What is a Font Flag? What is a Font Specimen Sheet?

By Jacob Cass

Do you know what a font flag or font / type specimen sheet is? Here are the answers as well as an example made by myself for typography class at university.

What is a Font Flag?

A font flag is a poster – a visual ‘sell’ – presentation of the style, feel, mood and aesthetic sense of a particular font. It deals with the emotive, pictorial, poetic or pragmatic sense of the font. It may recall the sense of history, the classification group, notable or famous uses. It is about appeal – looking good.

What is a font specimen sheet?

A font specimen sheet is about measurement specifics, display of the font – all characters and expressions, at differing point sizes, paragraph setting, leaded or tracked. Upper Case and Lower Case, title box, formal identification of the font - its name, classification, designer/typographer, the foundry – and a demonstrated showing of ‘font family’ characteristics – weights/shade in print.

My take on making a font flag and specimen sheet

For typography class at University we could choose any typeface we wished and then we had to make up a font flag and a font specimen sheet, here is the result, as well as a title page.

I chose Bodoni because it is so unique and because I wanted the challenge of working in an Didone (Modern) font, something I have never done before.

I made the background in Photoshop from about 8 different layers, then merged them and imported into Illustrator. The rest was done in Illustrator. You may notice that the Fibonnaci Sequence or golden mean has been the inspiration for these designs.

The characteristics of a Didone (Modern) type face.

• Thick vertical strokes.
• Thin horizontal strokes.
• Fine hairlines.
• Straight serifs.
• Extreme contrast between the thick and thin stokes.
• Curved letters balanced and slightly compressed.
• The angle of stress is vertical.
• Prints best on a smooth matt finish, white paper with black ink.

A thing worth noting on most digital Bodini fonts is that they suffer from a particular kind of legibility degradation known as “dazzle” caused by the alternating thick and thin strokes, particularly from the thin strokes being very thin at small point sizes. For more info on this see Bodoni on Wikipedia.

Bodoni Font Flag

Bodoni Font Specimen Sheet

Typography Title Page (For a little typopgraphic pdf book we are creating.)

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