Type Design

Finally, we were required to make a typeface. I ended up doing a second typeface for our final, extra credit project. I'm not that proud of the type spec sheets, but I am proud of the fonts themselves. I spent a lot of time on them, trying to develop fonts where all of the letters worked well together and were built on a similar theme. In the process, I learned that I love designing fonts. The fun challenge of it is coming up with a stylistic theme for the font and then finding a way to standardize that theme across all of the letters. You also can't just copy one curve completely from another letter, because each letter needs to be adjusted in certain ways to make it mesh visually with all of the letters that might be around it. Making a display font that is unique but balanced and legible, is really fun, and I think I did a decent job at that for making a couple fonts in a couple of weeks.

Festival Flyer

This is the project that I'm least proud of. It was supposed to be a fall festival poster that was exploring placing type on a grid. Unfortunately, I had a really stressful week at work and didn't feel very creative, so this is all I was able to finish.

Type Spec Sheet

For my type spec sheet, I chose to use Didot. It's an early modern typeface which has very thick vertical strokes, and thin horizontal strokes. It's a serif font, but because it exaggerates the rules of serif fonts, it is much more of a display type than something that you could read for long periods of time. Personally, I think it's beautiful. I chose to base the type sheet around the T, because it highlighted the strokes of Didot and created a perfect simple grid for organizing the information. I made the V look like its swooping around the T just because I thought that looked really cool.

Expressive Type poster

For this project, we were supposed to make an expressive type poster, utilizing a quote from a famous graphic designer. This project was really frustrating. From the beginning, I wanted to make it look like half of "STEAL" had been torn away or stolen from the poster. However, for a long time, my poster just looked faded and cloudy. Then, after much searching and experimenting, I discovered the wrinkle tool. Suddenly, what had been incredibly time consuming to accomplish became relatively easy. It's not perfect, but overall, I'm really happy with how this poster turned out. I feel like the expressive type techniques that I utilized do a great job of actually expressing the meaning of the quote.

So, I decided to start putting everything in separate post instead of on the projects tab, so I could talk about them a bit. For this project, we were to make logos for fake company names provided by our teach. Compared to a number of people in the class, I went for a pretty minimalist approach. However, this does not mean it only took a minimal amount of time. The largest amount of type was simply spent searching for two different fonts that worked well together. If I was going to have very simple, type-based logos, it was very important that the type be exactly right. I think, overall, I'm most proud of the Midwest Media logo, although I don't think it's necessarily the best of the three. What I'm proud of was the choice of fonts in the that logo. I had to find a font that had an easily reversible W in order to make the MWM. I found that font, after a lot of trial error, in Futura. Then, I had to find a font that would work beneath it. I chose Copperplate, which has a great solid look for a company name.