Assignment Due Monday Feb 13th
Typographic Hierarchy:
For this assignment, we were given a block of text and were asked to manipulate it to make it clearer.
1: Linespacing
For linespacing, I tried to block off information that I thought was most important and that related with similar information. For my first attempt, by only spacing out the lines, I separated the 3 events by date. At the top, the main title stands alone, “Carnegie Mellon HCI Institute” and at the bottom, Admission free stands alone. I felt that in my first iteration, the location at the bottom was too packed. I ended up separating the campus address with the location and time of the actual event. I also split up the main title of the seminar “The Z-Axis Seminar Series” by itself which I plan to single out in other exercieses.
2: Typographic Weights
For typographic weights, I chose the two weights Helvetica Neue light and bold. I chose these two to contrast since bold did not stand out very well against the normal weight. In my first iteration, I bolded the very minimal information I thought would be necessary to stand out. There is the institute and the seminar name, the major dates of events, the time and place, and the price. These pieces of information to me were the most important. In my second iteration, I bolded the same as the first, but I bolded the speaker names as well. To some people, the name of the speaker may or may not help in deciding whether to attend or not.
3: Weights and Horizontal Shift
For weights and horizontal shift, I followed my previous logic. More important “sub headers” would be bolded, and other less important information would be a light weight and shifted over to the side. This gave each iteration a lot of contrast that helps you to focus in on the key points. In the first example, I bolded the dates, time and location of the speakers. This was a barebone approach but you can easily see what happens during each day. The second iteration, I decided to put the names of the speakers in bold and not shifted over. This left the name of the presentation unbolded and not as important to glance over. I also unbolded Rashid Auditorium. I felt with the names bolded now, there was too much information thrown at the audience. I unbolded Rashid auditorium and blocked it with the rest of the Carnegie Mellon campus address.
4: Weight and Line Spacing
For weight and line spacing, I used the same bold vs light weights to provide a great deal of contrast. Bold was used for the main headers. For my first iteration I believed that the dates once again were the main points. I also ended up bolding the time, place and price again since this is necessary information to me. Immediately under the date is the speaker and his/her presentation. In the second iteration, I wanted to space things out a little, even though it may not appear as nice as my first iteration. I added the speaker name to the bolded title under the date and spaced out the presentation name in its own block.
Pre-design Sketches:
For our poster design, we were required to make 5 different sketches to plan out the poster itself. I tried to go 5 different routes:
For sketches 1 and 2, I tried to incorporate elements from the prior black square project. For each of these designs, I focused on size and location. For the first sketch, I wanted to use the ampersand, a large and complex symbol to use as a background. I wanted it to spill off the page and I will possibly add other large symbols to create an interesting overlapping background. For the second poster, I wanted to stress the name of the typeface, Avenir. I also want to enlarge the quotations to possibly surround the bodies of text and characters I have to put in.
Sketch 3 and 4 are more simplistic designs with a focus on the locations rather than background appeal. Sketch 3 follows a vertical format similar to Japanese poetry. For a project with so much to add (symbols and characters), a vertical format seemed like a good way to use the longer vertical space of a page. The fourth sketch is a general article type poster layout. In the top box, I plan on finding examples of popular text that uses the Avenir font and adding the body of writing underneath.
Though this last sketch doesn’t look complete, there is a lot I plan on doing for it that I can’t possibly draw up on one design: so I left it bare for room for interpretation. The main focus of this layout is to illuminate the Avenir’s geometric style. I thought of somehow incorporating music staff lines into my poster to somehow show off the letter heights. I may also incorporate some sort of background using characters as seen in my first sketch.
