Project3: Type Specimen Poster Documentation
The typeface I picked to explore is Avenir.
Here are some basic information about Avenir.
Designer: Adrian Frutiger
Year Designed: 1988
After years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces, in an interview with Linotype, Frutiger said he felt an obligation to design a linear sans in the tradition of Erbar and Futura, but to also make use of the experience and stylistic developments of the twentieth century.
The word Avenir means “future” in French and hints that the typeface owes some of its interpretation to Futura. But unlike Futura , Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. These nuances aid in legibility and give Avenir a harmonious and sensible appearance for both texts and headlines.
I brainstormed a few ideas for a poster that I can incorporate what I have learned so far in CDF (Typographical hierarchy, Voice exercise… etc)
Andrew, my friend in CDF class who also makes a poster for Avenir, also came up with an exactly same idea of poster. If you take a look at the sketch of poster on top right, we both thought of placing “AVENIR” diagonally across the poster.
I started working with the idea of splitting the word Avenir in two lines and makes the font size as big as possible.
Idea # 3. No. Lines too far from each other. I don’t like.
Moving on to Idea # 5.
Mhm. I like.
So the designer of AVENIR, Adrian Frutiger is from Swiss. Therefore I want to implement something that may give a sense his background. It does not have to be obvious. Also I want the background color to have another color along with white negative spaces.
Swiss flag looks like a white cross in a red background.
I initially tried to make the background as though it has a white cross in the center; however, it was messy. I decided to just have a white column to through the center of the text in the same direction.
The hue of red was too strong that it could easily take away observer’s attention from the body text. So I lowered the saturation and had color in a pastel tone. This way, the background is more subtle and possible to effectively support the body text.
In order to create more emphasis on the body text, I brought the idea of dropshadow. The color of the front layer is pastel blue as an complimentary color of pastel red. They go quite nicely together. Looks like a cotton candy.
After the most important parts are fixed, I played with arrangements of Designer’s name, Year it was created, Descriptions, and a few other ways to decorate the poster with letters and symbols.
Hierarchy (or What I believe as the flow of observation)
Body Text (AVENIR) > Designer & Year > Description & Type Texts.
And here is the first draft of poster for critique.
Throughout the critique, I received a lot of thoughtful feedback from peers and teachers.
Important critique on my work.
- Color complement works well that makes the title stand out clearly. Fun use of color.
- Overall, Good hierarchy use.
- The informative text (description) looks out of place, especially with its centered shift. Black on pink causes eye strain. ← valuable feedback
- Some stuff like }}} or *^^* or # or & are distracting and random.
- Contrast between pink and blue for texts are not recognizable.
****MAJOR PROBLEMS****
Informative text (eye strain, hard to read)
randomness with texts with lacking contrast between pink and blue.
unnecessary background garments
I eliminated all the problematic components of the poster to start all over.
Originally I had type characters in blue vs pink contrast because I wanted them to be not as visible because I considered they had a lower priority. However, the fact that it may give observers eye strains bothered me.
No unnecessary background water marks of random symbols anymore.
Capital and lower case alphabets alongside the white column. Small enough to not distract the viewing. It seems quite nice. I have put all the special characters and numbers mashed up in top left corner, but it does not look good. Also, I experimented with new technique of manipulating the shape of text box but not neat yet. The informative text needs work.
I created a layered triangular space in the bottom right corner to give out informative text. Light blue & Darker blue mix. Subtle tones. Color of the text, White vs Black. White looks better.
Last set of pieces to go on the poster.
Going back to the Poster Idea sketch #3, I have an idea of numbers and symbols going vertically. I brought that idea for this last piece of poster.
……………………….. I go with the first one. But then they look so lost.
……..No
To balance the whole poster out, I made a block of blue space. It looks pretty good, but….
Okay. I prefer this one.
FINAL PRODUCT
Final Product
Yay. Overall, I am very satisfied with how it turned out.
