Project 2: Final Documentation

Times Research

The font “Times” was first released in 1931 by the Times of London. They commissioned a new font specifically to be used for their newspaper. The head designer was Stanley Morision. Times was based on an old font called “Plantin.” After it was released in the Times of London, it became the main font used in the publishing industry. Soon after, a lot of popular variations came out of this font such as Times New Roman and Times Europa.

Inspiration Pulled from Times Research

I thought it was particularly interesting that this font was created specifically for one newspaper. That’s a pretty bold move to create a new font for the specific purpose of the London Times. I decided to roll with the ideas of London and Newspapers. It seemed like a nice idea to allude to what my poster was about using graphical elements.

Original Sketches

All of these sketches have some sort of “newspaper format,” particularly the middle image, and the sketch on the right of the first image. I also originally wanted to try to include a union jack somewhere (quickly realized that I didn’t like that idea.) One of my favorite things about researching the London times was their logo:

I had the idea to somehow make the logo out of text. Regardless of whether people understood the reference, it’s a nice graphical element.

Times Logo / Graphical elements

These were my attempts at making the logo out of text elements. I chose the second one because it more closely resembled the actual logo, and I felt like you could tell more in the second element that the characters are ascii characters.

I also tried alluding to the union jack using characters, and it ended up looking cluttered:

Playing with different Times Headings

These are two different versions of times headings. I preferred the one on the right because it highlighted the word “Times” which was a central component of this poster. I also immediately liked the idea of a “drop cap” for the body text. It’s elegant and reminiscent of a newspaper.

Building the Front Page

I kept going with the newspaper theme and tried to put a headline on the left and an “image” on the right. The headline emphasizes that the London times has created a new font, and tries to draw in some curiosity about what this “new face” is. I began playing with using the character set as an “image” in the newspaper.

I decided that using the character set next to the headline was too much text, so tried playing with some larger characters to make it look more like an image. But also decided to change that because the characters didn’t really have any significance.

I then tried using more of the logo as a background graphical element, and decided that it looked a bit cluttered.

I started playing with color and very large “T”s and liked the effect of a border that gave. My only issue with it still was the fact that the character set competed for the attention of the text, so I was debating whether to make it larger or smaller. But I still wanted it to fit within the newspaper.

Final

I ended up using the T to separate the title from the text, by putting a blue bar on the right of the title, and a red bar on the right of the text, and I liked the separation that it gave. It seemed more relevant to put the Bold, italic, and regular “Aa”s in the place of the image because it emphasized the fact that the poster was about font.

Post-Critique Thoughts and Improvements

I think the biggest lesson that I learned from this project was the fact that things look completely different and have a completely different effect when they are printed out versus when they are on my computer screen. On my computer the large elements on my poster seemed very pronounced and shocking. After printing it out I realized that my elements weren’t nearly “shocking” enough. Some people’s titles took up half the poster. I liked that I wanted to use the font’s history in an obvious way, but I think next time I need to just start designing something in big blocks, then add elements that I want to allude to something. I think overall, everything needed to be heavier. I struggled with trying to keep the newspaper looking like a newspaper while making the poster bold enough to catch people’s eye.