Tag Archives: Fonts

Assignment 4: Show Me (Part One – development)

  By | |
Leave a comment
Mindmap show research for a typographic design assignment

Brief:

Design the font for use on the cover of a magazine called type and write a short article for the magazine using a range of typefaces, with typographic illustrations, drawing on all that you have learned in this section. The article should include sections on:

  • What makes a typeface interesting
  • How a typeface is constructed
  • Question marks
Mindmap show research for a typographic design assignment

Show Me mindmap

I began with my usual process of creating a mind map. A brainstorm of all the things that came to mind as I was thinking about the assignment. This raised a number of points:

  • The physicality of the production of type and how much of the history remains in the terminology we use
  • Its variety and the fact that typefaces are constantly evolving and morphing
  • A formalised anatomy and underlying rules for how best to work with type
  • How typography has been integrated into different artistic movements
  • Its role in conveying messages and therefore having a notion of ‘audience’

Three ideas emerged in terms of where I might take the design:

  • A minimalist approach
  • A Pop art/collage style
  • An approach based on the materiality of type and its origins

I had also been sketching, just playing with different approaches and layouts. I think it’s fair to say I’m not the most accomplished at hand drawn type but it helped me evolve the designs I would focus on.

I used a couple of online tools to try and help develop a typeface. One was based on my handwriting, which I deliberately exaggerated:

Example of a handrwitten typeface

Handwritten typeface

This was fun to develop but I don’t think it was ever going to be a serious option for my designs. I tried FontArk but found it difficult to use and it kept crashing.

I also went back to some of my earlier research, and examples in my visual diaries around Pop Art and minimalism. I continued collecting for my Pinterest boards and following feedback from my tutor for Assignment 3 I have started using my ‘Swipe File’ board as a more eclectic collection place, just pinning things that catch my eye rather than being organised into a particular theme.

I found a number of online resources like ‘Thinking with Type,’ that were really useful in terms of understanding type construction and design ideas. Alongside this I watched YouTube tutorials and did a lot of reading around the subject. I found ‘The Typographic Workbook’ particularly helpful.

I was starting to formulate my design ideas but realised I needed the text for the articles so I knew what I was working with in terms of content. I may not have followed the brief precisely but I decided to go with the aspects of typography that interested me. The first was around how typographic design needs to focus on both the micro and macro levels. This is important in relation to how we read and the fact that we don’t read letter by letter but scan and pause allowing time to process the visual information when we pause.

In terms of construction I suspect that was supposed to be about ascenders, decsenders, ligatures etc., but I was fascinated by the more fundamental construction. Western capital letters are based on five archetypal structures that apparently have remained unchanged for nearly 2000 yrs. This was intriguing and I could see how it might be incorporated into a design.

Alphabet laid out to show the five underlying structures

The five archetypal structures

I found a really useful thread on Quora about the origins of the question mark and this suggested some of the visuals I might include.

The research stage helped highlight a number of choices that I would need to make  as I approached my designs:

  • Tone
  • Style – serif or sanserif
  • Readability and legibility
  • Relationships and layout

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Exercise: Hierarchy

  By | |
Leave a comment

Exercise:Hierarchy (Graphic Design 1, pg. 99)

Design three different pages:

  • An interview with a TV actor in a listings magazine entitled: Will Sheila tell the naked truth?
  • A review of a new piece of hardware or software in a specialist computer magazine
  • A book review in a newspaper’s weekend edition

Research these types of publication and identify three different combinations of typefaces appropriate for each magazine. Set these combinations so that your header is above 12pt in size, your body text is 12pt or below and subheadings sit in between in your hierarchy.

Naked Truth

Looking at the listing magazines there is a reasonable variation in format. Most of them seem to include blocks of colour and images. Some are based on a very standard grid with up to three columns. I decided to go for two columns with san-serif body type, (Lato, 12pt). I added a large header (Futura PT 36pt) in bold within a colour block to grab attention. The sub headers are Lato Bold in 18pt and I added a callout box in 24pt. I find the listings magazines quite busy in format so I wanted typefaces that would be reasonably clear amongst the other elements. I also adjusted the leading and tracking to try and even out the ragged end a little. Justified text using the three columns seemed to have too many rivers making it harder to read. Overall, I think it was reasonably successful in replicating the format of listings magazines, but I’m not sure it is a very creative interpretation.

Technology

Technology magazines vary in their typeface use from very contemporary to quite traditional, but many seem to favour serif with justified paragraphs so I decided to use Museo Slab with Minion Pro. The main heading is 60pt (Museo Slab), the call out boxes are 18pt with body text at 12pt. I wanted to wrap the text around the mobile phone image rather than keep it in columns and this took me a while to sort out. After some persistence I finally made it work and decided to tilt the image so it carried across all three columns.

I ran the header into one word because it is still readable as a sentence but I liked the way it lined up on the page. It makes a clear statement about the content of the article. I didn’t use subheadings because they would break the flow but added highlight boxes with larger point size for emphasis instead. I was quite pleased with this layout because I think it fits in its genre and is clear and readable. It also forced me to keep improving my InDesign skills.

Book Review

Having looked at the format of some different newspaper book reviews it seemed to me they all had a fairly clean grid layout. Most included an image but these were relatively small. They were either all san-serif or a mix of serif and san-serif. I decided to set myself a challenge and use three typefaces for this layout – heading in Corbel (60pt), subheading in Roboto Bold (20pt) and body in Merriweather regular (12pt).

After trying both formats I decided to go without hyphenation even though it makes the right edge more ragged. The format is very plain but I think it does what is expected of a book review. My sense is that the focus has to be on the review and that the design should not get in the way.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Of all the exercises and projects in this unit this is the one I probably found the most difficult, and not necessarily because of the design requirements. It was more about the frustration of feeling I didn’t have the level of skills I needed. I am sure there are improvements I could have made but it seems there are so many variables to change in terms of point size, paragraph layout, weight, leading, kerning and so on. I found the more I fiddled the worse it got. So in some ways it feels like each design is a compromise where I have achieved the best I can given my current level of expertise. I hope that each is at least recognisable as an appropriate format for its genre.

Exercise: If the face fits 1

  By | |
Leave a comment

Exercise: If the face fits Graphic Design 1 pg: 94

This exercise comes in two parts, the first being to create a sample book of typefaces. Organising the typefaces into:

  • Serif for continuous text, and headings
  • San-serif for continuous text and headings
  • Script fonts
  • Decorative fonts
  • Fixed width, techno and pixel fonts

Identify which typefaces have bold, italic, black or light fonts.

Oblong sample book page

I took two approaches to this first part of the exercise. The first being to start to create a sample book and the second being to use software to organise the typefaces.

I decided to use the sample book as an opportunity to take the plunge and use InDesign. I have used other packages before like Publisher but a couple of earlier attempts to get to grips with InDesign were not entirely successful. I decided on a landscape format with a very simple design so the typeface could be easily identified and I could feature the different formats.

I learnt a number of things in setting up the sample book:

  • How to set up an apply master pages
  • How to set the document language
  • Turning off hyphenation
  • Fill and stroke
  • Adjusting typeface and characters
  • Locating and adding glyphs
  • Using past in place

I’m not convinced I produced the samples as efficiently as I could have but at least I’ve got started.

As an alternative I also signed up to MyFontBook, which allowed me to quickly identify and tag the typefaces on my computer. This is a great way to do the work of the sample book quickly but I’m glad I started with InDesign before I used this.

I can see how useful the sample books might have been in the past and can be helpful as a quick reference guide now; this feels like the start of an on-going process. I have only done two of each form of typeface in my sample book so far but have found the process very good for familiarising myself with InDesign and the typefaces on my computer. It was useful to see the different formats that typefaces come in (reglar, light, bold, italic etc.) and the different tone they can each evoke from fun and informal to serious and formal.

 

Save

Save

Save

Save

Research Point: Magazine typefaces

  By | |
Leave a comment
Paragraph of text from Elle magazine with analysis marks
Paragraph of text from Elle magazine with analysis marks

Typeface analysis

(Research point: Graphic Design 1, page 87)

Choose a magazine and look at the main typefaces they use for the body text and headlines.

I had bought a number of magazines to use for the various exercises and research points and decided to use ‘Elle’ magazine for this activity. This is not a magazine I’m particularly familiar with and it seems to have a very distinctive style so I thought it would be a good starting point. I used various online tools (Identifont, WhatTheFont and Font Matcherator) with mixed success. The various searches gave five matches for the main heading:

  • Nimbus Roman Modern Compress D
  • Euphonia Latin
  • Redeye serif bold
  • Ambroise Std Francois Demi – this was the closest match as far as I could see

On further research a couple of blogs suggest it is Didot, which having seen it, I think is correct. I am obviously getting a bit typeface nerdy because this blog piece on Didot’s history was fascinating!

The brief was just the kind of challenge that Hoefler & Co. loves: we were asked to create a typeface that works like no other, a Modern which — unlike the commercial cuts of Bodoni — would have hairline serifs, and maintain them over a range of sizes. From the Didot collection we chose the grosse sans pareille no. 206 of Molé le jeune as a historical model, and extended the scant material in Didot’s 1819 Spécimen des Caracteres with quite a bit of invention: italics designed to work at large sizes, a range of different weights, and the many characters that Didot’s workshop never made. In the service of the design’s thin hairlines, we drew each of the family’s six styles in seven different “optical sizes,” each designed to be used at a different range of sizes, for a total of forty-two fonts.

The ‘July’ subhead got 9 matches:

  • Vedo Book
  • Irma Light, Regular & Medium
  • Cyntho Pro Regular
  • Relay Wide
  • Family Bird
  • Relay Wide Light

It looks to me like Relay Wide Light is the closest match. At the beginning of the activity I noticed I was broadly scanning the words and the typefaces but I was then looking in more detail (see the image above). The sorts of things I started picking out were:

  • Bowl shapes
  • Whether there were serifs
  • The position of serifs – were they either side of the line or just above/below, right or left
  • Where serifs sharp or rounded
  • Angles – this was noticeable particularly on the ‘S’ character, did the top and bottom line up or where they slightly offset

This was another good activity for really looking at typeface construction and understanding the characteristics that enabled me to decide which typeface is the closest match. It was also interesting to see that although a magazine like ‘Elle’ has its own house style much of its content includes advertising with additional typefaces. I was struck in looking through the magazine at just how many typefaces are included; this must make presenting a consistent style challenging.

Once I had finished my typeface searches I came across this blog piece, mystery solved!

Domaine and Galaxie Copernicus in use for Elle UK by Suzanne Sykes & Mark Leeds in the UK.

Suzanne & Mark have really mixed it up with three totally different typeface families, including a forthcoming sanserif from Mário Feliciano. On paper and in theory, these typefaces shouldn’t “mix”, but in Elle they totally work. It’s a testament to the typographic skills of the designers that they’ve created a sympathetic environment for the fonts to thrive! The magazine is thoroughly contemporary, as it needs to be, and the pacing various throughout. Some spreads verge on controlled mania, others are calm and tastefully restrained.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save