Week 6 – UXD Principles and Concepts

Week 6 has been focused on typography. I’ve never been as consciously uncertain about every text formatting decision I’ve made as I was this week. Starting to learn about how text should be used, while you’re still not an expert is fairly disconcerting. However, after this week’s assignment, I feel a bit more competent in choosing appropriate font pairings.

This week’s assignment took me the longest of any assignment to date. Even after the recommended and other materials, I feel like there is so much more to learn. As far as the terminology that accompanies fonts, I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground. But each glyph of a typeface seems like it should be governed by some laws of geometry and mathematics, especially rules for how to pair fonts. There were enough readings and videos this week that I didn’t dare go down that rabbit hole for fear of not finishing the other assignments.

This week felt light in discussions with peers, but I’m hopeful that we’ll get to see each other’s work through a summary video. For my assignment, I stuck close to the example in the presentation we covered but put my own spin on it. I would have liked to do something different, but really had no idea where to start. Seeing others work would be helpful, but I’d love to read through their thought process as well.

I did find all of the readings this week incredibly interesting as usual. I never realized typography was so refined, detailed, and important to our visual sensory system. Between last week’s exploration of design principles in general, and this week’s focus on type, I feel like I can look at a design and do a somewhat satisfactory job assessing it. That’s pretty significant progress in a short amount of time.

Notes aren’t quite ready this week, but I will update the post when they are.