typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed.
04 路 typography
the project
CODEX 2014 Codex comes form the latin word caudex which means book. At Creative Company this is also the name of their employee handbook that is given to all employees every year. Codex holds the latest practical information, and explains the company visions and spirit.
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target group - my dear colleagues The target group is all of Creative Companys employees. There are almost 200 people working in the company all the way from warehouse workers to people sitting in the office or driving salesmen. In other words this is a very diverse target group, although they all have one thing in common, they work in Creative Company. CODEX is considered a vital and important part of the HR work in the organization. One of the important goals with the book is to expand the understanding about the company spirit and visions, namely one
vision referred to as "The Dream Factory". But The Codex also holds a lot of practical information, like contact information, organizational charts and holidays. At the same time codex is a look back at the past year, with a lot of stories from employees and pictures from social events. This is very important and might be one of the biggest motivators for an employee to actually read in the book.
will you be my typeface? Myriad Pro Light + Italic Myriad Pro Regular Myriad Pro Semibold + Italic Myriad Pro Bold Felt Tip Roman Regular
06 路 typography
Creativ Company's main font is Myriad Pro, which I was required to use. This might sound like a limitation, but I actually think Myriad Pro fits perfect in this book. It's a Sans Serif font and I think it gives the book a very modern and serious touch. In great contrast I used Felt Tip (an also very used font by CC) to play around and make the reading more dynamic and playful.
paper cover size spiral method
280 g / 120 g coated matt plexiglass A5 landscape black 15 mm CMYK / digital printing
how do I look in this spiral?
As something new compared to the previous versions I decided to make the codex in landscape format instead of a normal boring book format. I loved the new possibilities this gave me and went with an A5 size to keep the price down. This new format gave me the possibilities to make a 3 column design and decided to make the text left justify for a more clean an ethical look. I knew that this book would probably be used a lot by employees in
all sorts of situations, so I thought a spiral back was a good and cheap solution that would make it easy to handle the book laying on a table. My only problem with the spiral back was the look. It seemed clumsy and not very inspiring so I designed an inner margin with some of our latest product artwork. The idea was to sort of hide the spiral by making it almost a part of the design. At last a matt plexiglass was added to make the book more durable and exclusive.
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what about the technical stuff? oh boy. I am not going to dig very deep into how you actually use this technique, but I am going to explain what it is, and why it is important. InDesign is packed with advanced features, but I’ll stick with t he ones that I think are the most important and characteristic for this project. First, we have the Justification tab in our paragraph style. This is very important when you have large blocks of text, and especially when the text is set to Left Justify as it is in this case. Left Justify can be aesthetic
and clean in a beautiful way, but it can also give the graphic designer some real challenges like floods in the text and unwanted hyphenation. Justification is here to help you with that, combined with the hyphenation tab and H&J violation. The unwanted hyphenation can be controlled in the hyphenation tab by setting up rules that prevent the most common unwanted things like widows and orphans. Floods and textflow are handled by Justification.
Justification controls how text is balanced in columns and what rules they follow. By changing the percentages in Minimum, Desired and Maximum you change how tolerant InDesign is when trying to make everything fit nicely in the columns. If you turn on H&J violation you will be able to see where InDesign is forced to break the rules and how much. This will appear as a yellow tint on the text.
You might need to make multiple paragraph styles with different Justification settings that force the text to wrap differently. And that leads us to paragraph styles, because they are just as important. Paragraph styles is used to easily ensure the same typography is applied all over the document, and even in multiple documents combined with the book function. It is also possible to nest styles and combine it with charac-
08 · typography
ter styles and even object styles. In advanced cases this can style very complex things with a single click. Next we have the baseline grid to ensure our text is always aligned, and our margins to keep the correct spacing around the edges. At last we have master pages to apply pagination, sections, etc. to all pages.
gutter 5 mm
inside 22 mm. outside 21 mm. top / bottom 20 mm.
typograhy my friend, tell me about yourself Typography is beautiful in a way that science can’t capture. So what is great typography? This question has many answers; and opinions, and it’s sometimes really hard to tell why something looks great, and something doesn’t. However there are some basic rules that you might rely on. I am very aware of the fact that the Graphic Designer I am today, is heavily influenced by the good old typographer that where back then. Typography used to be a hand craft and a good one. This still shines
BASELINE GRID 11 pt. starting at top margin + 2,4 mm.
thought in modern days of computers. There is just a slight problem because the computer dos a huge amount of work for us these days, so we might not even know all about the good old hand craft that is behind everything we take for granted today. 1. However, here is some of the basic terms that you might not think too deep about in your everyday life as a graphic designer. first line left indent
true leading 2 pt. leading 11 pt.
to be honest this illustration is just to prove that I know this stuff exists, and also a great way to find it again, because I don’t really use this stuff very much in my daily work, but it’s go od to know t h a t it’s there. 1. 2. kerning
tracking
1. 2. 3.
ascender
ear
ascender line midline 3.
x-height
baseline
em-space (1 geviert) en-space (1/2 geviert) thin-space (1/4 geviert)
descender line descender
counter
serifs
stem
the end result; is everyone happy? The project was extremely successful and made precedence about the company’s codex books which still today (2016) follow the same style, and it might continue to do that in many years to come.
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