CDF Project 3 — Type & Hierarchy
In this project, I applied my knowledge of my typeface, Helvetica, hierarchy, and Gestalt principles in order to create a poster that effectively communicates the distinguishing qualities, usages, and history of Helvetica. As the only limitation was a choice of 1–2 colors and the inclusion of certain content, I was free in my interpretation of the typeface and how I wanted to present that in a type specimen poster. Below is my final type specimen poster for Helvetica. I will document my thought process from research to initial sketches to digital iterations to mid-crit to final iteration and final crit and reflection.
Part I: Research
First, I wanted to get a thorough understanding of my typeface, Helvetica. Below are the research results I gathered:
- Who designed it and when?
Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger (with input from Eduard Hoffmann) designed Helvetica in 1957.
2. What type classification does it fall under?
Helvetica is a sans-serif typeface.
3. Was it created for a specific purpose or context?
It was developed by the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry). It was created to match a trend of the renaissance of the “grotesque” sans-serifs among European graphic designers. Haas wanted to compete with Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market.
4. Are there any specific uses of it that led to its popularity?
Its neutral typeface with clarity and no inherent meaning behind it led to its wide use, as it could be used in a variety of contexts. Helvetica is popular for commercial wordmarks, often used by the U.S. government, and widely used in transportation (NY subway system). Some notable companies that use it in their name are Microsoft, Target, and The North Face.
5. Are there any features that set it apart?
Helvetica has a high x-height and a tight spacing between letters which makes it look dense and compact. It is oblique, slanting slightly to the right, rather than italic. There are also wide capital letters of pretty uniform width, especially noticeable in the “E” and “F.” Some other notable characters are the square-looking “s” and the little difference between the upper-case “i” and lower-case “L”. The number “1” is also distinguishable with its bracketed top flag. Finally, Helvetica has tight, narrow apertures that limit onscreen and small font size readability.
Part II: Initial Sketches
For my initial ten sketches, I wanted to brainstorm a diverse set of poster ideas that could all potentially convey Helvetica. Below I describe my thought process for each one, going from left to right and top to bottom.
First sketch: I really liked the number “1” in Helvetica, as it has an unique flag shape as well as curvature on the top. Using the side of the paper to emphasize its straight edges, I drew the “1” on the right. The space on the left allows me to put content such as the characters of Helvetica, designer name, and year. The “Helvetica” on the bottom balances out the flag of the “1” on top.
Second sketch: Tilting my whole poster gives more dynamic to composition, and enlarging the “1957” highlights the more recent development of the typeface. With the tilt, I wanted to keep the rest of the poster simple, so I included just the designer name below the “19”, the name of the typeface, and a quote about it to balance out the composition.
Third sketch: Looking at some other Helvetica posters online inspired me to have “Helvetica” reflecting, giving character to the typeface. However, I found that it makes the text a bit harder to read. The rest of the content, such as the designer name and character set was more constricted in its placement, making the poster a bit too rigid and structured.
Fourth sketch: Again garnering inspiration from online posters, I wanted to emphasize the “l” with its simple rectangular shape that could be extended. With the phrase “Pretty, Popular, Perfect”, I wanted to give life to Helvetica while describing its aesthetic and ubiquitous use. With the separated rectangle, I wanted to do inverted color-blocking. However, the poster still had too much negative space.
Fifth sketch: Coming back to the use of the number “1”, the hashtag works well with the “1” because it makes it seem like Helvetica is the #1 font. Furthermore, it kind of looks like the New York subway station map which uses Helvetica. However, with this design, it is hard to see anything else but the #1 and the poster looks crowded without clear hierarchy.
Sixth sketch: In this sketch, I opted for maximum simplicity, with all lowercase letters to emphasize the high x-height. The text on the right balances out the composition while leaving ample white space. Although I liked this composition, it seemed too simple to me at the time.
Seventh sketch: I saw many posters emphasizing one character, so I thought I would do that as well. The letter “a” stood out to me, with its interestingly shaped bowl and counter-form. I thought it would be clever to have the large “a” also be the last letter of “Helvetica.” However, that might be confusing viewers.
Eighth sketch: In order to convey Helvetica’s wide uses, I thought of the quote “When in doubt, use Helvetica.” I thought of using inverted color-blocking again to make that phrase stand out from the rest of the content (designer and year).
Ninth sketch: This sketch was a very interesting one, as I really wanted to showcase the uppercase, blocky, letters of Helvetica as its distinguishing feature. Thus, I was trying to use some letters to create other letters. For example, the letter “H” seamlessly connects with the “T” and “I”. A major downside of this that Suzanne later points out is the unreadability of the name of the font, since everything is merging together.
Tenth sketch: With my final sketch, I wanted to emphasize Helvetica’s Swiss origins by converting the “t” into a “+”, that is on the Switzerland flag. By keeping everything else simple, the cross stands out, especially as I was thinking about coloring it the same color as the Switzerland flag. The font name will stand out a lot while not being too boring.
Part III: Digital Iterations
With input from classmates and Rachel and my own preferences, I decided to digitally iterate on my fourth, ninth, and tenth sketches.
I worked backwards, as I thought this one would be the easiest to transpose digitally. Turns out, I was wrong. While playing with the kerning and turned out to really tricky in aligning the letters so that there was no awkward spacing, but also so that the rows aligned as well. Since the “i” and “l” are skinny letters, it was especially hard to make the spacing even but also make it look the rows of letters were aligned. Placing the designer names, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, and the date under the cross emphasizes the origination of the typeface, rather than having it at the bottom in my original sketch. I furthermore found a quote by Massimo Vignelli that I thought embodied Helvetica really well. It is as follows:
“You can say, ‘I love you,’ in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.”
This quote, along with a suggestion by Rachel to include the different variations of Helvetica, led me to include portray the different variations of Helvetica through the phrase “I love you.” As I wanted to include the variations, I had to play around with the different placements of the quote and variations, as I definitely wanted viewers to read the quote before the column of variations in order to have context. I furthermore did not think the kerning I had in my first attempt was void of awkward spacing, so I opted to do equal spacing of letters versus alignment of the rows.
The hierarchy of the text was still not very clear, so a friend suggested that I decrease the opacity of “Helvetica” so that I can overlay some content on it. However, I still did not like this iteration very much because I feel like I see the “I love you” first before anything else, not able to make a connection to anything until after I see the rest of the poster. Overall, it looked like the text was randomly placed. Wanting to come back to this idea, I moved on to my next few digital transpositions.
For the leftmost poster design, I thought, “Why not just extend the ‘l’ fully to emphasize it even more”? That partitioned the poster into a left and right side, where I could play around with where I want to have my text. However, after talking with Rachel, I realized that my text would turn out really big on a 10'’ x 16'’ poster. Furthermore, Suzanne pointed out that although she likes the emphasis on the counter-forms, there is not much that distinguishes Helvetica as a text and the poster is not very dynamic overall. With the partition with the “l”, it makes it very hard to do anything else with the poster. Also, Suzanne inputed that the “Helvetica” at the bottom makes disrupts the hierarchy as Helvetica should actually be the first thing viewers see, while in this case it may be the last thing they see.
The middle design is more straightforward and has better hierarchy, as people will read top down, seeing the “helvetica” before the white text, however, I still thought the design was too basic and rigid and its uniqueness is not brought out enough.
Moving on to the rightmost design, I played around with the sizing of the characters and alignment to make the letters flow into each other as well as emphasize the uniformity of the uppercase letters. After fiddling with it for a while and talking to Suzanne about it, the general consensus was that while a cool concept, it makes the typeface name unreadable and the poster crowded, leaving very little room for much else.
I seemed to be a designer’s block at this point, running out of ideas and ways to bring Helvetica’s history and character to life on a poster. But, taking into account all the suggestions from Suzanne and Rachel which include keeping the red cross to symbolize Switzerland, bringing out one distinguishing letter, adding the variation names underneath the “I love you”s, making “helvetica” clearly the first thing you see, and trying to playing around with a horizontal landscape, I came up with two other designs shown below.
For my first design, I made an enlarged red cross to really emphasize the Swiss origins, as well as tilting it to make the poster have more flare and dynamic. The counter-form of “a” was really unique, so I wanted to draw viewer’s eyes to that by placing the designer’s names and year there. The curvature of the “R” is also really unique, so I placed that on the far left to balance out the poster and not conflict with the red cross. As the quote did not fit on this composition, I listed the variation names instead.
Remembering the unique high x-height of Helvetica, for my second design, I wrote Helvetica in all lowercase letters. I divided the word where the syllables split into two and two. As readers read from left to right, I put the quote on the left and the column of “I love you”s on the right. Although looking back on this, the viewers probably would have saw the “I love you”s first anyway after finishing reading “helvetica”.
Part IV: Mid-crit
I brought these last two designs to share at the mid-crit.
For the first poster with an emphasis on Switzerland, there were several critiques that were very valuable. First, make the “I love you”s aligned more left and smaller so that it is not directly in the middle of the cross. Second, move the “R” so that you can tell that it is an “R”. Third, make the “a” lighter so that it is not the first thing people see and becomes more of the background.
For the second poster, someone suggested to make the “t” a red cross to emphasize the Swiss origin like I had previously thought of. Further comments included that I add color and make more hierarchy in the content (maybe through color?), as they only see “helvetica” right now. Finally, Suzanne suggested that I play with the placement of elements to make the text and content more aligned and balanced.
I agreed with everyone’s points, and taking their critiques and suggestions to heart, I started my final iterations.
Part V: Final Iteration
I changed the alignment of the variation names to leave more space on the right, which did look better. I brought in the “R” closer to the “a”, but when I did that the vertical part of the cross obstructed much of the “R” and made it hard to decipher what was going on. Thus, I shifted the vertical bar to the right and changed the location of the designer names and year. I did not like this, however, because the counter-form of “a” was obstructed and the composition overall seemed more unbalanced and messy.
I reverted back to my original design, and thought changing the letter would solve the problem. The imperfect circular shape of the “e” was still pretty unique and viewers can tell that it is an “e” behind the cross. However, Suzanne pointed out that the roundness and similarity of the “e” and “a” conflicted with the sharp edges of the cross. Also, it still looks a bit crowded with a lack of hierarchy. I decided to move on to my other design that I thought had more potential.
Right off the bat, I changed the “t” to a red cross. To give the composition a greater sense of alignment and balance, I completely took out the “I love you”s and spaced out the “helve” more to span across the poster. The alignment of the “+ica” fit perfectly as the lowercase letters had similar widths and the “l” and “i” are identical in widths. As one of my main issues during the mid-crit was a lack of alignment, I made sure that the “l” and “i” were perfectly aligned. They also happened to align in the center of the poster, adding balance to my poster. Without the “I love you”s, I was able to fit the quote on the bottom left. Going along with alignment, I made sure the width of the quote was the same as the width of the “h” and that the first line of the quote aligned with the x-height. I also ensured that the designer name and year were the same width as the “h”. For color accents, I colored “Max Meidinger” to emphasize the designer’s name and provide hierarchy after reading “helvetica”. Furthermore, I colored the counter-form in the “e”to highlight its unique counter-form but also to provide balance in color throughout my poster. I did not color the counter-form of the other “e” and the “a” to maintain equilibrium.
Nearing the final stages of my poster, Suzanne suggested two things: 1) “Massimo Vignelli” does not need a dash before it and can be spaced out more from the quote itself. 2) “Extra Light” and “Extra Bold” can be more easily deciphered if the other text was made grey or less opaque. Moving “Massimo Vignelli” onto the next line, although seemingly a small difference, made a huge impact on my poster as it provided greater balance. The quote is now closer to the same x-height with the extra whitespace. With the quote itself, I first tried making the quote italic besides the variation words, which worked alright, but when I made the quote less opaque, the variations of Helvetica really jumped out. I made “Extra Light” and “Extra Bold” italic to add extra emphasis.
I personally really liked the concept of the “I love you”s, so just to make sure that the column could not fit anywhere on the poster, I played around with the size and positioning of it. Ultimately, the poster speaks for itself without it. The large font name screams a font that is used widely anywhere and everywhere. The prominent variation names of Helvetica in the quote already demonstrates its diversity. The x-height with the lowercase letters and the counter-form with the color accent are notable. The Swiss origins pop out. Finally, the poster is overall clean, simple, yet effective. Thus, I now have my final poster (shown below).
Part VI: Final Crit
It was final crit time, and it was pretty amazing to see all the changes and improvements people have made since mid-crit. Overall, I got a lot of positive feedback from peers on my final poster design. Suzanne commented that she really liked the “purposeful” use of lowercase letters to emphasize the high x-height. Many liked the overall balance and alignment of the poster that makes it soothing to look at, including the “l” and “i” in the middle, the balance of content on both sides, the alignment of the text to the “h”, and the equal spacing between the “l” and the dot of the “i” and the “i” and its own dot. Furthermore, one peer said the strategic use of red in the “e”, designer name, and cross makes adds to the balance and emphasizes important aspects of Helvetica. Finally, another peer said that the big text of “helvetica” works really well because the structure of the text is the first thing you see.
Part VII: Reflection
Throughout this whole process, I kept comparing my posters to others’ and thinking that my designs were too simple and plain. However, now that I am finished with the project, I learned that simplicity is often times better than complexity in communicating effectively and clearly the meaning of something. Although simple-looking, my poster effectively communicates Helvetica’s distinguishing characteristics, its origins, and its uses. Seeking and receiving constant feedback throughout the process is really useful, as it prevents me from spending too much time on something that was not going to work in the first place and helps me break out of designer’s block. Ultimately, utilizing resources such as peers, mentors, and the Internet helped me greatly on this project.
