I've Got a Type

Page 1

I’VE GOT A TYPE

Brian Landisman



I’VE GOT A TYPE By: Brian Landisman Typography I, Fall 2014 Professor: Thomas J. Dolle


INTRODUCTION Type is all around us. It has always been one of the most common and effective means of communication. But when talking about type, there are many elements to consider. These include typeface, font, line-spacing, point size, and grid layout to name a few. And when all of these elements come together, they even have the ability to add feeling to what is being communicated. I have chronicled my work completed for my typography class, part of the Pratt Institute Graduate Communications Design program. The first part of the semester was a review of the technical requirements of typography. The second part was an exploration of the abstract compositional uses for typography, integrating both hand skills and the computer as different ways to render type. This book was the final assignment, and incorporates the steps taken in the process of composition exploration, while the book itself functions as an introduction to the complexities of editorial design. These projects have given me a greater understanding of typography as a vital communication tool.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Neighborhoods of type. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Grid & page design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Compositions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 a: letterforms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 b: letterforms & words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 c: letterforms, words, text, & graphics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 d: positive/negative & texture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 e: image. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

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Neighborhoods of Type The neighborhoods of New York are diverse and rich with character. This character can be seen in the buildings, the shops and restaurants, the public spaces and the people who make the neighborhood what it is. A major contributor that helps define each neighborhood is the type that is utilized. The text present can accurately capture the overall mood and pluse of the area. I began exploring the various neighborhoods of New York City. From the bright and bold style all over Times Square, to the grungy expressiveness of Williamsburg, it was an eye-opening experience to see the personality of the neighborhoods reflected so strongly in the typography present.

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TIMES SQUARE

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CENTRAL PARK

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SOHO

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WILLIAMSBURG

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Grid & Page Design A grid is an invisible and underlying structure of a page that’s used in placing type and directing the reader to various elements on it. A grid would normally include side margins, top & bottom margins, columns, spaces between columns (gutters), horizon lines indicating placement of typography, and other pieces to create a visual and organizational structure. A grid can be very simple, or have many more complex and specific elements depending on the composition. It is meant to add precision, consistency, and uniformity to the typography and compositions being created. In this section, I began working with different grid structures and incorporating various layout guides in order to create effective spreads for an article discussing the popularity of vegan food.

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GUIDES FOR PAGE DESIGN TYPE STYLE Typeface name Version Weight Manufacturer

TYPE SIZE Legibility Importance

End-user media

SPACING

Letterspacing Wordspacing Line spacing (leading) Paragraph spacing Space between paragraphs Space before/after Indent left/right

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GRID LAYOUT Column width Gutters Margins Borders

INFORMATION LEVELS Headers, subheads, captions Callouts Sidebars Style sheets

DETAILING

Paragraph defining Bullets End of story icons Section dividers Punctuation/proper quotes


THE RISE OF PLANT MILK & TOFU

Vegan Fare is Mainstream in Southern California by: Jeff Gordinier

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t was a warm California evening in the city of West Hollywood, and Kathy Freston was sipping a martini. “Just because you’re a vegan doesn’t mean you don’t want to have fun,” she said, sitting in a booth at a restaurant called Craig’s. “I’m a decadent gal. I want to drink. I want to feel full at the end of a meal. I just don’t want it to have any animals in it, for a variety of reasons.” Tall, slim and golden-tressed enough to be mistaken for a movie star, Ms. Freston is the author of books like “Quantum Wellness” and “The Lean,” and a high-profile advocate for veganism. She strives to consume nothing that can be traced back to sentient creatures: no meat, no eggs, no dairy. But chilled vodka with extra olives? No problem. Nor did she have any qualms about eating from a menu that includes an 18-ounce bone-in rib-eye steak. Craig’s, hatched last year by Craig Susser, an alumnus of Dan Tana’s, the age-defying hangout on Santa Monica Boulevard, is not a vegan restaurant. It represents a new culinary wave that can be felt all over Southern California, that reliable ripple-generator of so many national trends: the omnivore’s restaurant that courts vegans and

vegetarians (particularly the glamorous and powerful ones who are a crucial engine of the dining economy here) by preparing meatless dishes that surpass the droopy steamed-vegetable platters of yore. In fact, from power tables in Beverly Hills to pubs in the San Fernando Valley, the surging popularity of plant-based diets is drastically changing the dining landscape. That shift is under way in various cities around the world, but it’s happening in an explosive way in and around Los Angeles: at the elite gastronomemagnets, at casual gathering spots and everywhere in between.

AT THE COOL TABLE Actors and talent agents hammer out script deals over the Kale Colossus entree at SunCafe in Studio City, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Vegan celebrities have become such a fixture at Café Gratitude that paparazzi occasionally camp out on the sidewalk. Elegant spots like n/naka and Hatfield’s have extensive ever-changing tasting menus for vegetarians. But the after-work crowd can also head out to Golden Road Brewing, a craft brewery that rises from a sun-baked industrial

The bruschetta, a regular customer at Cru, located in SIlverlake, CA.


patch just off the on the menu in September, Ventura and Golden with a patty of Gardein, a State freeways in protein substitute, standing the Atwater Village in for chicken. neighborhood, for Ms. Freston is friendly with vegan Super Bowl just about every famous grub (a quinoa vegan in Hollywood. Lately burger, a hero with there are quite a few, and deep-fried avocado they’ve changed the power slices, meat-free dynamic enough that celchili) on a menu ebrating a box-office triumph that makes room for over bountiful platters of a hillock of pulled charred flesh is no longer pork. “I’m not the necessarily appetizing to the food police, but I like stars who helped bring in the opening the vegan money. “That old meat bradoor for people,” vado is dead,” Freston said. said Tony Yanow, the It wasn’t always thus — not entrepreneur behind even in the city where Alvy the brewery, as well The Supreme Pizza, topped with sunflower “chorizo,” is only one of the top Singer, the protagonist in sellers of SunCafe, located in Studio City, CA. as Mohawk Bend and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” Tony’s Darts Away, winced as he ordered alfalfa which serve dishes like sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast. Lake neighborhood, where meat lovers a “vegan tailgate dog” and Buffalo-style When Ms. Freston began turning vegan marvel over the pumpkinseed chorizo. cauliflower florets. “People will order about a decade ago, she said, “Nobody At Craig’s, a vegan grilled-eggplant capfood like that because it tastes good.” was interested in that. I remember onata shares menu space with a dish, Vegans and carnivores used to glare at Werner Herzog yelled at me at a dinone another in militant opposition, but Jerry Weintraub’s Spaghetti Clam Show. ner party when I first started going Southern California is reveling in a sort Not long ago, Ms. DeGeneres asked Mr. that way. He totally made fun of me. Susser if he would try a vegan spin on of can’t-we-all-get-along cross-polliIn the beginning I didn’t know anyone chicken parmigiana. The dish appeared nation that you see at Cru in the Silver who was eating this way. It was totally

“You picture vegan restaurants with a lot of people with sandals and dreadlocks”

said Ellen DeGeneres, who stopped by with her spouse, Portia di Rossi, to chat with Freston. Here at Craig’s, the mood was more high heels and blond locks. The indian-spiced tofu burger, another dish offered at SunCafe.


THE RISE OF PLANT MILK & TOFU VEGAN FARE IS IN MAINSTREAM IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

There’s no shortage of vegan menu options here at Craig’s on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood

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By JEFF GORDINIER

I

t was a warm California evening in the city of West Hollywood, and Kathy Freston was sipping a martini. “Just because you’re a vegan doesn’t mean you don’t want to have fun,” she said, sitting in a booth at a restaurant called Craig’s. “I’m a decadent gal. I want to drink. I want to feel full at the end of a meal. I just don’t want it to have any animals in it, for a variety of reasons.” Tall, slim and golden-tressed enough to be mistaken for a movie star, Ms. Freston is the author of books like “Quantum Wellness” and “The Lean,” and a highprofile advocate for veganism. She strives to consume nothing that can be traced back to sentient creatures: no meat, no eggs, no dairy. But chilled vodka with extra olives? No problem. Nor did she have any qualms about eating from a menu that includes an 18-ounce bonein rib-eye steak.

Craig’s, hatched last year by Craig Susser, an alumnus of Dan Tana’s, the age-defying hangout on Santa Monica Boulevard, is not a vegan restaurant. It represents a new culinary wave that can be felt all over Southern California, that reliable ripple-generator of so many national trends: the omnivore’s restaurant that courts vegans and vegetarians (particularly the glamorous and powerful ones who are a crucial engine of the dining economy here) by preparing meatless dishes that surpass the droopy steamed-vegetable platters of yore. In fact, from power tables in Beverly Hills to pubs in the San Fernando Valley, the surging popularity of plant-based diets is drastically changing the dining landscape. That shift is under way in various cities around the world, but it’s happening in an explosive way around Los Angeles: at the elite gastronome-magnets and the casual gathering spots.


WHAT THE COOL KIDS ARE EATING Actors and talent agents hammer out script deals over the Kale Colossus entree at SunCafe in Studio City, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Vegan celebrities have become such a fixture at Café Gratitude that paparazzi occasionally camp out on the sidewalk. Elegant spots like n/naka and Hatfield’s have extensive ever-changing menus for vegetarians. But the afterwork crowd can also head out to Golden Road Brewing, a craft brewery that rises from a sun-baked industrial patch just off the Ventura and Golden State freeways in the Atwater Village neighborhood, for vegan Super Bowl grub (a quinoa burger, a hero with deep-fried avocado slices, meat-free chili) on a menu that makes room for a hillock of pulled pork. “I’m not the food police, but I like opening the vegan door for people,” said Tony Yanow, the entrepreneur behind the brewery, as well as Mohawk Bend and Tony’s Darts Away, which serve dishes like a “vegan tailgate dog” and Buffalo-style cauliflower florets. “People will order food like that because it tastes good.”

Vegans and carnivores used to glare at one another in militant opposition, but Southern California is reveling in a sort of can’t-we-allget-along cross-pollination that you see at Cru in the Silver Lake neighborhood, where meat lovers marvel over the pumpkinseed chorizo. At Craig’s, a vegan grilled-eggplant caponata shares menu space with a dish called Jerry Weintraub’s Spaghetti Clam Show, both of which might be viewed as gentle ways to woo the A-listers. Not long ago, Ms. DeGeneres asked Mr. Susser if he would try a vegan spin on chicken parmigiana. The dish appeared on the menu in September, with a patty of Gardein, a protein substitute, standing in for chicken. “I’m willing to do anything,” said Mr. Susser, something of an expert in celebrity relations. “I want them here, and I want them happy.” Ms. Freston, who recently separated from the media executive Tom Freston after 14 years of marriage, is friendly with just about every famous vegan in Hollywood. Lately there are quite a few, and they’ve changed the power dynamic enough that celebrating a box-office triumph over bountiful platters of charred flesh is

SunCafe’s signature dish, the Supreme “Chorizo” Pizza, located in Studio City, CA.

“You picture vegan restaurants with a lot of people with sandals and dreadlocks, drinking carrot juice,” said Ellen DeGeneres, who stopped by to chat with Freston. Here at Craig’s, the mood was more

“high heels and blond locks.”

“The line is always out the door for the Bruschetta, but well worth it,” said a customer emphasizing a very popular dish at Silverlakes’ Cru.

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Compositions Composition is the organization, or grouping of different parts, of a work of art or design to achieve a unified whole. Although typographic compositions utilize the same basic concepts that are part of all visual arts, there are unique ways that typography relates to each of these concepts. By forming strong and specific relationships between the elements, as well as incorporating visual concepts in abstract ways, a new and more open relationship with typography is achieved. Shown on the following pages, my exploration of typographic composition started with simple elements--three letterforms--and became a process of identifying abstract concepts as they became visualized. Additional elements were added each week, and new relationships evolved as we focused on certain aspects of the compositions, such as positive/negative, texture, and image use.

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COMPOSITION CONCEPTS SIZESCALERELATIONSHIPFORM HEIRARCHYCOLORSTRUCTURE DRAMARYTHMBALANCEDETAIL TENSIONHARMONYDIRECTION CONTEXTCONTRASTMEANING DEPTHTEXTUREMOVEMENT PURPOSEFULACCIDENTALTONE

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a.

Composition: letterforms For the first part of my composition work, I began experiementing with my letterforms chosen from the alphabet. It was initally challenging to look at these letters as anything other than letters. But as my work progressed, I realized that each piece of type is an individual entity on the page, and there are endless ways that these entities can interact with one another. After employing design concepts (scale, tension, balance, etc.), I found I could manipulate the type into new and interesting ways.

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Composition: letterforms & words Keeping the three letters from the previous assignment, I then included word elements. The words, although specific to a title, are not meant to be illustrated or have any sort of meaning in the composition, other than as a typographic element. Using only the three letters with these words, I created the following compositions, while still considering the multiple design concepts.

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Composition: letterforms, words, text, & graphics I then added some text into the composition, in addition to the letterforms and words used previously. I quickly noticed that the placement of the text was a key factor here; because the readability of the text is not necessary, I found I could use it as a sort of texture when shrunken down, or blow it off the page, creating a much different feeling to the structure of the composition. I applied some optional graphic elements here as well. At first I avoided using these in my work because I felt that they would not provide anything to the composition other than a distraction. My attitude toward these shapes, however, changed once I saw how they could be used as an accent; they serve my work as a subtle guide for a more pleasing flow throughout the page.

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If musicals were rated like baseball’s slugging percentage, the numbers for the York Theatre’s revival of this 1989 revue would be positively Ruthian. Of the evening’s twenty-four songs, by the lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr., and the composer David Shire, at least half are home runs, and most of the others are line drives off the wall. (Unlike with Ruth, there are no strikeouts.) As directed by Maltby and sung by an outstanding quartet of musical theatre actors. There’s a pleasing flow to the songs, which illustrate middle-age concerns both mundane and existential, but no story to speak of. Each tune is a little play in itself, a gem of cabaret-style composition, equal parts clever and tender.

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If musicals were rated like baseball’s slugging percentage, the numbers for the York Theatre’s revival of this 1989 revue would be positively Ruthian. Of the evening’s twenty-four songs, by the lyricist Richard

Maltby, Jr., and the composer David Shire, at least half are home runs, and most of the

others are line drives off the wall. (Unlike with Ruth, there are no strikeouts.) As directed by Maltby and sung by an outstanding quartet of musical theatre actors. There’s a pleasing flow to the songs, which illustrate middle-age concerns both

mundane and existential, but no story to speak of. Each tune is a little play in itself, a gem of cabaret-style composition, equal parts clever and tender.

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Composition: positive/negative & texture Positive/negative is the relationship between figure and ground. Are there black elements on a white ground, or white elements on a black ground? Does the ground interchange from black to white? It is important to consider not only the positive space, but the negative as well when creating imagery. Texture is the ability to render type in ways other than just hard edge black and white. Combining hand effects (drawing, painting), machine-made effects (photocopying, scanning), computer effects (PhotoShop, Illustrator), and/or accidental effects (spills, tears, rips) allows one to define type in unusual and unique ways, challenging you to see it from a different perspective. Here, I made positive/negative and texture as dominant components. This project provided me the opportunity to start thinking outside the box and explore non-traditional representations of typographic form. The same three levels of typography are still present in the compositions, but with the addition of these new elements, I got to experiment with seeing type in many different forms.

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Composition: image The final stage of my composition work was adding an image of an object into the mix of my existing typography levels. I chose a pair of household scissors as my image because it has a very unified, yet interesting, shape to it. The trick here was to use the object in a way that creates a harmony with the other elements I’ve already been using up until this point. Do the scissors blend into a part of the image? Or are they manipulated in a way that makes them a clearly seperated element? As I began to use the scissors into my compositions, I assimilated positive/negative and texture at times, which proved to add a level of stimulation when looking at them. The resulting compositions are still abstract, but hint at the richness that can be brought to even the simplest realistic project. The complex relationships between typographic elements and the concepts of design are exhibited in these engaging works that become expressive peices of art, communicating on multiple levels.

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If musicals were rated like baseball’s slugging percentage, the numbers for the York Theatre’s revival of this 1989 revue would be positively Ruthian. Of the evening’s twenty-four songs, by the lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr., and the composer David Shire, at least half are home runs, and most of the others are line drives off the wall. (Unlike with Ruth, there are no strikeouts.) As directed by Maltby and sung by an outstanding quartet of musical theatre actors. There’s a pleasing flow to the songs, which illustrate middle-age concerns both mundane and existential, but no story to speak of. Each tune is a little play in itself, a gem of cabaret-style composition, equal parts clever and tender.

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t wo nd e ac in its e a r u , t y rev runs thea pla 9 e 8 tl e al 19 hom usic a lit s i is m e th of lf ar et of tune l h iva ha rt ev east qua . Eac r s l f t e’ ing o atr re, a and eak e Th hi tst sp rk vid S ou y to o n e Y Da by a stor h t r o for pose ung ut n s s r m d e ,b mb e co y an ntial u e n nd th altb xiste h t e, r., a by M nd e g J a a t by, ected ane t l Ma s dir und m A s.) both rns

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CONCLUSION This work has opened my eyes to the world of typography. Now, I see type as not only simple letters and words, but also visual shapes that aid in communication. I have learned to take numerous design concepts and apply them to various forms of typography; from working with type in an organzied and coherent manner in editorial page design, to a more abstract means of ultilization. I am happy to walk away from this class with a newly aquired a set of typographic skills, as well as different way to look at type. Morever, I feel more secure to take these very skills and integrate them into all of my future work. After all, this is a never-ending journey, and it’s just the beginning.

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