Bria Crain: Week 5

I found this example of type on Fonts in Use. It is the cover of a small publication, Design Reporter, that was released in Australia during the 2009 State of Design Festival. It was a critique of and a proposition to the local newspapers—the creators felt that there was a lack of design journalism in the mainstream press, and created Design Reporter in the style of a newspaper to show the need for it. Headlines are set in Greta Grande, a modern serif font. Greta Text, a serif font most similar to the Clarendon type classification, is used for the rest of the copy. The cover is crowded with text, but the layout works because of the size and typeface differences. There is a clear hierarchy in place. The most important elements are the largest, and the high contrast between the thick and thin stroke weight draws attention to the headlines first. The least important information is small and set in Greta Text rather than a display font. I think that using two fonts within the same family was a good choice; they were created to work together and are diverse enough to be visually interesting. I'll keep this example of hierarchy and font choice in mind when handling large amounts of text in future projects. I like that the most important elements are mixed in with the less important elements rather than set from top to bottom, most important to least important.

Deyton Koch #5

  


I was looking through old design text books for my blog this week. These posters are from Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming by Ellen Lupton, (I admit I do not remember for which class this book was for). There is so much I could say about all 8 of these posters, and I really should take some close up shots so that you can see them better. But it was how these posters were made that really intrigued me. The section I found these examples under was titled "Sprinting", and that is a term that I was unfamiliar with after 4 years of design school. Anyway, "sprinting" is a "technique for breaking out of your own habits by forcing yourself to come up with a new visual solution in a fixed time frame and then moving on quickly to try something else". So these posters were intentionally designed very fast (I will include the details in this blog), both for typographic experimentation and the results are successful in some very diverse ways. Obviously, they could be polished up, but that is irrelevant. This sounds like a useful assignment to try myself, especially if I feel like I am stuck or need inspiration, or just want to force myself to try something new.

Twitter Typography Series (left). These posters use tweets from the five most heavily subscribed Twitter feeds between October 13 and 15, 2009. In order to experiment with typography in a quick, immediate way, the designer created one hundred posters in a series of thirst-minute design sprints. She chose twenty-five designs to print and display. Design: Krissi Xenakis.

Mars Book Sprints (right). The designer employed sprinting in order to generate multiple typographic concepts for a book design. Her parameters included using variations of a centered grid, using only black and white, and using only the typefaces HTF Whitney and Bodoni. The text is from Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980). The designer created a total of twelve page variations. Design: Christina Beard.

Vikings-Danika

Vikings. This TV series has a beautifully kerned San serif in all caps across the spread, with a highly decorative capital. The Nordic knots entwined in the large V show a strong since of culture and history, while the blood stain represents the violent past and fame of this culture. 

Jennifer Hernandez Post 3

The type used on this poster is an Art Nouveau display type (circa 1910's), seeming to be influence by traditional German blackletter typefaces of the (circa 1500's. The ornate flourish-style ligature between the two "o's" blends well with the Art Nouveau frame, and the choice of a flourished blackletter reflects both the masculine connotation of tattoos as well as the feminine energy of the subject herself.

Jessica Prohl

Sobek is a futuristic typeface that I think is really interesting. I hope to have use for it in the future (ahahah), because it's really beautifully rendered and surprisingly readable, even though the forms are not the most conventional.