Baskerville Process Documentation
Baskerville, a typeface known for its rounded serifs and high contrast characters, was developed by John Baskerville in 1754. John Baskerville desired to create this typeface with a softer feeling while emphasizing its perfection and true forms. In modern times, Baskerville is commonly used in books and magazines due to its high level of legibility.
In my initial sketches, I focused on illustrating the hierarchy of information. After playing around with order, sizing, and placing, I determined the hierarchy I wanted was, in order of importance:
- Typeface Name
- Typeface Designer
- Year
- Informational Paragraph
- Quote
- Character Set
I ended up focusing on the three designs illustrated below.
In this iteration, I tried to separate the important information from the extraneous by clearly dividing it with the slash. The name of the typeface is clearly the first focus of the poster as it is large and centered. The yellowish background was used to emphasize the age of the typeface, posing an analogy to aged, yellowing paper. I felt this design looked nice as a sketch, but did not convert well to its digital form. There was too much empty space and it did not tout the sense of perfection and form that John Baskerville was trying to convey.
My second version attempted to capture the history of John Baskerville. First, the black background is representative of his old business in japanning, which is to cover a surface in a hard black varnish. Furthermore, the red, blue, and yellow colors reflected his residence in Birmingham, England, as those colors are that of the local flag. Lastly, John Baskerville’s mastery of typography is especially demonstrated in the letters “Q,” distinguished by its swash tail, and “g,” where the tail almost, but not quite, touches the start of the lower curve. As such, I displayed those particular letters as an homage to Baskerville’s designer. However, I was unsure if the color scheme, being all primary colors, would appeal to those who did not understand the background of John Baskerville.
In my final iteration, I wanted to stay true to Baskerville’s primary use in books and literature by only using black and white. Also, I utilized the capital “O” to emphasize the vertical height of Baskerville’s characters as well as isolate important information, such as the typeface name, designer, year, and informational text.
By inverting the color scheme, I tributed John Baskerville’s japanning business, similar to the previous iteration.
To reflect the designer’s desire to obtain the true perfection of characters, I wanted some sort of an underlying theme of perfection as well. I demonstrated this by making each element or group of elements perfectly centered along the vertical axis.
After shrinking the font size, as suggested in the preliminary critique, I found I had extra room that made the poster feel empty. Therefore, I added the optional quote inside the “O,” filling it with more text. The space between John, Baskerville, and 1754 was also shortened as to make it a more cohesive unit. 1754 was also centered.
However, I did not like how the center became very text heavy and how the informational text was so close to the edge of the “O.” As a result, I lowered the “O” to be centered along the horizontal axis as well as the vertical axis to allot more space in the upper region of the poster. This way, I was able to move the quote outside of the “O,” freeing up vertical space that allowed the informational text to become skinnier. This made the most sense from a hierarchical standpoint as the quote was not important enough to be inside the “O.”
Ultimately, this became my Baskerville design submission on account that it paid homage to John Baskerville’s japanning background, emphasized the height of Baskerville’s characters, reflected its current use in books by only using black & white, and isolated certain information to allow for a clear visual hierarchy.
