Philippova Marina G.
DISPLAY FONTS CONSIDERED IN TERMS OF FONT CLASSIFICATION
Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №4 (40) December, 2012
The development and sophistication of visual messages in the modern global society requires that the designer be skilled in graphic language manipulations. The use of font classifications may be of help for the designer in his professional work, particularly when working with display fonts.
In the recent decade, classification of cyrillics has been considered by many researchers, and different authors disagree concerning how to interpret the term «display font», giving it various formal and functional characteristics. The interrelation of these two aspects in a type is especially important, therefore the construction of a font classification is performed taking into account these parameters.
Proceeding from functional characteristics, all fonts can be divided into those intended for setting basic texts of books, newspapers, magazines (textual) and those for drawing attention to individual phrases (displaying). Attracting attention may find two extreme expressions: highlighting information in homogeneous text (headings, highlighting of separate letters, words and phrases) and attempting to be heard in a graphically oversaturated environment (advertising). In both variants, a font is used for display purposes. Possibly, it is for this reason that the term «display font» is applied by different authors to various type families. The design of headings, titles, covers and subheadings urges types to be more reserved in order to be in harmony with the body text of the publication. This parameter has a family of title display fonts corresponding to it. Fonts featuring expressive formal characteristics and used in advertising, jobbing work and logos should be referred to the family of artistic/figurative display fonts. The latter type of fonts may be divided into subspecies: hand-written; historical and national; decorative fonts based on special processing of the basic ones; thematic; stylistic; and analphabetic symbolical.
Because of their variety and diversity, display fonts are a difficult object for classification. But the need for such typology is very great, as it would allow us to approach more intelligently to interaction with font material and thereby improve the communicative qualities of the visual message.
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