Typeface Poster

For our third project in Communication Design Fundamentals, we worked on a typeface poster. For this project, the purpose is to create a poster that clearly conveys the information of a randomly picked typeface to the audience. We had to research the background history of the typeface and communicate that with a poster that only utilizes the given typeface and different colors. We needed to include the year it was created, the entire character set of the typeface, the author’s name, and also a short blurb on our findings of the typeface.

I began the project with a background research of the typeface. There were a couple key elements that I found through the background research of Gill Sans and the creator Eric Gill that I thought was very interesting. This typeface is used in settings that although are not completely formal but also not completely casual. For example, it is used for brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, BBC, and Penguin books. These brands all have a sense of formal setting to it as BBC is a news source, Tommy sells clothes that are semi-formal, and Penguin books publishes books. Therefore, I thought that the poster I create should convey a semi-formal theme to the audience.

I started off by just playing with the typeface itself. We learned a lot about the readability and legibility of the text, so I tested out various types to see how readable it was. For example, I tried all upper case, all lower case, and a mixture of both. I also played with kerning to see how various distances between characters will affect how it is presented.

Then I drew out a couple quick sketches on the sketch book to see how I could potentially arrange my poster and format each element that needs to be included on the poster.

After the preliminary sketches, I proceeded to put some of these ideas into action by creating them on Adobe Illustrator.

There were a couple things I tried to keep in mind when creating these sketches. It was the hierarchy of the poster, the readability of the poster, and the important messages that I wanted to convey about the typeface. I tried creating irregular shapes with some of the characters in the character set so that it can create an emphasis on those characters.

The desk critique gave me a better idea of what I should work on and I went along with one of the ideas and tried to refine it. Unsure of how to include the character set into the poster, I went on youtube and looked for videos that taught me how to insert text into other texts through Adobe Illustrator. I chose the character “t” for the character set because I liked the way “d” and “p” reflected each other to create emphasis; however, “t” was just there with not a lot of emphasis on the triangular top. By putting the character set into the “t”, it not only included the character set into the poster, but also makes the reader want to look at that area of the poster more.

I learned a lot through the first critique, and what changes are needed for the upcoming iterations. With the poster printed out, I realized that the “g” was actually very light in contrast with the background color. So I played around with the background color and the opacity of the “g.” I even tried other colors of “g” to see how that looked. Other colors of “g” did not work as the entire poster would be way too white. Then I decided to change the background color to a lighter shade of blue, and making the opacity of the “g” to 100% black. To increase the contrast. Other feedback I received was that the character set of the typeface was not clear enough, so I decided to include a set of character set in the top triangle of the “t” both creating a more apparent character set and also creating more emphasis on that top triangular part of the “t.” Furthermore, to help guide the reader’s eyes more, I made the first character of the paragraph larger and played with its kering to make sure that the paragraph is more readable. I also decided to change the two paragraphs from flush left to justified, because I thought that having it justified would create a more structured and formal feeling to the poster. However, with justified, I had to go into each like to set the tracking and kerning of the characters so there are no awkward spacing or holes in the paragraph.

This was the final piece that was printed out and trimmed. Extra space was left on the edge of the poster for me to trim of the white edges. For this poster I went for a simple and semi-formal look to match the typical settings Gill Sans is used for. I really enjoyed creating this project as it gave me exposure to different typefaces and also made me realize that different type face can convey various meanings. It was also pretty open ended so it allowed us to use our creativity and explore various different options.