For part of the typography class I’m currently taking, we’ve got to put up a weekly post about the typography and typefaces we encounter in our everyday lives. It might be a sign we encounter on the street, a logo on a restaurant napkin or a image we see on the web. The idea is to become more aware of the type that’s all around us and familiarize ourselves with the qualities of good typography.

Oh and cut me some slack if all my terminology isn’t quite accurate. I know the basics, but have a long way to go.

Something that caught my eye this week was a cover to an issue of Midwest Living my mom had laying around her house. I have always been a sans serif guy and decided that as part of this class I’d push myself out of my comfort zone and experiment with more serif and script typefaces. Think that’s why I noticed this cover, as it actually features all three: a logo with serifs, a script headline, and sans-serif sub-headline.

 

The Midwest Living logo is set in Bodoni Poster Compressed. The specific version of Bodoni they’re using seems to have a little more radius in the serifs than the one I have. They’ve also tightened the tracking and flipped the ear of the “g” up to match the ball of the “i”‘s.

 

The sans serif typeface in the sub-headline is Frutiger 67 Bold Condensed. I was able to identify it as Frutiger based of the tail of the uppercase “Q” and the shape of the lowercase “s” and “,”.

I wasn’t able to identify the script typeface used to set “Sweet summer”.

 

One of the other things that struck me about the way this type was set is the interesting gestalt alignment. “Sweet summer” is set the same length as “Midwest”. The “w” of sweet and the “B” of best are both vertically aligned with the last stem of the “M” in midwest. I could go on, but you can see the alignments for yourself.

 

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