Typography Project Final Documentation
Andrew Jaung
Pre-design Sketches:
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.
History of Avenir:
I was assigned the typeface, Avenir. It is a very simple and clean sans-serif based typeface. My research on the history and its style follows below.
Feb 20th Documentation:
My lastest poster ended up not coming out exactly how I envisioned it. The day before the first crit for this project, my computer decided to crash on me. All my prior screenshots and project files were nowhere to be found so I ended up having to miss crit.
As you can see, I tried to play with a simple color scheme with darker elements being able to stand out against a lighter background.
My prior attempts that I unfortunately lost and I can’t display were much busier in design. I enlarged letters and symbols to their maximum size and overlapped them. By playing with the opacity, I was able to create a pretty cool complex background image with a viewer being unable to realize that it was created with the typeface itself. I tried to recreate that from memory for today’s final crit, but I couldn’t get it perfect so I had to change my design to something much more simplistic.
Here is my latest version. I like the name of the typeface being the only slanted piece of text. This draws your attention to the name of the typeface instantly. The larger letters scattered around that are unable to be fully seen in the printed form gather your attention from far away. The smaller text in the middle describing the typeface is there for further information if you are interested and step forwards towards the poster to read more.
I am glad I strayed from the idea of a busy background. Avenir is supposed to be a simple and geometric typeface. I translated that idea into the final layout, using the shapes of the letters themselves to give the poster life.
Feb 22nd: After the 1 on 1 Crit with Julia:
I ended up switching the background from the lightest color to the darkest color. Now the larger letters are the lighter color which gathers your attention from afar. Also after talking with her, I realized that I hadn’t thought of hierarchy that much. The 50'5'5" rule is very easy to follow in my opinion for this project. My lighter blue shades of color capture the audiences’ attention from 50' since they seem like abstract shapes. The major points: typeface name, designer, and year designed are smaller and bolded in white to stand out against the background. The description and the character map are in 12pt font, medium stroke. These are the very nitty-gritty details that someone would only be able to read if he/she were 5" away.
Final Project:
I ended up switching the layout of the characters and added an additional large block number (3) to the top left to fill in some extra space. I changed the kerning of the lettering to equally space it out and provide unity to the character map.
Compared to my pre-design sketches, I believe my design has evolved greatly. I liked the diagonal lettering from my second sketch, but shrunk it down. I also incorporated the large symbols and letters from the first design sketch to create a unique background. I really liked the idea I had in the 3rd design of vertical type, but since this typeface is meant to be read horizontally, I had to edit it to rotate the designer’s name and the year of design 90 degrees instead of having it vertically read.
After Crit Review:
After the crit, I discovered that people could not decide what was greater in degree in terms of hierarchy between the typeface name (Avenir) and the designer/year. After reviewing my poster, I do agree. Avenir and Adrien Frutiger/1988 are all generally about the same size. This does add confusion to the poster since humans generally read top to bottom, causing Adrien Frutiger to be the logical choice for title.
I enjoyed crit this time around much more than last time since people were very good at picking out “flaws” and things that were confusing/not correct. I am also surprised that even though others used characters from the typeface to create a background, during crit, people told me that mine doesn’t create any sort of tension in terms of hierarchy. The letters in the background, though the largest were actually seen as low on the hierarchy scale.
