aka: How do you properly handle paragraphs of text?
Assigned Reading/Watching:
- Designing Type pg 70-79
- Typographic Design & Communication: Chapter 5
- Thinking with Type: pg 150-201
- Vanseo Design Blog Post about the Anatomy of a Grid
- This video on Grids
Lecture Tasks:
At the end of the preceding class, students randomly select a lecture task pertaining to the topics to be covered in this class. I’ve attached the ones I use below.
Activity:
This is the closest I get to a standard lecture throughout this course. However, the talking is interspersed with a heavy dose of Jigsaw-ing and practical demos.
Start with a simple test to demonstrate the power of structure in text layouts. Something like showing a wall of unformatted text and seeing how long it takes to find a particular piece of data. Then show the same piece of content, this time formatted, and seeing how quickly the data can be found.
Then as I work through the various topics in the lecture, I include breaks to test how much of the material the students are picking up. E.g. After talking a few minutes on the types of grids and their uses, optimal proportions for line-length and leading I show a few bad layouts and ask the students to point out what’s wrong. Like this one:
Likewise, after talking about types of alignments I show them a few badly designed menus asking how they’d fix them.
The last section deals with the golden ratio and demo-ing how to create a grid from scratch in InDesign & Illustrator. After which I spring a quick no-stakes pop quiz to see if they were listening. I use Kahoot to administer the quiz both so the students can get real-time feedback on the assessment, plus it’s fun. Here’s a link to the Paragraphs Quiz in Kahoot I’ve used for this lecture.
After this I typically transition to Exercise 6: Grids & Paragraphs.
Teaching Type to Hostages 