Project 3: A type specimen poster, Garamond
In this project, we are making a type specimen poster. The typeface I was assigned with is Garamond, an old-style serif letter typeface, created by Claude Garamond in late renaissance.
In the beginning, I tried to draw down my ideas on the paper with a pencil and quickly I came up with posters with a lot of drawings, including pictures of matrices and books.
However, after I showed my drafts to our TA Rachel, she reminded me that we were not allowed to use complex pictures in our poster but only character.
With that in mind, I started out playing around with the arrangement of each character in the word Garamond. However, as I tried a couple of iteration, I found the posters to be too plain. Most of them are not so meaningful work without at least a paragraph describing what Garamond is. Thus, I went on doing a deeper research on the history of Garamond and trying to find out what could be an alternative approach to present this old-style serif typeface.
The creation of the typeface Garamond has a long history to tell, and there are a couple of points really caught my eyes so I decided to apply those points to my poster to make the meaning of my poster richer.
The first point is this typeface was based on the typeface used in a book called de Aetna : Petri Bembi de Aetna Angelum Chabrielem liber, which means a joinery to De Aetna in English. Although I myself have not read the book, I could read joy, happiness and nature just from the name of a book. Thus, I thought about constructing a shape with characters that connects nature and the typeface.
Secondly, I learned that this typeface was created by a French engraver Claude Garamond. He used to engrave these character to punches, which were used to make matrixes for letter printing. As I was googling punches and matrixes, I found that most punches were made out of metal and most matrixes were made out of copper.
With those ideas in mind, as I was playing with arranging characters of the word “Garamond”, I thought about arranging characters of word “Claud” as well. With a couple of trying with both upper cases and lower cases, I found if I have so many characters on the poster, it is a bit too crowded and not clean to read.
However, at the same time, I found that the shape of ‘C’ and the shape of ‘G’ are similar but different in an interesting way. Thus, instead of trying out a different arrangement of 13 characters from “Claude Garamond”, I went on trying different orientations, positions of only 2 characters.
The turned out was really exciting as I formed a shape of flower from these two characters which I did not expect myself. The reason why it implies the meaning of a flower is the book joinery to De Aetna delivers a sense of nature in the history of this typeface. When I presented my poster ideas to our class, most peers thought it is cool shape and idea while some thought it looks a bit scary because the shape has too many angles and lines, while remaining the whole shape as a big black chunk.
Thus, for my final iteration, I decided to add colours to my design to make it less aggressive. From my second idea, I want to apply grey and brown as my theme colours for the poster, for metal punches are usually grey and copper matrices are brown. By doing so, not only did I deliver the history of the typeface creator, but also made the poster warmer and less scary to read.
Type & Hierarchy Exercise 3
Designer: Claude Garamond who was a French engraver.
Time: This typeface was created in late renaissance, sixteenth-century.
Type classification: Garamond is an old-style serif letter typeface.
Differences: ‘e’ with a small eye and ‘a’ with a sharp hook upwards at top left.
Text : “de Aetna : Petri Bembi Garamond Angelum Chabrielem liber”
