As a followup to Monday’s class, I’m asking everyone to do one of four typography safaris as listed below. Also, be sure to read “Man of Letters,” a profile of type designer Matthew Carter by the New Yorker magazine, someone you’ll meet in the film Helvetica on Wednesday.
For the type safaris, I’m commissioning Darren, Emma, Caroline, Brenna and Kelly to choose a typeface for a re-issue of Pride & Prejudice, to introduce the classic novel to a new generation. Choose a typeface for the cover, and a typeface for the body text, and provide a paragraph justification for each as to why it’s the right typeface for the job. Your priority for the body text type choice is of course readability and legibility.
I’m commissioning Audra, Stacey, Kristin, Bonny and Lindsey to choose a typeface for the new iPhone4S, for all of the display type – email, texts, etc. Provide a paragraph justification as to why it’s the right typeface for the job. This is a typeface that has to work in really small or tight spaces, so do some testing. Make sure the typeface is readable even when really small, so look for letters that bump into each other, and make sure “ones” are distinguishable from lowercase “L”s. Helvetica won’t work, in other words.
Group three (john, Alyssa, Sydney, Rob, Jonathan, Cari), I’d like you all to walk from your dorm room to your first appointment of the day, taking photographs of all signage you encounter in between those two points. Write up a brief narrative of your safari, pointing out especially effective type (and why) and really poor type (and why). You will find that poor display type abounds. Think about signage type as interface. It’s supposed to help you quickly find what you’re looking for. So, ask, does it work? Or was there a better choice?
Finally, I’m commissioning Abigail, Rachel, Michelle, Brian, and Joey to imagine themselves running for the office Emperor or Empress of Berryland, an idyllic and wholesome land of milk, honey and someday soon, football. This office makes you an all-powerful ruler. You have to design a campaign poster, like Obama’s HOPE. And you have to choose a typeface for your campaign. This typeface has to embody and communicate your core values as a candidate. Choose a typeface and provide a paragraph justification as to why it’s the right typeface for your campaign, identifying what those core values are. Give us a sample of your choice if you can.
I’m making these safari catches due at class time on Friday.
I went through a few of the websites you left, along with the scroll list on my Microsoft word. I tested several that I thought were pleasant to read. I had the font on 18, because I have extremely bad vision and small fonts give me a headache, and then I reread the instructions and realized the fonts must work in small spaces. Well this helped to narrow my options immensely and quickly.
For the new iPhone 4s, I would choose Cambria.
I tested several, and was stuck between Cambria and Georgia. These seemed to vanish in style, allowing me to go straight to the context of what I was typing. However, when I changed the size of the font to 8, lowercase letters in Georgia rammed together. i used ‘suzie’ to test the theory. I could not make out the word without straining. The number “one” has a nice serif on the top, distinguishing it from a lower case “L.” I believe that emails, texts, and other pages of type on a phone could be easily read with minimal headaches using the typeface Cambria.
Well, imagine my surprise when I got put in a group related to one of my favorite books of all time. Oh happy day! But getting down to business, I deliberated for a rather long time about which font to choose. First, I took the liberty of creating a subtitle for the cover of the book that I think contributes to the text selected. It would read “Pride and Prejudice: The Vintage Edition for Modern Readers.” Having a longer title also gave me the chance to see what a larger selection of the letters. The key for me was how the capital Ps looked for the title. I wanted them to be pretty elegant and fancy, but not thick or heavy…I wanted sort of a whispy feel that would perhaps harken to mind a handwritten letter in ink pen. I finally settled on Snell Roundhand, a typeface I discovered in Microsoft Word that I had never seen before. I loved the looping, swooping, soft Ps and interconnected script that I found easy to read despite its antique look. I thought the way the lowercase f, g, and j all looped back toward the beginning of the letter rather dramatically was very visually appealing. My favorite part was that all the capital letters had loops, but each one was slightly different, yet there was such continuity. The overall slant of the font also made me think of the turmoil of action in the actual P & P work itself…the situations of each character as they desperately searched for true love in a society when that wasn’t the norm. It looks as if the letters are little people all being blown over by the harsh wind of society’s demands while trying to find their own path and refusing to lay flat on the ground.
For the body text, I selected “Goudy Old Style.” The name by itself makes me chuckle. I liked the lightness of it…none of the letters seemed heavy and it was easily readable at any size. It doesn’t look modern at all, which I liked – in fact, it looked a bit like it would be right at home on parchment paper. Even in a really small size, the letters never looked cramped, which was important for me. It wasn’t a dark type – it didn’t look really bold and black even though that is the color it was. It was very delicate. Also, one thing I did that really helped me decide was to list out the whole alphabet, both upper and lower case, and change it to the different types I was testing. That gave me a better idea of the vision of the entire typeface. Secondly, I coupled the body text with the typeface I had chosen for the cover of the book and they seemed to fit. I can’t put an exact finger on why, but they just did.
Good choices, Emma. Snell Roundhand is a Matthew Carter typeface, developed before Verdana or Georgia (I think). Goudy Old Style is Frederic Goudy’s most popular typeface, and you can see it in Harper’s Magazine. It’s a Renaissance-minded font with lovely serifs — something the Bennetts would appreciate! Mssr. Goudy was best known for his Gutenberg Bible-looking black letter typefaces.
I have an iPhone so I thought that this was a very interesting safari because I kept thinking, “What typeface would I like to read in?” After looking at numerous styles of typefaces, I decided I liked Candara as a nice, simple, clean sans serif typeface. The number ones do have a serif so they are distinguishable from lowercase Ls, and they do not run together when you make the font little. It is very simple, easy to read, and doesn’t distract from what the text is trying to say, which I think would be the point of a typeface for reading emails, texts, and various other messages.
The other style I looked at was Constantia, just to see how a style that does have more serifs and is a little more elaborate would look. I could read it and the ones where distinguishable from the lowercase Ls, but the letters did run into each other the smaller the font was. However, for letters with serifs, it was legible.
I think that any typeface picked for the Apple iPhone should be clean, sharp, and stylish just like the brand that Apple wants to portray. Plus, it needs to easily readable at a glance since many businessmen and businesswomen use their phone daily. They do not need to be squinting all day long, and they do not need to waste minutes trying to read undecipherable text.
While walking out to my car to go to work, I paused briefly and glanced over every sign I passed. Many of them had good and bad attributes to them. Some were really good and, well, some were not so good. I saw many signs but I will discuss two that stood out to me. The first one I saw during my trip to the car was the Fire and Tornado Safety Information sheet on the back of my room door. This sign is short (kind of), sweet, and to the point. It is a white background with black Helvetica(?) lettering. The words are spread out into sections which makes each section easy to find and read. Also, the heading of each section is in bold print thus making it easier to find. This style of type on a warning/safety sheet very important. It allows a person to find pertinent information while in a rush. Lets say a tornado is about to destroy Dana. I can run over to the door, skip over all the non-important stuff and read the section on tornados without much fumbling. This is what makes this sign so great.
Next, on my way down the stairs, I encountered a sign that made my head hurt. This sign was to advertise “Hair-raising Happenings” during halloween weekend. The background was half purple, half black with orange writing. Some sort of fancy text is used which is spread out all over the page, in different sizes. Each event is written in some random spot on the page in about several different sizes. To make matters worse, the text is interspersed with random lines and circles of the same color. This makes the mess all the more confusing. In order to see when, where, or what something is, you have to sit there for a minute and analyze the poster. This, in turn, gives you a migraine, kind of like looking at a flashing light for several minutes. This migraine effect is definitely NOT good use of text/font on a sign. Although is is a halloween poster and needs to be funky looking, I feel like there could be other, more effective ways to accomplish this.
This took me much longer than I had expected and I still am not sure that I am satisfied with my decision. I saw the “perfectionist” side of me coming out as I began playing with different type faces, playing with their sizes, and even mixing some type faces to see how they would look together. It was very tedious and I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of work and dedication it takes to design these faces. That being said, I chose Andalus as my typeface for the cover. I like the sharpness of the font with its very defined edges and serifs. At first I wanted something fancy and I tried Edwardian Script ITC, but it seemed visually overwhelming and hard to read. Then I tried Calibri, but it was much too simple. Andalus was a decent balance because it is very readable and it has somewhat of a fancy “old” feel that I think is appropriate in representing the story but not enough for a young person to walk past and say, “Ugh, that’s a boring antique.”
For the body text I chose Cambria. This type face was clear and neat but I feel that it also maintained the older/elegant feel that is expressed by Andalus. It contains similar serifs and sharp edges but I feel that the style is toned down enough to be very easily readable when written in a smaller font size. I really liked the thickness of the letters in Cambria because they were not so thick that they just meshed all together, but they were not so thin that the white of the page behind the letters was drowning them out. Overall, I think Cambria was a perfect balance between readability and the emotion expressed by typeface of the cover.
Walking from my dorm in Deerefield to where I work in Evans is a short trip. Most of it is outside and there are not a lot of typefaces to be seen when you’re not looking for them. They’re also not scattered around very well. I found a large concentration of poster, flyers and what have you at the end of my hall and then in the hall surrounding the entrance to the BITS Center.
One thing that I did notice was that there aren’t as many horrible typefaces as you might first think. It’s like we talked about Comic Sans. It has a use and it’s overdone because it’s used where it’s not supposed to be. Likewise, many typefaces are used where they should not be. I didn’t compile an average, but I did find that many flyers used three to four typefaces with the Stall Wall Weekly having at least 14 typefaces. All of them vastly different. Often there is a novelty typefaces to get your attention, then san serif for the body, then a script or serif for date and time.
A good example I have of this is a flyer for “No Shave November.” This flyer is less than half a page, has very little information on it and yet it has FOUR typefaces. The worst part is that the top font looks very similar to the typeface used Colgate toothpaste and the second typeface (which merely says “Presents” yet is the largest typeface on the page) looks like the typeface from the movie Predator. They’re not the Colgate or Predator typeface, but they’re close enough that I think “toothpaste” and “alien versus Arnold Schwarzenegger” every time I walk by one.
There was one standout representation of typeface was outside, and that was the emergency station in between the Evans and Science parking lots. While there are obviously countless typefaces featured on cars in the form of decals, license plates, and vehicle logos, I didn’t look at them very much. There are just too many.
But the emergency station caught my eye because it was the first typeface worked. It’s simple black text vertically on a yellow pole with the single word “Emergency.” I think it’s Helvetica. It was nice, easy to ready and you know it means business. It’s easy to decode because it’s so easy to read. Multiple fonts simply make signage too complex to discern their message quickly enough.
Before I started looking at different fonts, I decided to anaylze what I needed from a font.
Since I was running for the office of Emperor of Berryland, I needed a font that conveyed absolute authority, confidence, a sense of culture, and a strong feeling of idealism.
I managed to find all of these things in the font “Castellar.” Castellar has a clean, engraven look to it reminiscent of Roman or Greek culture. A Roman-looking font is perfect for campaigning for the position of emperor.
Furthermore, this type’s resemblance to the classical cultures of Greece and Rome fits Berry’s commitment to academia. Classial elements permeate Berry’s campus and can be seen through the pillars on many buildings and the head of Athena on the front of the library.
The engraved aspect of the font also helps give it a sense of authority. This type doesn’t just look like a few strokes of ink on a page; Castellar looks as if it has been painstakingly carved into a block of marble. This in turn makes me, the canidate, look like a reliable and dependable choice for voters.