Type Specimen Poster
Communication Design Fundamentals: Project 3
Project Introduction
The focus of this project was to practice applying the concept of hierarchy — the organization of information and details in order of importance — through text. With text, there are many ways to emphasize and de-emphasize individual elements, including text size, capitalization, bold or oblique text, line-spacing, indentation, color, and contrast. Our goal was to express the history and characteristics of an assigned typeface through a poster, using only text, color, and hierarchy to guide a viewer through the information. The typeface I worked with for this project was the Avenir typeface, designed by Adrian Frutiger.
Typeface Research (Feb. 5, 2019)
To begin the project, I researched basic information about the Avenir typeface. Avenir was created by Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger, and released in 1988. It is a sans-serif geometric typeface, meaning that the characters do not have the little strokes at the ends, called serifs, and that the characters are based on geometric shapes like circles.
Frutiger based his designs off of existing geometric typefaces such as Erbar and Futura, however he decided to add small details and changes that were intended to make his typeface a more organic take on the standard geometric style. His goal was to make the type more suitable for reading and extended text, drawing certain elements from more traditional typefaces, including the two-storey “a” and curl-bottomed “t”, as well as optically correcting other characters, like the “o” which is not a perfect circle.
The word “avenir” is the French word for “future”, and now several years into the future, Frutiger’s designs are quite popular. The typeface is now widely used by many corporate and educational entities, including companies like Apple and Bloomberg, and universities like Wake Forest University.
Initial Sketches (Feb. 7, 2019)
Based on the information I researched about Avenir, I created a number of preliminary sketches for my typeface poster design.
Creating the sketches proved to be a bit difficult for a typeface poster, as unless you know how to write in the typeface by hand, it is unlikely you’ll be able to accurately represent the text. Most of these sketches are a rough estimate of what the actual poster might look like. I found there were many different ways of expressing all the information needed, so I ended up drawing quite a few sketches, however my favorite from the lot were the last two, which I decided to move forward with for making digital versions.
Initial Digital Iterations (Feb. 7-12, 2019)
From my initial sketches, I moved to digital iterations, beginning by creating digital versions of two of my original sketches. I decided on one horizontal design and one vertical design, along with adding color to each.
The horizontal one was intended to be the simpler version of the two, while the vertical one was intended to be a bit more adventurous. I wanted to try playing with color, and so I created a large mass of randomly colored letters in the typeface, then used the name, designer, year, and character set as a clipping mask to show small glimpses of the colorful letters. However, I felt that it was difficult to see exactly what the rainbow mass was, so I added an additional version of the vertical poster where the letters were overlaid on top of the black background.
I brought all three of these posters to our first mini-critique on February 12 for feedback.
Feedback on Initial Digital Drafts (Feb. 12, 2019)
We received plenty of good feedback from our mini-critique, both for individual poster designs as well as overall.
My horizontal version received generally positive feedback. Most comments stated that they liked the subtle use of color, the simplicity, and the cleanliness of the poster. The only changes suggested were to make better use of the negative space, and somehow connect the top to the bottom.
With the black version, many people liked the letter mass in the back, and said that it was a cool and interesting use of color. However, it also made the smaller text harder to read, and some people wished they could see the individual letters more.
With the tartan version, even though you could see the individual letters more clearly, having so much happening in the background was a bit distracting. While the contrast and use of color was well received, the background was too busy and drew attention away from the actual text. Most comments mentioned that they preferred the colorful words over the colorful background.
In general, people seemed generally happy with the visual hierarchy of the posters, and felt the information was expressed clearly.
A further examination of the instructions brought to my attention the fact that I could not use the rectangular clipping masks for the Background version, and that our paragraph text chunk should not exceed 100 words. We were also told to include all punctuation in our character set, which I had not done initially. So, moving into further iterations, I kept all these in mind and decided to pursue the landscape and black paths, scrapping the letter background version.
Further Digital Iterations (Feb. 12–19, 2019)
Based on the feedback I received and a reread of the instructions, I began moving forward in two different directions for my next digital iterations.
The first thing I did was condense my body paragraph to fit the project requirements. A comparison between versions 1 and 2 of the Black posters shows a significant decrease in the amount of text to read. Given the large amount of text regardless, I decided to highlight important phrases that help detail the history and characteristics of Avenir. This way, the reader could easily find important information at a glance, or read the entire text if they were interested.
During an additional critique, my instructor mentioned a couple pieces of advice to help further improve this poster.
- The character set, given its relative size, draws the viewer’s attention, without leaving an easy path back up to the body text.
- The designer name and year have weird spacing, making it seem as though “Frutiger 1988” is grouped together and “Adrian” is separate.
- The color in the body text is almost too strong, and might be better off as a lighter tint.
- There is a bit of competition in hierarchy between the typeface name and the designer/year, due to the full white having more contrast than the colored letters in the name.
- If set on using the colorful letters in the back, try to rearrange them so there’s no strange overlap creating ugly brown or grey colors.
- The color exists in the top and middle of the poster, but disappears at the character set, so it might be better to add color in there somehow.
This advice helped me create version 3 of the Black poster, which fixed some of the spacing issues, rearranged the background letters, lightened the tints in the body text, and highlighted characters of interest in the character set.
A separate path I explored was the landscape version, which eventually turned into the large-letter path. Based off my initial feedback, I tried iterating on my original landscape design to create a second version.
Even after moving things around, I found I was struggling quite a bit with the negative space of the landscape orientation. It was difficult to pull all the different elements together into a cohesive whole. I was ready to abandon this path as well, but I really liked the large letters in the background, and decided to play around with that concept rather than the landscape concept. From there, I branched off into a separate direction.
The “AV” series I created following this deviation utilizes the first two letters “A” and “V” of Avenir to create a frame and highlight some of the geometric lines and spacing of the typeface, while keeping an otherwise clean and minimal presentation of the information, as intended by Frutiger.
One thing that bothered me was that the word “Avenir” has a natural forward slash (/) flow, while the space created by the large “A” and “V” has the opposite (\) flow. To counteract this, I included a period at the end of “Avenir” to offset this directional mismatch and give the word a sense of closure.
Some initial feedback on this poster included:
- Weird spacing of the title and body text. They are center aligned while the background creates a natural diagonal that might be easier to follow.
- Strong character set again, try to lower the contrast, decrease the size, do something that makes it easier to return to the body paragraph.
- Has potential but needs some tweaking.
From these comments, I made a second iteration, with the biggest focus on realigning the poster more naturally.
At this point, I was stuck between settling on Black v3 and AV v2, so I tried combining different concepts from both to see if that created a better effect.
While the combination of the two looked quite interesting, I didn’t like how the colorful letters looked muted when placed on the grey “AV” background. It was a nice direction to explore, but I decided against using it as the letters were quite distracting as well. Instead, I chose to vary the background for the “AV” design.
I tried a number of different iterations for background and text colors, and found that when not on the original beige background, I liked the hierarchy and simplicity of this design over the Black designs. In the end, my favorite color combinations were the fourth and sixth combinations shown above.
I ended up printing both the light and dark versions, and decided after printing that the darker one better embodied the sleek and futuristic feel I wanted to express with the typeface. On the physically printed paper, the teal color came out a bit darker than I would have liked, especially for the designer name and year, but otherwise I was happy with the result. The information and hierarchy were clear, and the poster had the characteristics of the typeface that I was looking for.
The most eye-opening feedback I received at the final critique was that the ragged edges in the paragraph (especially in the “organic” line) really pulled the eyes in, and the poster could have been improved by adjusting the edge so it was not as ragged. While I turned in AV Dark as shown above, some slight adjustments left me with the final poster shown below.
Reflection (Feb. 26, 2019)
From the start of this project, I struggled a lot with trying to figure out how to represent a typeface and its characteristics in a poster. How do you display text so that it is “futuristic”? How do you make it “organic” or “geometric”? I know my final product was not perfect in expressing any of these concepts, but I like to think it’s not too far off.
I’ve learned that the visual flow of text, its color, and its size can all help contribute to embodying these ideas, and that all these things definitely play a role in creating a clear hierarchy of information. Text is a lot more versatile than I originally thought, and small details can create big impacts, even though everything is made up of letters and punctuation in the end.
I think learning about hierarchy in general has also been a valuable experience, as it is something I never really paid attention to in the past. Now when I walk around campus and look at different posters or banners, I think about how the information is presented instead of simply deciding “this poster looks nice” or “this poster looks bad”. This project has further expanded my thoughts about how intention and design play a huge role in communication, and I’m excited to keep that knowledge with me continuing on into the future.
