Typography - Week 4

Typography

In the first section of our lecture we had a reminder on the definition of typography, it's importance and later on continued on with our pilot projects.

Typography is important as it is an essential part in communication, and since it is related to speech we can talk about typography having a tone of voice. As someone who struggles with reading books, legibility is essential (unless it is not and for a good reason). If it is not legible, it feels like someone is mumbling or whispering to you and you can not make out what they are communicating. We have been given a few examples to say how each one makes us feel.

This font feels creepy as it has a lot of jaggedy edges and even though it just says "Let's go swimming!", it feels more like a threat rather than a suggestion.

This font feels contradictory, as the text is in bold, which suggests urgency and intense action, and in red, which looks threatening, while the text reads "Be very very calm. Now." This type of text should have been done in a softer and thinner font to match the description.

This text reads "Hire me" and the font looks like a lazy or rushed scribble, which suggests that this person has no urgency for a job or is making a joke. It looks very unprofessional and can not be taken seriously.

Typography Challenge

In this lecture we were challenged to redesign a newspaper advert and insert the text which our lecturer had provided us with. I have never made a newspaper anything before so this should certainly be a challenge. They also provided us with images, which was not a lot so this was going to be hard to work with.

I started using Photoshop to put this text and the images together. I was having a hard time as Photoshop would not naturally shift text to be in a certain sized box, it just kind of runs off the screen when I copy and paste it, so I manually had to shift the text, and the more I adapted the images, the more formatting I had to do. I could have found an easier way to do this but we had a very limited time span for this, so here we are.

Helvetica Neue for title, Baskerville for body

I used the font Helvetica Neue for the title, and Baskerville for the body of the text, and I like these fonts as they are legible and commonly used in newspaper and it looks professional. However, the way I did it was not great as you can see in the image above. I was struggling to find a proper way of inserting the text around the images to make it look aesthetically pleasing and still easy to read. Once my lecturer saw this, she said the text looked too cramped together like it was 20 people trying to find in a wardrobe, and she was right. She recommended that I paste the text on either side of each image rather than trying to fit it all in one text box, and that is what I tried.

body the same, title is now Times

This time however, I changed the font of the title to be Times, as obviously that is the one that is used in, lets say, New York Times. I had moved the text to be on either side of the images, but I still struggled to fit the rest of the text, so I had inserted it in between the awkward gap in the middle of the paper. I think it looks okay, again I have never made a newspaper page before and it was my first time so it was a lot of learning curves at once.

If I were to do this again, I would first look at a lot more newspaper adverts and analyse what they include. I would make notes on the positions of images, the size of the text, and any other details that I might have missed. Basically, more research as usual. I would also not choose a bright white background as even looking at it right now is a bit blinding, maybe a soft grey or creme would work better and be more legible. I would look into more fonts which are used in newspaper as I am sure that there is a vast majority that I could have used and still made it look like a cool newspaper. Overall, I would definitely practice doing more of these to get better (duh) but with a cool twist, like making magazines and more pop-trendy if that makes sense. Just something more modern. I would also experiment with mixed media, so maybe like printing off the text first then glueing it onto a page with the images, something like out of a sketchbook. Anyway, this was still fun under the short time we had!