Type Specimen Poster Documentation
When I first started researching Baskerville, I saw that the website typewolf.com had used the italic ampersand symbol as part of their logo. This italic ampersand was a distinguishing feature of Baskerville, and I wanted to center the poster around this graceful character. I also liked the idea of using the ampersand to tie together “John” and “Baskerville” as two separate elements into “John & Baskerville.” For my sketches not only did I try to focus on the ampersand, but also convey a classic element in the layout. From my sketches, I chose to move forward with the fifth one because it was the most like an elegant book layout, and Baskerville is often used as the typeface for books.
I began by playing around with the colors after placing chunks of text in their general positions. As I iterated through colors, I decided to add a a quote between “John” and “Baskerville” to add another layer of meaning to the separation between the two, as the quote is said by John Baskerville. The color schemes were mostly taken from colourlovers.com. During this process I also tweaked some things such as bolding “John” and “Baskerville,” the margins around each chunk, varying the overall shape of the character set, and etc. For figuring out placement of elements, I wanted to put more weight on the bottom half of the poster than in the middle, and thus put more white space at the top of the poster. The final color scheme was chosen because the “watermark” like feel of the ampersand was subtle, but still noticeable, and the colors were more classic than some of the other schemes without being conventional.
From critique, most people felt the poster was off-balance and that the colors did not necessarily work so well together. They did like the ampersand, and how it did not contrast greatly from the background. From the digital draft to printed copy, the colors were much more washed out, the background color appeared more yellow than green, and the red almost black. This made me come to the conclusion that my current color scheme would not work for a print version. Another point I noticed from the critique is that the title of the poster may not be interpreted as “Baskerville” but instead as “John Baskerville.” In my further iterations, I strove to fix those issues.
For the final poster, I played around with the colors more while attempting to keep the watermark-like property of the ampersand. I also reduced the length of the quote so that the quote itself would have more attention as it is less dense than the body paragraphs. I tweaked details such as the leading in the character set and the size of the body text, and centered the elements vertically on the poster. Initially, the color schemes were still drawn colourlovers.com, but those did not work as I wanted them to. I then chose background and paragraph colors based on the idea of an old book, with accent colors to draw attention to information and clearly delineate the hierarchy of the poster. In order to strengthen the idea that “Baskerville” is the title and not “John Baskerville,” I made “John” smaller and centered “Baskerville.” This weakened the relationship between “John” and “Baskerville” because the two words were too far in proximity, so I moved them closer together to relate them.
After the critique I had mixed feedback on the final colors I chose, but people on the whole were satisfied with the hierarchy of the poster. The colors were more saturated printed at Fedex than on the computer screen or in the test prints, which I take to mean that test prints should be done at Fedex. Overall, for an assignment about hierarchy, I learned mostly about how colors can promote hierarchy in a piece.
