Baskerville Text Poster — Documentation
Initial Sketches:
I had a lot of trouble not only coming up with poster ideas that I thought were impactful, but also with translating these ideas to pen and paper. I liked what I was visualizing, and the sketches were not as representative of that as I would have hoped. That being said, I iterated on the sketches with the ampersand and the bottom left sketch. I liked how the serif of the ampersand presented the font name and how the general shape of the character. The idea for the bottom left poster didn’t translate very well to the sketch. I wanted the Baskerville “B” to be highlighted through text of character text.
Digital Iterations on the “B”:
The first few digital iterations were based primariliy on the sketches. I realized quickly how cluttered the poster was with these two competing fields. As an attempt to damper down the background, I adjusted the color of the character set, but I still felt like this poster was cluttered. The character was swallowing the “B,” yet the “B” was standing out because of the harsh black and white contrast. These aspects of the poster, worked against what I was trying to create.
The character sets behind the “B” were clearly not working, so I moved them inside the “B.” From here I changed the size, color, leading of the character set as well as the background color of the entire image. I thought that maybe an off-white would make the strong black and white color contrast less jarring.
Once I finalized the leading, font size, and color of the character set, I started experimenting with colors to make the “B” softer. I tried making it white, and liked how the inside of the character was highlighted by the character set. To highlight the exterior of the character, I used a larger gray coloured “B” outside the white character. Appreciating the gray and white contrast, I wanted to add more gray without loosing that gray outline. Because of this, I ended up adding another white “B” to outline the gray. These outlines added depth to the left edge of the stem, and I really liked how the white outline disappeared into the sarif.
I didn’t like the all gray background as much as I had hoped to, but I still wanted to include the gray. So, I used this gray rectangle as a way to highlight the other text of the poster and bring attention to the hierarchy present in the poster as well as bring in that grey element while still leaving white space. I also added a frame to the poster for many reasons. Baskerville is a combination of old-style and modern-style fonts. I wanted my poster to be representative of this mixture. I feel like the outlines and bowl of the “B” reperesent the modern-style while the straight stem and very horozontal top and bottom of the “B” represented the old-style. I felt that this frame ran parallel to these straight and horozontal pieces of the character and therefore brought more order to the poster and highlighted these features of the “B.” I also liked how it drew attention to the poster as a whole instead of the poster just having one center focus. My main qualm with this poster is the placement of the date. I feel like it was unnatural, and I was hoping to get some advice on that in mid-crit.
The main commentary that I recieved in mid-crit was that I should add more contrast to the poster. Taking this advice, I tried stronger colours. Black was still too harsh. I also reduced the frame size to leave white space inbetween the frame and the edge of the poster. I thought that that would give it more of an impact in drawing the eye to all parts of the poster.
In this final iteration, I cleaned up the image and changed the placement of the date. This new placement allowed the other text to settle in more comfortably in the stem of the character.
Overall, although I wish worked more with the ampersand poster (ampersand poster documentation below), this poster represented the font better overall. It effectively utalized the character set, hierarchy, and white space in a say that the other poster wasn’t able to.
Digital Iterations on the Ampersand:
I can’t really explain why I was so drawn to the shape of the ampersand. I think it has something to do with its combination of thick and thin, it’s curves, and it’s sarifs. The bottom left ampersand was fairly settled into place, and this gave me a lot of freedom with the white space of the rest of the poster. I started adding more characters and moving them around to see the shapes it would create.
I enlarged an upside-down ampersand and placed it over the shape the two sarifs were creating. I think that this created an interesting place for the “Bakerville” title. I ended up focusing more on the “Baskerville” title and zooming in to bring that to the front and center of the poster. I also added a gray character as an accent colour. The white space between the two sarifs was intentional and controversial. I got negative feedback on it saying that it made the title hard to read. I personally like it because I thought the tension it created drew more attention to the title.
After the mini-crit, I closed the gap and thought about how to add a character set or other text into this poster. I wanted to maintain as much of the ampersand forms as I could while leaving healthy space for the text. I extended the gray from the ampersand down and shifted the title text up in an attempt to create that space.
After many attempts at placing this text and rearranging it, I didn’t like where this poster was going, especially in relation to the other poster. I didn’t think this was representing the font as well as I wanted it too and the design decisions were less meaningful. I wasn’t highlighting interesting features of the font, and I wasn’t saying enough about the font other than the font itself. Because of this, I decided to no longer persue this piece.
