Project3 documentation
Times New Roman font poster.
I was a little confused about the objective of this poster at the beginning. I thought we were supposed to explain the font in detail, so almost all of my proposals were text heavy. Later I found out there weren’t enough text for me to fill the whole page. Also the purpose is not to overwhelm the reader with text.
The top left two pictures feature two iconic capital T’s from Times New Roman and some text that are aligned with the vertical part of the character T. The third one is a body of text whose form spells out as a T. I put the name and year at the top to get rid of white space. The third one has a Times New Roman headline. I slanted it to make it look like newspaper, many of which feature this font. The two on the right are also intended to have a traditional newspaper feel, except that the sixth one has a backwards “NEW” to contrast the theme of the rest of the poster.
Top left is a design where I attempted to accentuate the Times New Roman, especially the T by throwing some irrelevant characters. This one looks a little noisy. The hierarchy can be improved. The top middle is a big T containing text. This is the same as the one I had imagined from before. The one change I made was that I outlined the T because I thought just using characters would be hard to recognize the T. The top right is a more traditional design. I think the T and i have some awkward space. Also, the bigger T might look better if it aligned with the N. The vertical characters are a little hard to read.
Bottom left is the newspaper idea from before. I couldn’t find as much text to cover the page however. So I made T, N and R extra large to fill space. It lost the newspaper feel I was aiming for. Bottom middle is the first idea I had. This one has the problem where the contrast between T and “imes New Roman” is so large that it is hard to tell they are in the same phrase. The last one spells out “Times New Roman” vertically. I don’t like the white space to the left. Also the lower case vertical letters are hard to read.
All the posters are too text heavy. After observing ideas of my classmates, I realized that I didn’t need to put so much text on the poster.
For the final iteration, I decided to experiment with the noisy piece. I remembered that someone recommended me to change the ambient characters to make the title stand out. I also liked how the characters look against a black background. It looks like a fancy newspaper. I wanted to experiment with the extra characters cutting into the black square. This did achieve the desired effect. Now, the extra characters look extraneous. So I deleted them.
At this point, I thought it would look much more natural to cover the entire upper portion of the poster with black to cover up the white space. I moved the author’s name and creation date to the top left corner, and changed the size of 1 in 1932 to be extra large.
Next I decided to experiment with positioning the Times New Roman somewhere else, and enlarging the T again. I realized that there was too much text in the bottom, so I deleted them and replaced with a simpler paragraph. There was a lot of space on the left side so I thought of placing the capital T there. I also adjusted the color of the black square to be lighter to make it look softer. I tried to experiment with cutting the bottom part of Roman and switch with another colour. This did not work too well and I thought the big T already introduced enough “surprise” to the poster. I aligned the three blocks of text on the left side, and moved “Stanley Morison down to align with the T. I changed the color of the left T to create a curve and make the white space flow into the black area.
The final version looks like above. I lifted Times New Roman slightly above the bottom edge so that they are more easier to read. I thought just touching the edge created some tension. In retrospect, I should have closed the gap between the “R” and “M” with “O” in “ROMAN”. The could have created an interesting curve. Also the “S” in “TIMES” looks a little farther away than the other characters.
After Tuesday’s demonstration, I modified the kerning a little to make the ‘O’ and ‘S’ appear closer to the other characters.
