The Yahoo! User Interface Library includes a reset stylesheet.
  5. T/F? In CSS, the font-size property is used to set the size of the em square.
  6. T/F? The tallest character in a given font is always the height of the em square.
  7. T/F? Most browsers have a default font size of 12 pixels.
  8. T/F? With relative units for font sizes like ems or percentages nested elements may inherit a larger or smaller font size.
  9. T/F? Increasing the text size in Internet Explorer 6 has no effect on font sizes specified in absolute units like pixels.
  10. T/F? At the time of this presentation, Jeff Croft typically used percentages to specify font sizes.
  11. T/F? Jeff insists that links should always be blue and underlined.
  12. T/F? By “measure,” typographers mean the vertical distance between each line of text.
  13. T/F? Jeff cites Wikipedia as a site that does a good job controlling the measure.
  14. T/F? The “leading” that a typographer cares about rhymes with “bedding.”
  15. T/F? By “leading,” typographers mean the vertical distance between each line of text.
  16. T/F? On the web, the first line of a paragraph is typically indented.
  17. T/F? Proper quotation marks are curly, while tick marks are straight up and down.
  18. T/F? Serifs are non-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols.
  19. T/F? Because the slanted nature of italics conflicts with the pixel grid nature of the web, you should never use italic characters on the web.
  20. T/F? You should never combine a serif and sans-serif font together in the same design.
  21. T/F? Browsers have recently been adopting @font-face, which allows you to embed an actual font in a web page.
  22. T/F? Hosting a font file on your web server makes it really easy for someone else to steal.
  23. T/F? sIFR (pronounced “SIF-fer”) is a technique for creating PNG images that are graphical representations of text in a particular font.
  24. T/F? TypeKit provides a way for your buy a license to a font and then embed it in your web site by adding a line of JavaScript to your  HTML markup.
  25. T/F? The League of Moveable Type is a foundry that releases open source fonts.

DUE Tuesday, Mar 09 – 4 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)