Experimenting with Analysis Diagrams

'A' in Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Snell, Impact and Eccentric (L to R)

After analyzing the area that defined the peak of the letter 'A', I was left with a bunch of analysis diagrams that were albeit interesting to look at, but didn't translate to anything but, well, just interesting digrams!

It was only when I compared the different diagrams by laying them on top of one another that they started giving me information that I could interpret. With this thought in mind, I decided to conduct a simple experiment.

I took the letter 'A' in 6 different typefaces, Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Snell, Impact and Eccentric. I drew them at 100 pt font size, at which they were more or less of comparable height.

Then I took the peak as I had defined in my previous post. I repeated some of the analysis and then layered the resultant diagrams on top of each other. The result was : one image formed by 6 layers of information. The information was interesting, but the resultant images were much more exciting for me!

Fig.1

 

Basically I took the height of a letters and made a square out of it (height of letter x height of letter = resultant square). I then layered the squares on top of each other in different ways creating different images.

Again I did the same kind of diagramming, but this time with squares that were created, were done using the widths of the letters instead of the heights. The resultant images, obviously similar in nature, were completely different in appearance.

Fig.2

By comparing Fig.1 and Fig.2 we could interpret a lot of information what would not be as apparent by just looking at the letters. For example, we can safely conclude that for letters ('A' in this case) of the same height, the widths a lot less varied than the heights. The 'A' for Impact and Times New Roman, has a significant difference in height, but the widths are almost the same. Such interpretations and conclusions kept me quite busy for a while!