typography

 I honestly don’t really feel overly self-critical about myself. I certainly take others’ criticisms of my work with a grain of salt and I work to improve my projects, but I don’t let myself get hung up on the negative stuff or the things I don’t like about a project. If I don’t like something, I ask other people what they think. I try to figure out what the most disliked parts are, and then I go fix it. Or I scrap the whole thing (rather, save it as a draft and start with a fresh canvas for a new approach). Perhaps though, if my OCD and perfectionist tendencies could be seen as faults, it would be because I tend to spend longer on certain parts of a project to get it to a point that I’m satisfied with it. Overall, though, I see those as good things that make me strive to do good work that I’m happy with and that I know I’ve spent effort on, and I still make sure that I have projects done by their due dates.

The weather report project helped to relate type to motion, and to do this studied the L.A.T.C.H. system for making effective animations. I decided to choose a capital city in a country close to each corner of a map where the Atlantic Ocean is in the center, and used the weather conditions in those cities over my birthday weekend for the animation. I used latch, time, and category structures to convey the weather information in different layouts, while keeping everything on screen. I was able to use previous knowledge with After Effects as well as new methods I learned in class to create a smooth animation with clean transitions between L.A.T.C.H. structures. The most difficult part of this assignment was figuring out how to animate the transitions in a way that wasn’t too crowded on the screen, but I am pleased with the final results.

The Wikireader was a more in-depth exploration of grid structure and text formatting, like the grid booklet was. In addition to paying attention to grids and text, the Wikireader also introduced image formatting to the booklet. Space had to be made in the margins or aligned with the text to let the images become a coherent part of the booklet, and not a distraction from the text. Therefore, the grid system I chose allowed for images to be featured in the margins beside the primary text column, or even intersect with the text without becoming a distraction. I was able to modify the text styles (using character and paragraph styles in InDesign) to differentiate headers from the body text, as well as the article information from notes and references.

Wikipedia Reader

The grid booklet was a method of exploring how to respect margins and line spacing for compositions that are very text-heavy. The grid that served as the basis for this booklet was based on the final trim size of the booklet. In this project, I was able to explore more styles of text formatting and deviating from “default” margins and typeface styles. Such examples of this in the booklet are the header styles and pull quotes to emphasize information from the text that could otherwise be overlooked. It was also important to me to use paragraph and character styles in InDesign to make the formatting so much quicker for such a long document; especially for the parts of the speech that were rapped rather than spoken.

Proportional Grid Booklet

The type specimen poster was a lesson on how type can be arranged in a style that creates interest to the viewer as something more than just another set of characters on the page. The posters I did emphasizes the use of intentional space on the page and of a limited color palette to create a product printed with a Risograph printer that holds more interest than a “normal” text-based poster. Additionally, the poster was meant to highlight the display font that I created. I chose layouts that highlighted single characters, examples of the text in a phrase/paragraph, as a word, and provided the entire specimen sheet for the font. The final posters that I printed with the Risograph machine utilized perspective/scale and opacity to create a visual hierarchy to emphasize the characters that made up the poster. Three of the posters were printed with flat-color Risograph ink, but the fourth was printed with gold-tinted ink on black paper.

The display font that I created is dubbed “Storybook”. There were restrictions on how to approach the font as far as what types of shapes were offered to construct the font, similar to the monogram, but the rest was up to me. This font was my response to a prompt about rejecting reality in favor of careless childhoods and storytelling. The response was to make a font resembling the importance of reflecting on how simple childhood is when you have no other realities to pay attention to. “Storybook” is a display font that takes influence from traditional, simple serif fonts and adds a medieval ornament in place of a traditional serif to make it a bit more playful and reminiscent of fantasies and storytelling, like something you’d find in a storybook.

The monogram project served as an introduction to understanding how fonts are constructed, and how to pay attention to the anatomy of type characters to create a cohesive set of initials. It was also a study of how to iterate creative results with limited approaches and rules of the parts that made up the characters. Lastly, this assignment was a study of cohesion, intent, and craft. Not only did I have to pay attention to the letters’ anatomy, such as cap height, x-height, and baseline, but the form of the letters and the variation of stroke/weight had to be cohesive and intentional. In my case, I attempted to imitate a calligraphic style with distinct variations of stroke.