CDF Project Three Documentation
Sketches
Design process:
The six sketches above are presented in the sequence of how I drew them, and show how my ideas were developed. To begin with, Futura emphasizes on geometric shapes, and clean/crisp forms. So in my sketches, I tried to accentuate these characteristic of the typeface. To emphasize the geometric shapes, I wanted to use a diagonal composition, and leave enough negative space to create the sense of clean and crispness. The first two sketches place a lot of weight on the name FUTURA, and uses the placement of letters to draw attention of viewers. In the third sketch I experimented with using composition of rigid text blocks to create balance and geometric forms.
After the first three sketches, I thought about the importance of each component of the poster, and how can I allocate space regarding their priority. The core and beauty of a typeface should be its character set, thus I thought about how I can allocate more space on the poster to the character set while maintaining nice balance and structure. I explored some possibilities in the fourth sketch.
At that point, I had the concern that the geometric form of the typeface was not emphasized enough, and thought of ways to improve in this aspect. So in the last two sketches, I experimented spelling out FUTURA sideways and vertically. One theory I’ve read about is that by default text would have more visual weight on viewers, and viewers would automatically start to interpret the meaning of text once they see it, even though they might not understand the language or word. Thus by placing FUTURA sideways, I attempted to make the text harder to read, so viewers would notice more of the actual forms and shapes of the letters before interpreting the meaning of the text. In the last sketch, I began to experiment using the character set to create generic shapes, thus the character set would serve more function in the composition of the poster.
Digital iterations
With the help of InDesign, I was able to work on alignment and experiment with different ideas more conveniently. In my opinion, alignment is particularly important for my poster, because I wanted to emphasize on geometric shapes and a good alignment of visual element is crucial in this regard. I thought about the layout of character set, and placed the uppercase A at top-right corner. In this placement the uppercase A echoes with the big A in lower-left corner, so the diagonal composition is further accentuated by the sharp corners of Futura’s crisp shapes. After desk review with instructors, we have identified caveats in this draft, ex. the even gap between each component of the poster.
With the convenience of InDesign, I experimented with alternative character set layouts. In the first three of them, I tried to use alternating cap-noncap to create visual guides and direct viewer’s attention. I tried guiding horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. However, none of these attempts works for my intention because of the variance in width and height among letters. The last layout is similar to the one in the draft, but with the position of numerals lower case letters switched. This layout works well since the numerals marks the division between upper and lower case letters, while aligning with the top of “F” in FUTURA. Also now the density difference between upper and lower section is more clear, so the dense-light-dense weight distribution from top to bottom of the poster is more balanced.
Since the character set is a dominating element of my poster, I wanted to accentuate characters that are the most iconic of Futura typeface, i.e. A, G, V, t, etc. I experimented with two approaches, one with circular shade beneath these characters, another changing the characters to a darker shade. However, none of the attempts worked well in my opinion. My principles for this design was clean and crisp forms, and seems both attempts work against this principle. Thus I did not adapt this idea in my final iteration.
For my final version, I tweaked the spacing between designer name, time, and description. The intention was to use the space between each of these to reflect the proximity of information. Thus time is kept close to designer name, so there is a clear gap between them, but viewer can still relate them as one element. Also the description paragraph is aligned with the A in lower left corner. The tipped over A has the form of an arrow head pointing to the right, so its form invites viewers to read the description.
