Project 3: Type Specimen Poster
Inspiration and Sketches
When I started designing my poster, I considered what Times font was designed for — newspapers. So I looked at many different newspaper layouts, particularly the old and new versions Times of London newspapers, and paid attention to how newspapers established hierarchy. Since we are not allowed to use textures, I quickly decided on using a newspaper-grey or tan color background.
In my sketches, I explored many variations of three completely separate ideas. The first was based on the Time Magazine cover layout, with a thin red border, bright colors and a large featured image made with characters. The second was based on the character ‘T’. I thought the symmetry and straight lines of the letter ‘T’ to fit very the newspaper grid theme very well. The character set would appear to fall through a tunnel through the middle of the ‘T’, and pool at the bottom of the poster, while the information and date would be separated by the ‘T’ as well. My last idea, the strict newspaper layout, was the one I ended up using, because I felt it fit the purpose of the font most closely.
In addition, most of my sketches incorporated the perfectly aligned columns, the well-tracked lines, the grid layout, and top to bottom hierarchy that characterize newspapers. However, the rigidity of the perfect grid made the poster space seem confining, even if the words bleed off the page. So I started tilting all the contents by 30 degrees to create the effect of a snapshot of a large newspaper spread. I also made all the text quite large to create the effect that the poster is a close up view of an old newspaper. This was inspired by various close up photos of articles, and I felt that this would make my newspaper design appear historical and aged.
In the corners of my sketch page, I explored individual components that I could use on my poster. The brackets at the top right were attempts to symbolize the Times of London logo. I used the simple bracket to represent the logo in my first draft, but took it off later since viewers did not understand what it was. In the bottom left of the page, I explored ways to arrange the character set as an image to add variety to my newspaper.
The old newspapers that I looked at had very dense , small text, drop caps, and little to no images (most likely due to complexity of printing images back then).
This design from linotype.com’s article on Times font uses different styles of the character ‘a’ as images in the newspaper design. They also used bleeding to suggest that this canvas is merely a small portion of a large newspaper spread.
In my first draft, I used similar size proportions as this sample from The Times of London. To emphasize the “snapshot” affect, I made the title text extra large so that it bled off the page, and the body text 18 pt font to make the piece appeared magnified (see below).
This image I found most closely resembles the hierarchy I used for my first draft. THE TIMES, in all caps, is the largest. I made the date much larger on my poster since it is more significant to my poster than to newspapers. The body text is preceded by a segment of bold, large text that introduces the article. The first word of the body text is in all caps (not small caps), and the rest of the body text is in what looks like 12 pt font but may be smaller.
This modern newspaper was designed to be viewed on electronic devices instead of the traditional newspaper, but it retains the large, bold article title, all caps for first phrase/line/word, and the thin columns.
First Draft
I decided to use Illustrator rather than InDesign for this assignment since I thought the rotated grid would be easier to work with on Illustrator. The two images above are my first attempts at creating the newspaper title and date. In one of my sketches, I used an enormous ‘1’ in 1931 to act as a structural divider for my newspaper, and also as my “interesting thing” from 50 feet away. However, due to Times being a serif font, I quickly found that using serif fonts as shapes and dividers was harder than I expected, since the serifs make the characters very obviously characters, and not shapes. So I abandoned the large ‘1’ idea, and made it the same size as the rest of the date.
However, only having 1931 in that long diagonal space beneath TIMES made that line seem awkward no matter how I placed the 1931 (left, center, right justified…). So I did some extra research and decided to add the month Times was published to the date as well. I looked at proper formatting for abbreviated dates, and it seemed like most sources recommended the period. However, the period created two problems. First Oct. 1931 was now too long, so I would have to make the text smaller (this was not actually a big problem). Secondly, however, the period created an awkward pause right in the middle of the date line. So I got right of the space, and it read ‘Oct.1931’, which didn’t feel right either since there should been distinction between ‘Oct’ and ‘1931’. Eventually I removed the period and just kept ‘Oct 1931’. I tried using normal capitalization, all caps, small caps. I found out that small caps only affects letters, which meant that OCT and 1931 now had different heights. All caps didn’t look right either, because ‘O’, ‘C’, and ‘T’ are naturally wide letters, so ‘OCT’ looked huge compared to the same sized ‘1932’. I ended using all caps with a lot of attention to kerning, and a smaller font size.
At the same time I also decided on the background color. I explored different tones of grey and tan to find a good balance between a grey newspaper ink tone, and the yellowish tones associated with aged paper. The image on the left was too bright, so I ended up using the color on the right as my final background color. (More on this later).
In the top left image, I added my body text — the paragraph I wrote in the previous Medium post, on the font’s background and purpose. Even at 18 pt font, and even if I had already added my plan for the character set, I felt that the canvas appeared too empty. So I went back to linotype.com and copied some more repeated or less important text about Times to add to my newspaper. In order to prevent the trivial text from distracting viewers, I used a lighter shade, smaller font size to deemphasize it. In fact, the extra text ‘s main purpose is to act as a texture to the background, so I chose a similar but slightly darker tone of my greyish-tan background color. In addition, to prevent viewers from trying to read the filler text, I purposefully let the text bleed off the page so that viewers will (hopefully) understand that the text is not meant to be read. This is why I extended the bottom block of text so that it extends past the bottom right corner.
To further emphasize exactly what text I wanted viewers to be looking at, I made the first paragraph larger, and bolded. This is similar to how the newspaper samples I looked at before had bolded titles, or snippets before the actual article. If I only wanted basic information about Times font, I would only need to look at this bolded paragraph.
Throughout the entire process, I made sure to track my body text carefully so that there were no awkward gaps, or orphans. Note that in these two images the bottom text doesn’t reach the bottom right corner because I actually extended the text much later. (see above)
I then added the character set as I planned in my sketch. However, I found that in order to avoid having the character set compete with the body text and keep the whole poster balanced, it was better to make it the same size and color as the trivial text. So the character set became part of the texture as well. This meant that the full character set as required in the assignment guidelines, plus small caps, was not enough to fill up the space. So I got some special characters that filled up the space perfectly. At this time I didn’t know about changing the shape of the text box yet, so I painstakingly tabbed, spaced, and tracked each line to where I wanted them to be. I also tried out different options for alignment, but due to my tabs and spaces, any alignment other than right aligned would mess up all the spacing. I ended up fixing this problem much later when I learned how to change the text box shape.
I then added the horizontal bracket I drew in my sketches to act as the Times of London logo. The bracket wasn’t wide enough to envelope the date, so I had to use a very large font size. I also moved it around the space at the top left corner to avoid awkward spaces on the edges, and between the bracket and the date.
Taking a step back to look at my entire piece, I realized that I had a lot of text. Even with the paler colors and smaller size, the entire piece looked too dense. So, deviating from the text-filled old newspaper layout, I decided to incorporate some of my sketches for images made with text.
I really liked the simplicity of using ‘a’ and ‘A’ as images, because it seems as if my newspaper was using giving readers a sample of this new font. This idea came from the linotype.com design included above. I used lines turned at 30 degrees to make the lower-case ‘a’ the same height as the first paragraph, and added a caption to make it clear that this was an image. I also added upper-case ‘A’ below the lower-case ‘a’ to establish a pattern, so that the lower-case ‘a’ wouldn’t seem like a random image in a page of text. Some people commented at the critique that they could imagine the font sample continuing through the alphabet off towards the upper right direction.
Again, zooming out to look at my poster, I realized the huge font size and bold black lines of the ‘a’, competed with the bold black lines with the title, date, and bracket. So I explored different ways of deemphasizing the a’s.
The reason I explored using borders was because I felt like using plain grey, the same tone of grey as my trivial text, make the entire poster look flat and washed out. While experimenting with darker shades of grey, I stumbled upon using two of the same characters, overlapped at an optimal spacing, as a 3 dimensional image. The darker grey ‘a’ serves as the shadow for the original ‘a’, and now the original ‘a’ seems to literally pop out of the page. I quickly replicated this effect on the upper-case ‘A’ below it.
The space to the right of the lower-case ‘a’ seemed like an awkward space, so I brought back the text I put there before and spaced it to fit around the image.
Critique and Comments
When I printed out my first draft, I was quite pleased with the way the grey tones turned out. The background looked more grey than it did on the screen, which fit the newspaper theme well, so I decided to keep the same background color. The a’s turned out to have tones of blue in them that came out quite clearly, so in my final draft I used a slightly warmer tone. I also noticed after I printed my first draft that the block of text in the middle, and the title block formed a large slanted T down the middle of the page. The black text of the title and body text formed a pattern that allowed me to see the T quite clearly, especially from a distance.
At the first draft critique, I received positive comments on the newspaper design, text bleeding off the page, and the 30 degree upward tilt. However, there were also comments on how dense the text was, and lack of spacing between elements. After talking to Julia and Kaylee after the critique, I decided I had to to deemphasize the trivial text a bit more.
Revisions
The first change I made was to move Stanley Morison, the font designer’s name, out of the body text into it’s own element, and decided the most logical way to place his name was as the author of the newspaper article. I noticed that everyone else in class did this, and the posters where this was unclear got constructive comments on how to make the font designer’s name clearer. This also added more white space between the title block and body text. I also un-bolded the first paragraph due to comments on how bolding an entire paragraph gives it too much emphasis, and that the lack of contrast makes it harder to tell what’s really important.
After aligning ‘Stanley Morison’ and the body text to the rest of the grid, I worked on finding a new way to emphasize the start of the body text without bolding the entire first paragraph. I tried bolding the first two words, all caps, small caps, larger size, same size…etc. I also tried to set the emphasized body text apart from the designer’s name.
The image above shows one of the variations I tried. At this point I felt like this looked pretty good — the author’s name and the first line both stood out, but since the author’s name was in small caps the two didn’t seem to compete too much. But the similar sizes for the two made me doubt whether the last statement was actually true. I asked Kaylee for some advice.
In a separate artboard, she changed my first line to the same size as the body text, and used small caps there instead. She also advised me to use a drop cap ‘I’ to emphasize the beginning of the paragraph, like many newspapers I looked at. Stanley Morison was changed back to normal capitalization, but I kept the font size. Since Illustrator doesn’t have a convenient way of creating drop caps like InDesign does, I had to manually adjust the letters and use guidelines to imitate InDesign’s drop cap.
Changing the font size to the recommended 12 pt font created a lot of empty space on the center column. So I tried to replace the trivial text at the bottom of the page with another text-image. I first tried to put a large Z in the center column (I was planning on moving the a’s to the left side to make it look like A-Z). However the Z looked out of place, so I returned to just using the a’s and rethought my placement of the character set.
I moved my character set into the negative space of a large, column-width upper-case A. This time I was able to use the text box shape to align the characters instead of resorting to tabs and spaces.
After adding the entire character set and the special characters, there still weren’t enough characters to fill up the square space around ‘A’, so I changed the tracking, leading. The character set looked very monotonous, so I also tried to add variety by strategically choosing letters and making them larger sizes. The differently sized letters draw some attention to the details of the text-image, but not enough to compete with the other elements of the poster. I moved all the symbols to the awkwardly empty triangle in the middle of the ‘A’, and reassigned some of the special characters to the bottom of the ‘A’.
Finally, after hours of rearranging the characters and tracking, I finished my text-image. Next, I tried to change the colors of different blocks to create a gradient, but later decided it was unnecessary. I also tried to create a falling effect by using progressively larger leading space and sparser text towards the bottom of the text-image.
I also readjusted all the spacing between elements to create more white space, so that the poster would not look as dense. This required more adjustments of the drop cap, and the lower-case ‘a’ to match the body text. I then added a “CONTINUED ON PAGE 6” as additional reference to the newspaper theme. I changed the trivial text color to be slightly lighter than before, to deemphasize it. I also spent time re-tracking the the trivial text to make sure there were no awkward spaces.
Notes: I was not entirely pleased with how the final print turned out, since the colored ink on cardstock paper had more yellow-red tones than when I printed on normal paper. Also, the small, lighter colored trivial text appeared grainy. I did not reprint due to assurances from the Fedex workers that this was perfectly normal.
