Type & Hierarchy

Print / Illustration, 2018, Individual Project

About the Project

This project was the third project for a university communication design course. The aim of the project was to explore typography and hierarchy in order to design a type speciman poster for a particular typeface; in this case, Garamond. The poster was meant to emphasize and showcase the typeface’s unique qualities as well as to recognize its history and usage today. The constraints for the project were that only type and basic shapes were allowed, with a minimum of three levels of hierarchy and two weights of typeface, and that one spot color (in addition to grayscale) could be used. Some of the variables we could experiment with were scale, weight, linespacing, indentation, color, tone, value, texture and position. The learning objectives of the project were “elicit the power of typographical signals for clarity and immediacy, adjust [them] to affect message and content, and discover how [they] serve as visual cues for hierarchy and association,” as well as to “acquire a methodology for approaching all messages”.

Project Process

Background

In order to design the type speciman poster for Garamond, I conducted some research on the typeface and assembled some potential content to highlight and display on my poster.

Garamond is a font named for the sixteenth century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, and has developed over centuries to refer to the group of fonts that resemble early modern French printing. Many modern ‘Garamond’ revivals are actually based on the work of Jean Jannon, a punch cutter active from the seventeenth century whose work was wrongly attributed to Garamond for many years because of its similarity. Garamond is classified as an old-style serif typeface. Claude Garamond created Garamond as he cut types for a Parisian scholar-printer named Robert Estienne. In the early 1900s, the types that Jannon created were used to print a history of printing in France, which brought attention to the ‘Garamond’ types and French typography and led to the development of modern revivals. In 1989, Adobe released a modern version of the font called ‘Adobe Garamond’, designed by Robert Slimbach and based on the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon. Garamond is marked for its elegance and readability. Some distinctive features of Garamond are an ‘e’ with a small eye and the bowl of an ‘a’ with a sharp hook upwards. The x-height of the letters is low, which makes the capitals look large relative to the lowercase letters.

Name of Designer: Claude Garamond

Year: 1499–1561

Features: e, a, x-height, capital letters, W

Quote: Adobe type designer Robert Slimbach has captured the beauty and balance of the original Garamond typefaces while creating a typeface family that offers all the advantages of a contemporary digital type family.

Initial Sketch and Digital Iterations

I initially thought of highlighting the quote that I found on Garamond, using hierarchy to point out the characteristics mentioned in the quote. The font name, designer and year would be ‘cascading’ down at the bottom half, and I was thinking of using the character set of Garamond in the background as a light grey, to sort of create a misty, surreal effect.

My first digital iteration looked like this:

I had liked the content of the quote, but struggled with the way it was displayed on the poster. I also generally felt this iteration looked too busy. The character set in the background ended up looking nice, but with it overlayed with the quote, things became a bit distracting and unreadable. Since I struggled with finding an ideal design of my quote through several iterations, and I needed to simplify the poster, I wondered if I needed all the content I had. A few of the things I noted from this iteration were that I liked the unique shape of the capital W of Garamond and the look of the character set in the background, as well as the choice of typeface for the font name, designer and year (all capitals for font name, regular Garamond). It was also pointed out to me by my instructor that my spot color was too similar to black and sort of blended into the rest of the type, so I decided to explore further with my spot color for my next iterations.

For the next iteration, I decided to in a way start from scratch, while keeping in mind some of the things that were good in my previous iterations. I decided to first work on building my background with the character set, thinking back to the way I was thinking of doing it in my sketch, with it sort of creating a surreal background effect. When I was finished placing all my characters and the character set formed a complete background, I realized that it was much more effective in displaying the typeface and the meaning of the quote, than using the quote itself. I decided that the actual quote was not necessary, and could be encapsulated by my design in a more effective way, so I decided not to use it. In addition, though I had liked the capital W of Garamond, it didn’t make sense to highlight the one letter when I had already placed all the lowercase letters on my posters and already created a background. This is how the next iteration of my poster looked:

I felt it was an improvement over the original direction of digital iterations. One of the things I wondered was whether I should have used the capital letters of Garamond instead of the lowercase ones, since when I placed the character sets side by side, the capitals looked much nicer and elegantly formed than the lowercase letters. In addition, some of the feedback I received was it was a little bottom heavy, in that the top portion of the poster sort of fades into the background and may look a little empty. A suggestion was to use my spot color to add more to the body of the poster. After talking it over with my instructor, I decided to stick with the lowercase letters as the faint background of the poster since it created a nice constrast to the capital letter title of GARAMOND at the bottom and also thus showed a fuller range of the typeface, but realized that I could still incorporate the capital letters of Garamond into the body of the poster by using a different design.

I ended up placing selected capital letters through the posters, sort of cascading in their own pattern, and used a bright, pale blue to highlight them. This way, the capitals still stood out against the lowercase, and was meant to accomplish my goal of more prominently highlighting the forms of the capitals instead of the lowercase (the constrast between lowercase and uppercase also was meant to make the capitals stand out more, as well as the difference in size, which was also done to prevent the patterns from becoming overwhelming). I was able to incorporate my original capital W, as well as select other capitals whose forms were unique and especially nice looking. I also took into account the way that a capital letter would fit into the background of the lowercase and made sure they still coordinated — though it was two different sets, the poster and entire typeface should still be connected. My next iterations just focused on finding an ideal placement and integration of the capitals, and my final iteration looked like this:

In the end, the surreal effect was meant to highlight the aesthetic and old-style of the font, as well as its longevity. It also gives the poster a bright and airy feel. The capitals of the font name were chosen to imply structure, elegance, and prominence, as Garamond is used in many book series today.

I’d like to thank the instructors of my communication design course, MacKenzie Cherban and Suzanne Choi, for giving me feedback and helping me with the development of my designs in this project.