Type Specimen Poster

For this project, I will be creating a type specimen poster for the Baskerville typeface. Beginning with research and then designing the poster, I’ll explore the nuances of the typeface to best express the general aesthetic behind it.

Research

• Typeface: Baskerville
• Designed by John Baskerville in 1757
• Baskerville is a serif typeface known for crisp edges and high contrast. Designed in England, the typeface is considered a transition from older to modern styles of type. The font has starker differences between thin and thick strokes, and sharper, more tapered serifs. Baskerville was designed for a project to improve the quality of books in England. John Baskerville taught calligraphy and carved gravestones, which is reflected in his work and the nature of the typeface. Baskerville has been used in publications of the Bible, Baskerville’s Book of Common Prayer, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Baskerville Full Character Set

Baskerville has a few unique features that I could highlight in my poster. The line at the bottom of the capitalized Q is dramatic and unique among other classic typefaces. The capitalized J is interesting when lined against other letters, since it, like the Q, do not share the same bottom line as the rest of the capitalized letters. Of the lowercase letters, G and Y have unique serifs. The number 3 also has an interesting center curve in comparison to other typefaces.

In my continued research, I found a quote from an English bibliographer admiring Baskerville’s typeface: “he stands unrivalled: such elegance, freedom, and perfect symmetry.”

Conceptualization

Based on my research, these are the basic sketches I started with for my poster design. I plan to include details like the designer and the year created in my description paragraphs.

Breadth Explorations

After sketching, I chose three designs to translate into a digital format. I tried to choose designs that were different than one another and those I thought could be manipulated and explored well in a digital space.

Depth Explorations

From there, I went deeper into each design to in some cases refine, in other cases transform them.

My changes to this design were to establish a stronger axis and define the axial influence on the characters by aligning the bodies as left- or right — aligned rather than center, and moving the font styles and B graphic closer to the axis. I found that, in sketching, alignment sort of fell to the wayside while it’s crucial to the design once I put it into Illustrator.

I made more substantial changes to this design. I made the Q in the background larger to have more impact from far away, and made the descriptive paragraphs smaller and left-aligned to make them seem less daunting to a viewer. This allowed me to make the character set, the arguable star of the poster, larger and higher hierarchically than the descriptive section. I also moved the quote to the top of the poster to give it more emphasis and, if someone is reading the poster top-to-bottom, the chance to set the tone for the paragraphs.

This design changed the most by far. Originally influenced by bible page designs, where Baskerville is often used, I was finally able to justify the text in a way similar to Bible text. This required me to adjust my spacing quite a bit, so I moved the character set and descriptive paragraphs from there originally spots. I also took the opportunity to display the fonts in an interesting way, and tried to make the poster more dynamic by making the typeset title into a vertical axis.

Final Iterations

The feedback I received from my group critique guided me to choose this design as my final poster and to make certain changes. My group was split on this or the blue ombre poster as the favorite, but I went with this one as it had the most potential. There was a great suggestion to add a bookmark, since it’s a shape that would make sense with the biblical/book theme of the poster and still help break up the image. There was also a suggestion that the poster could have just as much an academic energy as a biblical one, and I used that to drive some of my changes, since the Bible influence really limited me to a wall of regular, justified text.

First, I wanted to make the white lines outlining BASKERVILLE more prominent as to break up the poster and make it look more interesting. Then, I tackled the mass of text on the poster by adding a bookmark-type shape on the left, making the descriptive paragraphs smaller, and using those on the bookmark. That allowed me to move the rest of my text to the right to create more empty space and give the character set more emphasis.