Typography 1: Research

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Welcome Hopefully this gives you some valuable insight into what I’ve been up to this semester in Typography 1. The following pages are a compilation of my typographic research that has helped inform some of the decisions I’ve made throughout the semester leading up to my final project. Enjoy.

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Kerning Tracking Kerning: the space between individual pairs of characters Tracking: the overall spacing between characters Typefaces like Adobe’s fonts average about 100-150 kerning pairs; for Bitstream the figure lies between 200 and 500 pairs. Kerning is not as important to body text but is essential to a well-set title, header, or logo. For example, the title on this page is tracked out 25 where the title page is tracked out to 100.

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letterform

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picture symbol letter sa word dec

History

The history of western typography is extremely rich. With the invention of written language, perfection of the printing press, rise of advertising, and dawn of the digital era type has constantly been changing and adapting.

Type is often classified as Old Style, Transitional, and Modern. Within these are even more subcategories such as serif or sans serif. All of these denote the stylistic characteristics of a typeface or family.

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serif ans serif script corative 7

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BODONI

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modern 18th century typeface

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More on Bodoni Bodoni is a Modern typeface designed in the 18th century

by Giamattista Bodoni who ran a printing office under the Duke of Parma. Bodoni features a high contrast, thin serifs, and a vertical axis.

The typeface is widely used nowadays in the fashion industry. It is featured in the logos of Vogue, Armani Exchange, and Calvin Klein.

Light Regular Medium Bold Xtra Bold

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Hierarchy

SCALE

There is a subtle shift in the size of the typeface which works nicely between the title and body text.

CONTRAST

The varied weights of the different type used and the different styles of type all contrast strongly.

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By using the same typeface and size but shifting from allcaps to lowercase an oder of importance is established.

CASE

The type here is good in individual cases but all together there is too much clutter to discern a hierarchy.

POOR

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“Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.”

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Good Typography MARIHUANA What really drew me in here was the contrast between the curvy and, dare I say fun, type used for Marihuana and the strict and rigid type used for the rest of the poster. While it draws attention to the arguement it also shows the character of the words very well.

DIRTY How do you make something unclean look sophisticated?

Elegant? The juxtaposition between such a delicate and romantic typeface with such word that suggests filth, grime, or the unclean is incredible. The contrast between visual and the assumed is strong here.

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Type in Publication ABOVE Two different editions of AIGA’s Eye on Design printed publication. Both of these caught my eye with unique treatment of text that I think worked strongly. In the image to the left I was most drawn to the way the text begins to curve down the center of the spread. I found this to be a fun way to work with the text I think the use of white space allows this to work without feeling too crowded.

In the second image to the right, I found the hand annotations in red with a very plain serif to work strongly in evoking a very familiar scene for all designers: red lines. I am still unsure how I feel about the black box with the white text on this spread—it might be veering towards too heavy in my opinion.

BELOW The spread shown below is from an architecture book called Landscape of Faith and documetnts architectural interventions along a pilgrimage route in Mexico. The book is full of technical drawings, photographs, and text about the different projects. This page stood out as the folios and hierarchy of text worked strongly to balance with the full-bleed image on the opposite page which commands a lot of attention and could risk taking over any weak text near it.

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This spread is also from AIGA’s Eye on Design magazine. ABOVE However, I found this one more repelling than compelling.

In my opinion, there is too much going on in the spread that makes the text disappear. Upon a zoomed in inspection I felt as if the text was nearly impossible to read and I kept finding myself distracted by other material on the page. If the point is to read the magazine, this spread fails as it causes me great grief when trying to read any of the content.

The book below is Aldo van Eyck: Humanist Rebel and is a BELOW study of a prominent architect. A majority of the book is well-laid out and simple but the margins are poorly handled.

The top feels too small and gives a sense that they were trying to create a shorter book and fill space. The white space could be using would give the text a bit more room that I find important to pacing the reader. One nice thing about the book is the marginalia. For images referenced there is a small arrow to the line the image or drawing is referenced with a number and the images throughout the book are numbered to guide the reader where the image based content falls in line with the text.

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a study of

gentlemans quarterly RESEARCH LOG TYPOGROPHY

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Expressive Type All of these examples of expressive type are from various GQ magazines I have collected over the years. I’ve found they are extremely successful at pushing the idea of type as image and finding fun and creative ways to incorporate them into articles Some of my favorite examples are the spray paint drip and the one that has a map overlay on the bold white text. I think these two variants really incorporate the text well and lead into the body while still having a degree of artistry and creativity.

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