Western Calligraphy: The Northern Gothic Alphabet

Video Transcript

"So then, here is our little review of the Northern Gothic. Notice that it is a little bit more angular. Here is a problem that you may have. When you come down here to put the serif, or it's sometimes called a pedibus, which means "foot" on, you have to make sure that you get down far enough. Let me show you the kind of mistake that you could make. You could make that top serif too large, and then when you come down, you could stop too soon to make the foot, and you see, you wind up with an odd shape that suddenly you're out of harmony. So, I'll do a couple more of these and then I want to show you another possibility for a kind of variation. This is a possibility, especially if you come to the end of a word. So, margins and justified margins, starting at the right place and ending at the right place, are important to composition. You're making a decision, maybe you want it and maybe you don't. A trick to use to end up your line of writing in the right place is to do a little accordion thing with some of the letters, and it's probably not a good idea to have that happen on too many of the end letters because then it looks like you didn't know what you were doing. There are different letters that can be a little bit more accordion like, and I would say that the "N" is one of those letters. Let's say I pulled the "N" out and I went like this, and then I decided that there was too much space, this was too much of a gaping space. Yeah, okay, it gave me my justified margin on the right, but what you can do is you can fill it. There are little decorations like that that you can use that are like little fillers, and it's perfectly legitimate. What you have to do is you have to get your mind away from type and think in terms of more like what works, form following function. I want to show you one other thing and that is how you can take..."