Documentation of Typography Project

My assigned font was Baskerville. I did ample research and really wanted to focus on the history of John Baskerville, the creator, and the intended purpose of the font. First, I wanted to show that the font Baskerville was created as a modern twist on old typefaces. It was supposed to be a fancier font to create higher-quality books, and I used that theme for the first few designs I thought of. In the picture below, you can see some of my research notes. The top left design was supposed to be very clean, simple, and show the classic style of Baskerville. Next to that is one of two book cover designs. Since the typeface was made for book making, I wanted to emulate that page you see after you open the cover, before you start reading. I designed two versions for that, one centered in the middle and one leaning to the left for a more unique design that still looked somewhat like a book cover page. To the left of that one is one that was supposed to place Baskerville in the midst of the character set but have everything line up perfectly. I wanted to play with negative space and use as little space as possible to convey all the necessary elements. Lastly, I designed one focused on the creator, instead of the purpose of the font. Specifically, I focused on the fact that John Baskerville was known for being a great calligrapher and carver of gravestones, and I wanted the character set to form an outline of a gravestone and use the name of the creator and the font to look like the name of the person on the gravestone. These were all my original designs for the text, and I ended up coming up with a completely different design for my final work.

These are the digital iterations of some of those designs:

I did a few versions, and started with the more abstract one. I turned “Baskerville” on its side because Julia’s pet peeve is words placed vertically. Turns out, the spacing of the characters didn’t line up quite like how I sketched it. I scrapped that and moved on to the book cover page design. I actually really like how these turned out. As you can see, I did the centered and left leaning versions digitally, and I think I like the centered version more. These turned out exactly how I wanted, but my only issue was that it was too obvious, and too simple. I thought the concept of designing it literally exactly like what it was used for, with no modern twist or adjustment to make it unique, was too obvious to be satisfactory for a design class. I also liked it in black and white but I wanted to take advantage of our ability to use colors in this assignment.

The next two are slightly different iterations of the gravestone design. I wanted the grey to be like a tombstone and the text to look carved out, since John Baskerville was also a gravestone carver. The only difference between the two is using lighter background grey and darker font grey vs darker background grey and lighter font grey. I decided against this design because the font of the paragraph is too big for this project, but if I changed it, it would be too small to look appropriate on a gravestone.

After I tried some of my original designs I felt they were too obvious for the typeface. I wanted to play with something more abstract, and more interesting to look at. None of the other designs made me want to read about it. In the next iteration, I emphasized the “B” in “Baskerville” and positioned the rest randomly throughout the poster. It ended up looking awkward and unintentional and I knew I wasn’t in love with it, so I didn’t bother finishing it. I liked the direction though, so in the next iteration on the bottom left, I added another element to it. I found the original work John Baskerville first used his font to transcribe, and it was n edition of a book of poems by the ancient Roman poet, Virgil. There was no text of Virgil available online, so I looked for all the images of pages from Virgil I could find and manually transcribed enough text to cover the poster. I made the background a yellowed parchment paper color, manually whited out the text that went over the “B” and the “askerville,” and spaced out a rectangle between the text for the paragraph. I tried changing the font color of the latin text, changing the font color of the paragraph or the background, but in the end I just thought it was too overwhelming and not inviting at all. A whole page of text! Who wants to read that? My attempt to bring in the historical roots of the text failed again.

So I started over. Again.

The only thing I really liked was the way the “B” looked with the letters over it. I just had to figure out new words to go in it since I gave up on the latin poetry. Also, up until this point I’ve had trouble fitting in the character set without making it look awkward or copping out by hiding it altogether. So, it made sense for me to use the character set to layer over the B. However, since we had a bunch of punctuation to use, I couldn’t figure out a way to make all the punctuation and letters show just by fitting them over the B. I kept getting awkward gaps until I realized I could use the shape of the letters and numbers and punctuation to my advantage. I decided to comprise the B of letters and numbers in different sizes and rotations, capitalizing on the font’s flat edges and curves. I did this by first placing making individual text boxes for each letter, number, and punctuation, making them white, and arranging them onto the big black “B” I already had. Then, I selected all the individual characters, changed their font color to black, and deleted the black B behind it. The most notable characters in the set are the capital Q because of the unique swirly part under it, and the g because the bottom loop doesn’t close. I had wanted them to be a background graphic so I made them grey, and just included the part of the character that stood out which was the bottom of the Q and the open loop on g. The first version looked a little awkward, so I changed the paragraph, made B smaller, and switched the places so the B could breathe a little more. I uploaded these to Slack, and Robert commented on how cluttered it looked, specifically with all the competing aspects like the big letters and the big B. When I realized this, I made a few small changes according to his critique.

Looking at it now, I definitely could’ve taken it a lottt farther, but I did try to make the Q & g lighter!! Just for the record.

I printed the version on the right but it looked suuuuper purple so I changed the background color and ended up printing out the one on the right:

I was aiming for a blue-ish grey but it still looked a little lavender. Also the lighter background made the Q & g look even darker by contrast, and I hadn’t accounted for that. When I printed this out, the grey also came out a lot darker than I had hoped. After the class’ critique on Thursday, even though I turned in the one above, I still wanted to edit it and make it even better. This is what I came up with.

I think this helps the hierarchy as well since the most important things are black and go in height order. I made the grey much lighter, and even made the B in grey. The grey elements look a lot less competing and much more harmonious. I made the 1757 black since black in grey is much easier to read than grey in black. I honestly agreed with a lot of the criticism and it definitely helped me improve this a lot. I know I already turned it in, but in my heart, I consider this my final draft!

Thanks for reading!