Project Three: Type Specimen Poster

Typeface: Futura

Typeface Research

For some of the information I gathered about Futura for my poster, see https://medium.com/communication-design-fundamentals/project-three-research-736fce949eac#.kiomzk7ah

Sketching and Brainstorming

Below are 5 of the sketches I did for possible poster layouts:

When I was sketching, a lot of my inspiration came from the geometric nature of Futura. The designer of Futura, Paul Renner, focused a lot on simple, geometric shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles. So, I tried to pull this simple geometry into my poster.

In addition, I really liked the idea of using the letters in the background, especially since we were only allowed to use the typeface itself and color in the poster (i.e. no images or shapes).

First Poster Draft

For my first draft, I decided to play with the “X” background idea in the 3rd sketch. I experimented with different angles and arrangements until settling on this diagonal one below.

In this draft, I also experimented with the “Paul Renner 1927” triangle from the 2nd sketch. Below are two iterations I did of the idea:

The left arrangement is the first one I tried, closely following my original sketch. I liked how clear the inner triangle was, but felt like the overall outline of the shape was clunky. So, I tried condensing everything a bit in the right arrangement. However, This created some awkward spaces at the ends of “1927,” so I didn’t like this version any better.

Next, I decided to focus on the body paragraphs of the poster. Keeping with the geometric theme, I decided to try to make the paragraphs justified to create nice, clean lines and a square/rectangular look from far away.

After the paragraphs, I started working on the character set. Below are 3 iterations I did with various positioning.

My first attempt (left) focused on highlighting the angle of the “X”s and adding the geometry of the triangles in the top left and bottom right corners. I also thought it helped draw and direct the reader’s eye to the center of the page, establishing a clearer hierarchy. However, I wasn’t sure where to out the symbols from the character set, so tried a different arrangement.

My next attempt (middle) utilized the increased area available within the triangles of the “X”s. I thought this still outlined the shapes nicely and offered some interesting geometry. However, something about the proximity of the characters to the text just made the poster look a little too busy. In addition, it was difficult to get the character set to cover a logical portion of the “X”s perimeter.

My third attempt (right) tried to minimize the overwhelming feeling and awkward perimeter problem from the previous poster. I liked how the placement still emphasized the geometric shapes and drew the eye to the middle, but wasn’t competing with the other elements as much.

Feeling fairly satisfied with this draft, I decided to try out an entirely separate idea for a bit of breadth and to see what new ideas could come from it. Two of the ideas I tried are shown below:

In the left draft, I drew inspiration from my first sketch, creating a triangle with the name and character set. However, it was too difficult to split up the character set in such a way that the legs of the triangle could be even, so I eventually gave up on the idea.

In the right draft, I drew a bit of inspiration from the 5th sketch, focusing on making right angles with the text. However, I wanted the shape to be a square, which was proving to be difficult with the length of “Futura.”

Next, I started experimenting with the different characters in Futura. I was originally looking for good characters to put in the background and stumbled upon the brackets. Having just been searching for a way to create a square, they were just what I needed.

I started by framing “Futura” with the brackets. The shape is slightly rectangular, as making it square squished “Futura” a bit too much. Next, I experimented with an “O”s background, again playing to the simple geometric shapes of the typeface.

My next focus was the character set, and below are a few of the iterations I did for its placement:

First, I tried just “connecting” the brackets with a string of text from the character set (left most). However, this seemed to disrupt the Gestalt of the inner rectangle. So, in the next version (middle), I moved the baseline of the top row to the bottom of the bracket edge, and the ascender line of the bottom row to the top of the bracket edge. This helped outline the inner rectangle a bit better, but I thought it still left a bit of a strange space above/below the alphabet. I still had to do the numbers and punctuation, so I used those in the third version (right) to fill that space.

Below is the finished first draft of the second poster:

Next, I went back to the drawing board and tried to experiment with another completely different idea. I decided to pull inspiration from my first sketch, but less literally since that didn’t work out well in my previous attempts.

I looked to my keyboard again to see what shapes I could draw from the characters, and started experimenting with the triangular shape of the “<” and the square shape of the brackets. The progress of this draft is shown below.

First, I started with aligning “Futura” with the angular bracket. Again, I drew inspiration from my first sketch, making a triangle with the name of the typeface.

Next, I started adding more information and focused on “Paul Renner.” I thought it created an interesting effect to have the name almost cut out of the bracket and provided nice contrast to have it as a white figure above the black figure of “Paul Renner.”

I still really liked the idea of having the brackets frame part of the poster, so I put the paragraphs between the brackets. This created a nice, more square shape.

Next, I experimented with the character set. Below are two variations I did of the placement:

Ultimately, I liked the right version better. I liked how the vertical text helped elongate the poster and accentuated the vertical nature of the poster.

Next, I wanted to experiment with a bit of color and see how the poster could benefit from it.

I liked the starkness of the black and white, but also thought a red/orange color may be interesting. However, getting the color of “Paul Renner” to match the background proved to be challenging, so I decided to leave the poster black and white for now.

Still looking to experiment, I went back to my sketches. For my next poster idea, I drew inspiration from my 5th sketch with a square arrangement of “Futura,” “Paul Renner,” and “1927.” Below are some of the iterations I did of this idea:

First, I started by creating the square. I decided to use blue to help accent “Paul Renner.” Next, I added the quote and paragraph. I kept the justified paragraph, as I liked the geometric look of the clean margins. Lastly, I experimented with the character set. Going back to the geometric theme, I decided to play around with circles. I thought they contrasted nicely with the square in the middle and added nicely to the geometry of the poster. I also experimented with the background color, as shown by the middle and right iterations.

At this point, I was choosing between 4 posters to present for the mini-crit in class.

I had asked Kaylee and Julia for feedback on which to continue working on, and Kaylee said she liked the “X” poster, while Julia said she liked the posters involving the brackets. The triangle with “Paul Renner” interested me the most, so I picked the two below to show at the crit. In hindsight, I wish I had maybe picked the other bracket piece, with the “O”s in the background — I think it had the stronger hierarchy of the two bracket ideas.

At the crit, we put our posters on the board and were then given sticky notes to write one thing we liked and one thing we wished was on each poster. Below is a picture of my drafts at the critique with the stickies:

and here is a closer look at some of the comments on the notes:

In the verbal portion of the critique, the class focused on the left poster. In general, they said that the triangle and square seemed a bit disjointed from each other. There was also a comment that “Paul Renner” was a bit difficult to read. Another person suggested that I reverse black and white, which had potential to make it a bit more interesting. Kaylee also suggested that I make the paragraph text smaller.

The feedback on the stickies for the right poster included some mixed reviews on the “Paul Renner 1927” triangle — some said they liked it and some said they wished the information was separated. The notes also said that the use of “X”s was nice, but some wished that there was a bit more meaning behind them or that the colors were a bit more active.

Second Poster Draft

Going into my second draft, I wanted to start from scratch. Seeing my posters actually hanging in front of me and the comments from the critique made me realize that I was too focused on the individual elements (5 inches away) and had neglected the overall hierarchy and appearance of the poster (50 and 5 feet away).

In thinking of new ideas, I tried to focus on really making “Futura” stand out.

I thought there could be an interesting relationship between the T and U of Futura, since the U seems to fit into the T. So, I played around with this positioning as shown below:

I liked the way that the U complemented the space below the T, but felt that it made the word itself too disjointed. I wasn’t sure what effect having “fut” above “ura” would have on the way “Futura” was communicated.

So, I decided to leave “Futura” on a single line and decided to focus on the rest of the poster. I was still trying in 50 feet mode, looking for things to attract the eye from far away. I looked to my keyboard for inspiration again, and noticed the geometry created by the angled brackets. As shown below, I started experimenting with a pyramid shape formed by repeating brackets.

I liked the asymmetry of the overall shape and thought it added some interesting geometry to look at. I also liked that it built from left to right, following the direction of the italicized “Futura” and adding to the idea of moving forward from left to right into the future.

Next, I added the paragraphs. Again, I kept the justified alignment to continue the clean, geometric lines. I aligned it with one of the edge of one of the columns of brackets to create a nice relationship between the paragraphs and pyramid.

Next, I focused on the placement of the date and “Paul Renner.” Below are two different placements for the date:

The left placement just has “1927” centered within the brackets. I wondered if this disrupted the nice lines between the columns though, so in the right placement I right-aligned “19” with the left column and left-aligned “27” with the right column. I thought this spacing looked a bit awkward, so kept the left placement.

I also wanted to include “Paul Renner” somewhere within the pyramid, so experimented with two different placements as well:

In the left placement, I wanted “Paul Renner” to sort of fill that triangular space below the two brackets. In the right placement, I thought it might be nice to accentuate the diagonal lines with “Paul Renner.” Overall, I felt that the different lengths of “Paul” and “Renner” made the left placement look a bit awkward, so I stuck with the right placement.

With most of my information on this poster, I decided to try working on one more completely different draft with this new mindset of prioritizing the poster’s hierarchy.

In experimenting with “Futura,” I decided to have it read vertically for some variety. I also turned to my keyboard again, and started playing around with colons. I thought it was interesting how they created a sort of square grid, but were themselves two circles. Below is the arrangement I started working with:

After placing the title and the colons, I started adding the other elements and experimenting with color.

I asked Kaylee for a bit of feedback, and she suggested that I have “Futura” written horizontally but rotated vertically, since type really isn’t meant to be read from top to bottom. She also suggested I utilize the grid created by the colons. These edits are shown below, with the sideways “Futura” and clearer relationship between the margins of the paragraph and grid.

I also started working on the character set and tried to see how it could work with the grid as well:

I started arranging the characters to line up with the grid, as shown in the left photo. However, once I started working on the second row, I realized that the widths of the letters weren’t well suited for being put in a grid. The thickness of the M’s and O’s really stood out to me, making it difficult to arrange the characters in a nice, clean-looking way.

I decided to come back to the character set and test out some different ideas for the date:

In addition to the original “[1][9][2][7]” idea, I also experimented with incorporating “1927” into the grid. In the left placement, I typed “1927” into the grid, and in the right placement I added the numbers between the grid. Neither of these particularly stood out to me, so I decided to move on.

Going back to the first poster, I started experimenting a bit with colors as well. I looked up some color schemes, keeping an eye out for any that I felt fit a “futuristic” theme. I came across one called “Day and Night,” which had a dark blue and bright orange and yellow. I thought they looked really good together, and provided good contrast while also resembling the bright lasers/technology in space or darkness often associated with the future. So, I tried adding this color scheme to my poster:

In the left version, I just used purely the dark blue, yellow, and orange. However, I wasn’t sure that I wanted the paragraphs to be grouped in with “Paul Renner” and “1927” since they were all the same color. I tried to remedy this in the right version, having the name and date in a different, yet still bright, color.

I really liked these colors, so I tried using them in the second poster as well:

I then started experimenting with the character set again, bringing back the circular idea from my very first drafts as I thought the circles may work well with the circles in the colons. However, I felt that this left a strange white space in the middle right of the poster, which I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I tried a different idea:

With this arrangement, I had the letters themselves fill the space of the grid. However, given the number of characters, I found this to be a little too overpowering — I didn’t want to place that much emphasis on the character set.

Still not getting very far with the character set, I switched to the first poster for good.

To continue adding the information, I started working on the quote next. I tried a centered version, as well as a more offset alignment:

I liked the sense of direction/movement that the offset alignment had, but found the unequal gaps between the top and bottom lines and the margins to be distracting.

Next, I decided to play with the placement of “Paul Renner”:

In the left version, the name is placed closer to the 1927, which I thought nicely grouped the information of the origin of the typeface. In the middle version, I trie to accentuate the angle of the “A” and the idea of the text moving into the future. In the right version, I tried to give more of a relationship between the name and title. If “Paul Renner” was going to be close to “Futura,” I figured it could help to give them a clearer relationship in explicitly communicating that Paul Renner designed Futura. Ultimately, I settled on this third version.

Next, I focused on the character set.

In the first attempt, I tried to match the angle of the pyramid. However, this left an awkward space above the character set and next to the paragraph. In the second attempt, I tried to alleviate some of the awkward white spaces by centering the paragraph and having the character mirror the angled brackets. I also rearranged the pyramid to eliminate some of the harder-to-deal-with white space.

However, I didn’t particularly like either of these options, so I asked Kaylee and Julia for their opinions.

Kaylee suggested that I place the character set next to the paragraphs and right justify it so that there’s a nice relationship between the two. She also suggested I establish more relationships between elements using color or alignment.

To start, I added the character set. Per Kaylee’s suggestion, I right justified it and also aligned it with the column of angled brackets below it. In addition, I aligned the alphabet with the first paragraph and the numbers and punctuation with the second paragraph.

The left arrangement is the original one I did after reading Kaylee’s suggestions. I still felt like the white space may have looked a bit strange, so I played around with different positioning as shown in the middle and right arrangements, always aligning the paragraph and character set with the pyramid.

Ultimately, I ended up going back to the original, as I liked how the opaque character set on the left and the paragraph on the right drew the eye from left to right, continuing with the motion on the page.

Next, I started experimenting with color and trying to limit the poster to 2 bright colors in addition to the dark blue and white.

For the left and middle versions, I tried making “Paul Renner,” the quote, and the date all the same color. I thought this helped eliminate some of the distraction from having too many colors, but thought it created an unintentional relationship between “Paul Renner” and the quote, given their proximity and matching color. So, in the right version, I tried to see how the quote would look as orange, but thought this gave it an unintentional relationship with the paragraphs.

Overall, I liked the color scheme of orange, yellow and green better than orange, yellow, and pink. So, I left “Paul Renner” and “1927” in green and defaulted to having the quote temporarily white.

Then, I continued experimenting with the placement of the character set and paragraph, to see if the white quote changed how any of the options looked.

In the right one, I also tried the new arrangement of having the character set slightly lower the paragraphs, hoping to fill the white space next to the pyramid a bit more.

I wasn’t quite satisfied with this possible solution, so I started moving around the quote to see if this could solve anything.

In the left version, I tried to align the margins of the quote with the columns of brackets to follow that grid. In the middle and right versions, I started experimenting with filling that white space next to the pyramid with the quote.

However, I still felt that this left some awkward spaces to the left of the pyramid. So, I tried to format the quote such that it would follow the line of the pyramid and be somewhat of a complementary triangle shape, as shown below:

In the left version, I aligned the right margin of every line with the column of the pyramid below it. In the middle version, I also aligned the ascender line of the quote with the top of each row of angular brackets. In the right version, I aligned the baseline of the quote with the top of each row of angular brackets.

Below, is the poster with and without guide lines, showing the alignment of the different elements:

Overall, I liked the version above best, and emailed Kaylee and Julia for their feedback on it — I wasn’t sure if the leading was a bit too extreme. Julia suggested making the quote a bit smaller so that it didn’t fill all of the whitespace up. She also suggested I match the baselines of the character set with the baselines within the paragraphs.

I followed Julia’s suggestions and made the quote a bit smaller. I also aligned each row of the character set with two rows of the paragraphs. I still tried to have the quote align with the columns, as shown by the guide lines in the pictures below:

I also played around with the placement of the quote, trying to align it with different columns and parts of the pyramid, as shown below:

The left version has the margins of the quote aligned with the middles of the columns below. The middle version has the left margin aligned with the furthest bracket and the right margin aligned with the character set (and column below it). The right version has the left margin aligned with the middle of the column below and the left margin aligned with the character set.

In order to get a better perspective on the different placements, I did my first test print of the two posters below:

Here are 3 pictures of each poster from far away, middle distance, and close up, with the hopes of seeing how well the posters follow the 50–5–5 rule.

Overall, I liked the poster in the bottom row (with the quote extending further right) better. My worry was that it would break up the line between the character set and paragraph (and between columns), but I liked the larger text better and didn’t think it disrupted the line too much.

However, I wanted the text a bit bigger and wanted to change the green color so that it would be brighter. I also felt like the character set looked a bit too opaque compared to the paragraph, so I increased its opacity.

I did a second test print with the poster below:

Here are 3 pictures of the test print, following the same idea of 50–5–5:

Overall, I was pretty pleased with this print, so I decided to submit the file for the final print.

Final Poster

Below is the final poster that I sent to FedEx to print:

As part of this assignment, we also had to design with full bleed and then trim the posters. The trimming supplies, along with my poster and its edge are shown below:

Here is a closer image of the final, cut out poster:

Reflections

At the critique, people said that they liked the colors, particularly the bright yellow compared to the dark background. They also liked the pyramid made from the angular brackets.

Some of the critiques were that the date seemed to be placed out of the way, and wasn’t very noticeable. Another person wished that the pyramid continued all the way up, with one more bracket in the right most column. Kaylee pointed out that the character set and paragraph were competing a bit, and Julia suggested that the poster could have maybe benefited from making the character set even more opaque.

I agreed with the comment on the date — I think it was a bit out of the way, but I didn’t have a huge problem with it, because I thought it was pretty lowly ranked in the hierarchy. I kind of disagreed with wanting the pyramid to extend further because I liked the imbalance of the pyramid. I did agree though that the character set stood out too much. I think I overcompensated after my 1st test print in increasing the opacity.

In addition, I’m still not completely happy with the placement and sizing of the quote. I almost wonder if the poster could have just been fine as is, except without the quote.

Overall, I was generally pretty happy with the poster as a whole. I liked how bright the orange, yellow, and green turned out, giving a futuristic feeling. I also think the white pyramid offered something interesting to look at and made the poster more geometric, following the theme of the typeface.