51261 Project 3: Type & Hierarchy
Introduction
Project three is about designing a type specimen poster using variables such as gestalt, scale, rhythm, line spacing, indentation, color, tone, value, texture, and position. Before getting started with the poster design, we started off with a couple of typography exercises.
Getting Started
Sept. 24, 2020
Exercise 1
We are asked to explore how fonts affect the meaning and emotional feeling of a word in this exercise, I choose to explore the word trust.
The word “Trust” to me is often associated with stability, strength, and ability.
- Myriad Pro: This sans serif font has a neutral tone, the contrast is also low. The overall feeling of this font is stable, calm (and probably versatile to a lot of settings). While it certainly has this stable feel, when expressing the concept of trust, it lacks a bit of weight and contrast.
2. Source Serif Variable (Roman): This is a slab serif font. The contrast is a bit low compared to other serif fonts. Although it has more contrast than the Myriad Pro font, I feel like the contrast is still not enough to convey the strength of the word “Trust”.
3. Algerian: This is a very decorative and pleasing serif font to look at! It almost reminds me of the posters for circus in vintage movies. However, because of its ornamental nature, it’s hard for me to connect this font with the semantic of “Trust”.
4. Amador: This font has a very formal, classic, or even an authoritative tone. When looking at it, I often think of the legal or foundational documents written on parchment paper. I feel like it is strong, stable, and suggesting authenticity — personally, it reinforces the meaning of “trust”.
5. Engravers MT: This serif typeface have really strong contrast and very wide letterforms. It certainly gives me a very formal feeling — I connect this font to silver or gold engravings on stones/metals. It has this lasting, and strong feeling which I think coincides with my understanding of the word “trust”.
Research Typeface
I am assigned the typeface Didot.
- Typeface Designer: The Didot Family. Pierre Didot, the printer, published a document with the typefaces of his brother, Firmin Didot, the typeface designer.
- The year it was designed: 1784–1811 (mostly)
- History & the purpose of its form: The Didot family were active as designers for about 100 years in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were printers, publishers, typeface designers, inventors, and intellectuals. Around 1800 the Didot family owned the most important print shop and font foundry in France. Pierre Didot, the printer, published a document with the typefaces of his brother, Firmin Didot, the typeface designer. The Didot typeface was originally developed for stereotype printing. The strong clear forms of this alphabet display objective, rational characteristics and are representative of the time and philosophy of the Enlightenment. Adrian Frutiger’s Didot is a sensitive interpretation of the French Modern Face Didot. Another model for this design is the Henriade, a historical printing of the original Didot from 1818. The font Didot gives the text a classic and elegant feel. In fact, the font became popular in the 1960s in lots of fashion magazines.
- Full character set:
- (A quote): “Effortlessly beautiful but honed and crafted.” https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/gallery/2013/sep/14/the-10-best-fonts
- Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_(typeface), https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/didot/
5 Sketches of ideas for poster
Before sketching, I browse https://www.typewolf.com/, https://www.instagram.com/swissgraphic/, https://p-so.gr/, https://www.instagram.com/typosters/?hl=en, and https://www.instagram.com/the_daily_dose_of_design/?hl=en for inspirations.
Sept. 28th, 2020
Exercise 2
In exercise 2, I explored the typographic hierarchy. I choose 4 different exercises and made two different explorations for each exercise (a total of 8) using the text provided.
I choose:
- linespacing
Requirement:- Select one weight (Helvetica Neue light, roman, medium, or bold).
- Set all the type in that weight.
- Insert one full linespace between lines of type of your choice.
- You may not insert more than one full linespace between any two lines of type.
The second exploration has an additional linespace between “Human Computer Interaction Institute presents” and “The Z-Axis Seminar Series”. When creating the second exploration, I wanted to highlight the topic of the seminar series. However, it did not turn out as good as expected. Because there are no other typographic signals that are linking the host (CMU HCI institute) with the name of the seminar series, the connection and relationship between these two seem a bit loose. Also, the visual rhythm in the second exploration is not as good as the first one (the first one is more compact and readable).
- typographic weights
Requirement:- Select any two weights (Helvetica Neue light, roman, medium, bold).
- Set all the type in a combination of those two weights.
- For your option 2, explore all four weights in combination.
- No linespacing.
The second exploration has more variations between the weights. Because of this, the second exploration demonstrates the nuances in the information architecture better (shows more structures within the information). However, I really cannot tell if I like it more than the first one. The first one has the merit of higher contrast, therefore the most important information stands out more in the first exploration. (Because of the lack of other visual signals such as linespacing, the nuances in showing the information does not really stand out in the second exploration.) The shortcoming of the first one is the lack of weights for a more refined visual hierarchy. I feel that the date should not be in the same weight as the topic of the seminar series, while at the same time I felt that the date should pop out more than the content to guide the users’ reading rhythm.
- indentation
Requirement:- Select one weight (Helvetica Neue light, roman, medium, bold).
- Shift lines of type horizontally left or right, resulting in only two or three flush-left margins.
- No linespacing.
I made the schedules in the second exploration having varied indentation compared to the uniform indentation in my first exploration. I personally like the second exploration better, because the schedules are less crowded together, which means better readability.
- typographic weight & line spacing
Requirement:- Select any two weights (Helvetica Neue light, roman, medium, bold).
- Insert one full linespace between lines of the type of your choice.
- You may not insert more (or less) than one full linespace between any two lines of type.
The main difference between the two explorations is that I boldfaced the time and location in the first exploration but boldfaced the name of the speaker and the title of the talk in my second exploration. I personally prefer the first one because I find it easier to read through with only a little bit of content boldfaced (the date) rather than the whole chunks of content boldfaced.
Iterations of the Poster
Sept. 28th, 2020
Designing Digital Drafts
Inspired by pink in fashion magazines (especially in the 1950s~1970s)
Also inspired by elegant color palettes in those retro women magazines.
The third poster design was inspired by concrete poems, I wanted to add some y2k and futuristic elements to this classic font — popularity is fleeting, style lasts forever. I was also using a bit of randomness in the layout to highlight the “effortless beauty”.
For the fourth design, I explored using funky colors, but still (wanted to make it look) very elegant!
The fifth direction for poster design also incorporated a bit of y2k style and was inspired by concrete poems. I wanted to add futuristic feelings to classical typefaces. I really wanted to incorporate edgy and futuristic elements in this poster because the Didot font was quite revolutionary in an era of progress (the Enlightenment). When choosing the background color, I used celestial blue, because after investigating into the age of Enlightenment, I found that it was really a crucial era of hope in human history. Because of the rise of rationalism and progress in science, the idea of social progress originated in that era. Celestial blue to me is a color of hope and boundlessness.
In the meeting/critique with Anna and Ji today, we mainly focused on readability and hierarchy. Personally, the third design was my favorite because it has really strong and attention-grabbing futuristic elements in it. And I love the idea to use commonly perceived as “classical” fonts in modern, cyberpunk settings (I assume that Didot was a very Avant-garde font at that time). When I was designing for posters, I referenced a lot of posters, especially a lot in the advertising industry, that experiment with almost glitch art like style — the posters are eye-grabbing, and because there are not many words on the posters, they seemed to be compromising readability for eye-catchiness. I did not put much (or as much as I should) attention on the readability and visual hierarchy. However, since this project mainly focused on having us practice visual hierarchy, Anna and Ji preferred the two blue compositions because the voice looks clearer (and has a better sense in terms of hierarchy). They also recommended refining the sketches in terms of readability, such as increasing the leading and kerning. For the two blue posters specifically, they recommended getting rid of spacings in the character set, increasing line spacings for readability, and decreasing the line length for the paragraph, right now it is a bit too long (which undermines readability).
Oct. 6th, 2020
I revised my posters for clearer hierarchies. In particular, I played around with the four compositions below. I also newly create a cloud-like composition on the celestial blue background, in the hope of the curves and different opacities would aid visual hierarchy. I also made the paragraph in the middle blue poster shorter in line length, so it is easier to read. For the lilac purple poster, I changed the position of the paragraph, so that it is easier to read and overall more balanced because the words are less crowded together up top compared to the previous one. For the poster with pink background, I moved the paragraph which was originally inside the D out, so it is easier to read.
In the feedback session, Anna said she liked the blue and pink ones better because they have clearer hierarchies — there is too much going on in the lilac one. For the two blue posters, she recommended changing the position of the quote (maybe moving up a bit)? For the pink poster, too, she recommended moving the quote outside of D to the right of the poster on top of the paragraph — putting the quote inside D on a highly saturated background makes readers hard to read the quote. For the pink poster, she also mentioned moving the paragraph closer to the center, because the current space in between the left and right part of the page was a bit too big.
Oct. 8th, 2020
I continued refining the two blue posters and the pink poster. But for the interim critique, I only uploaded the two blue ones, As they were my favorite. After the critique, I asked for Anna and Ji’s opinion, they too, preferred the blue one.
Among the two blue ones, Anna and Ji liked the first poster better because it has clearer hierarchy which adheres to the theme of the project better (although the second poster was considered better in craftmanship by a lot of classmates, the concrete poem style of the poster undermined the readability). For the paragraph, they recommend playing around with the spacings and kernings (to get rid of the hyphens). They also recommend brightening the quote and aligning the character set to the two margins. I also received critiques from my classmates, Anna and Ji in google forms.
Oct. 13th, 2020
Before the critique with Ji started, I brightened the quote and adjusted the kerning on the poster according to the feedback from the last session.
Ji recommended moving the second line slightly to the right. It could also help to increase readability by increasing the leading in the paragraph. For better craftmanship, it might help to slightly push Nn to the right.
Oct.14th 2020
I put the year in which the font was designed in the second line and added some characters in the character set to adhere to the project’s requirement more. Because I want to make this poster look more “honed and crafted”, I manually adjusted the kernings line by line to make the paragraph look more rectangular. I also adjusted the kerning and leading in the character set. And of course, I revised based on Ji’s feedback! I sent an email to Anna to ask for her suggestions too on this poster. Anna recommended increasing the opacity for the paragraph and adding more weight (maybe by bolding the text?).
Final Version of the Poster
Oct.15th, 2020
I finished uploading my final deliverables on miro and google drive. When making the final mockup, I tried with two different posters. (the one with texts in the paragraph slightly bolded, and the one without). Although the difference was not so discernible in illustrator, when taking a zommed out view using the mockup, the slight difference in boldness was really amplified. Bolding the text indeed made the poster more readable.
The final critique went well, I explained why I particularly wanted to add a futuristic element using the hyphens inspired by concrete poems (because Didot was designed in the Enlightenment era and was such an avant-garde design at that time, I also wanted to incorporate its progressive and edgy spirit in the context of our time). I also explained my color choice — the Enlightenment era was a time of hope and the origin of social progress theory, so I used celestial blue to stand for hope and boundlessness.
The feedback I received talked about how people like my use of hyphens to aid hierarchy~!
Reflections and Takeaways
In this project, I really went down into refining minor details on my poster. When I hadn’t experienced a typography design process like this, I never noticed how the minor and subtle details (such as alignment and kerning) would really make a difference in how people feel about a piece of work. Previously, when I was a reader, I felt that I could generally tell the difference between good and bad communication design using my instincts. However, after this project, I feel that I am more confident in identifying those elements that matter and making adjustments on these minor details (thanks to Anna and Ji’s help during my iterations).
Another great takeaway from this project for me is to analyze the typeface and make design choices that are suitable for this particular typeface. The Didot font is very elegant, especially when it is used in headlines or logos. However, when researching into this font, I found remarks that it is sometimes unsuitable for body text because the contrast is so strong that some edges of the type might even become delicate and lose it’s form. At that time, I did not quite understand why — until myself has experimented with the Didot font. In order to make my body paragraph more legible, I manually adjusted kernings, slightly boldened my text, and made the opacity 100%.