Project 3: Exercises
These exercises are a part of Project 3 of Communication Design Fundamentals. The goal of these exercises is to understand the parts of letterforms and hierarchy and how they provide meaning to the text.
Exercise 1: Typeface Tracing
For Exercise 1, I traced samples of four different fonts using fineliner and tracing paper. The first two fonts (Adobe Garamond and Didot) were serif fonts, and the latter two (Helvetica and Futura) were sans serif fonts. As I was tracing the samples, I became more aware of the nuances in each font.
In Adobe Garamond, I could see that the serifs were bracketed with an oblique stress axis. There is medium-high contrast between the stressed and unstressed areas of the font. Even though Didot is also a serif font, it greatly differs in these aspects. The serifs are hairline, meaning that they are very thin. The stress axis is almost completely vertical, and the contrast between stressed and unstressed areas is high.
For the sans serif fonts, Helvetica and Futura are similar in their relatively low stress contrasts and vertical stress axes. They mainly differ in the geometry of their stems. Helvetica also always has blunt ends, but Futura ends in a point where two stems intersect. The lowercase “a” in Futura is simpler compared to the one in Helvetica.
Exercise 2: Typographic Voice
The main goal of Exercise 2 was to understand how the choice of typeface affects the meaning and emotional feeling of a word. I explored two words in particular: future and purity. To see how the font affected the word, I typed the word in a particular font in its own artboard in Adobe Illustrator. I then chose the top three typefaces to display here.
Future
When thinking of the word future, I came up with a list of requirements for the fonts in my head. The fonts had to be simple and clean above all else with as few frills as possible. This ruled out all serif fonts immediately. The three typefaces that I settled upon in the end were Futura, Orator Std, and PT Sans Narrow.
Futura was an obvious choice, as it even had most of the word in the font name. However, it truly lives up to a futuristic font. Just by typing out the word, it was easy to see that it was streamlined in every way possible. There were no extra curves or lines in the t’s and u’s, and the variation in thickness was minimal. Italicizing the text also gives the word an impression of moving forward. Orator Std fits the futuristic look for almost the exact same reasons as Futura, and the small caps also help with building simplicity.
After finding those two fonts, it became much more difficult to choose a third font, as none of the others that were available in the computer had the same amount of simplicity. I eventually settled on PT Sans Narrow because it was a sans serif font that was compact and neat even though it had extra parts in the t’s and u’s especially.
Purity
For purity, the choices of font were a little more open-ended since fonts are not usually created for the intention of portraying the word. My ideas mainly focused on cleanliness, but I also took inspiration from the recalling the general looks of my religion textbooks in high school. I ended up exploring three different ideas that fulfilled the definition in various ways.
The first font that I used for purity was Savoye LET Plain: 1.0. This font was more handwritten than the other options I chose, but it was one of the simpler handwritten fonts. The spacing between letters was relatively even, and the medium stress contrast helped make the “handwriting” feel clean.
My second idea emphasized the simple and clean look. I finally found the condensed extra light version of Acumin Variable Concept, which had virtually no stress contrast and few angles. It was “pure” in that it did not have extra frills and that no single letter tried to “stick out” in any way.
Using Baskerville was mostly inspired by what I imagine for the fonts of signs for churches and covers of religion textbooks. It is a relatively traditional serif font, and the medium stress contrast and bracketed serifs are easy on the eyes. The letters are nearly evenly spaced, contributing to the cleanliness.
Exercise 3: Typographic Hierarchy
In this exercise, I experimented with how typographic variables clarify a message. The variables that we explored were linespacing, typographic weights, horizontal indentation, and size change. These should hopefully emphasize the important parts: who is holding the event, the title of the event, the dates, the times, the location, and the admission fee. The varied parts are listed in the captions below each image.
