You all should take a minute to play this game to see how you do. It's pretty fun and super fast.
Kerning Game
I am embarrassed to say that I got a 24 on the word "Type" but I made a 100 on 3 words lol
This is actually slightly relevant to my blog this week because I am posting about a free calendar I got from Half Price Books last week (when I bought my example of an exhibition catalog). The game is relevant because I love the Half Price Books' logo if only they would fix the kerning on the word Books-- it has always bothered me. Anyway, here is a couple of the spreads from the calendar:
The header and subheads are the same condensed, geometric san-serif in all caps. The rest of the text is in a similar font that is even more condensed making it very hard to read at the tiny scale, though it might be necessary to fit all of the information into the boxes. They are very successful with the hierarchy of the information portrayed on the layout. The drop quotes and images captions in all caps, like the headers, making them much easier to read. The layouts are so similar that the random and barely noticeable variations seem pointless to me. The outline is overkill for the "bent corner" decoration, and the tan corner works so much better because the black type is even harder to read on the red background. I like how the image caption overlaps the image and the background is slightly transparent so you can see the image barely behind the words, but it does not lose any legibility, I like that better in the caption that is outlined. I also personally like the line work, but it is unnecessary and the spread is already so busy. They should have taken the most successful of each spread and carried it through all the months, or made the differences seem more deliberate or with reason.
