Week 11 Breaking the rules

I strongly believe that only those who are well versed in the rules of typography, visual hierarchy and composition are able to break from them in a useful manner. Lets face it - the rules were put in place for a reason, and that reason at the end of the day is the maximise readability and communication from publication to reader.

Use of a subtle - yet predictable - layout (which is of course flexible) increases the readers ability to navigate information and hence absorb it. I feel that it is only appropriate to break from this goal when their is a well considered motivation for it. For instance, lets say the below was an article about horses - the typographical result below may capture the readers attention - and if they like horses enough, they may try and read the article (though it is clearly more difficult to navigate than justified columns of text where every line starts and ends at the same location.

Obviously this is a more extreme case - though I think there does need to be a point where the two conflicting views (readability and artistic purpose) need to be battle it out and either come together in a subtle harmony (hard to accomplish) or one must be chosen over the other.

This applies for the grid - which shares the same purpose of reader expectation and readability of the page. I would use the example of iDN - a design focused magazine. Now, whilst I love to look at this magazine, I absolutely HATE HATE HATE reading it. Each page is drastically different, confusing and although there may be some sort of formal grid throughout, it is in my opinion far to easy to break from and overflow with content and badly placed text.

On the other hand, the grid does not always have to apply strictly to all elements lining up - I think as long as there is some sort of overall structural integrity to the document, then the rules can be more relaxed within that structure. For instance, the following drawing is hand set typography, demonstrates beautiful use of colour to create a secondary meaning, everything is all over the place, unevenly sized, kerned, leaded, but it fits both the structural integrity of a head, of a question mark and overall it sits within an invisible rectangular structure that is evenly and proportionately placed on the page. Furthermore, and to reiterate my initial point, the rules have been broken for a purpose - to convey a relevant message.

I do really like the previous reference to Wing's personal work - I think it is yet another perfect example of how harmony can exist between legibility and artistic purpose. Though some of the line lengths are hard to read, their is undoubtedly a strong emphasis on grid structure to the document, which (after looking at the website for the gallery) is strongly inline with the branded look and feel of the gallery itself.

my grid + typography selection for grid

Week 10 homework

Morris Fuller Benton (1872-1948) was an extremely influential typeface designer, having completed 221 typefaces.

He was a man well ahead of his contemporaries, and having carried on the work of his fathers work, is credited for the consolidation and design of the Century typeface family - let alone the conception of "type families" all together.

This contribution clearly altered the course of typography, giving typographers both pre and post digital age more freedom to create visual emphasis to letters or words.

As if this wasn't already a big enough contribution, M.F. Benton was then commissioned to modify the century typeface into the Century Schoolbook family, (commissioned by publishing company Ginn & Co) a typeface that was purely/scientifically designed for easy readability. He achieved this by utilising research by Clark University, which demonstrated young readers identified letterforms quicker through contrasting weight, but with the lighter strokes maintaining presence, as well as the importance of maintaining counter-form (negative space) around the letter which helped in recognising the face at smaller sizes.

In designing the typeface, Benton increased the x-height, stroke width and overall letterspacing, and soon this typeface became widely popular and familiar in North America, being the typeface that many first learned to read with.

Doyald Young, on the other hand, was a logotype designer / typographer who lived, worked and taught both pre and post digital age. Born in Holliday, Texas in 1926, he may seem like an unusual choice to use for this question - however Young's work was always unique and custom-made before it was digitalised, which - with reference to the Century typeface - demonstrates the immense advantage that contemporary technologies have had in the field of typography.

In an interview with Lynda.com - Young discusses his pride in a logo he made for "Prudential".

The initial request was to redesign the word prudential, so that it was friendly and closely related to a font but more tightly spaced and a little bit bolder than a normal typeface.

The companies emphasis on the word "friendly" lead Young to focus on the century typeface as its historical familiarity makes it comfortable which makes it friendly.

In short, Young redesigned a famous typeface to his liking. His improvements ranged from condensing the letter P and the tail of the letter a, as well as making letters, such as the letter t, taller so that they were more quickly read.

The result was Prudential Roman, an in between of ITC century book and bold - which in his words "satisfies the goal of many text faces where no 1 letter stands out. "

I believe that Young's work here shows how easily typefaces can be perfected and modified in the digital age - however one of the reasons that I love his work ( and his publications ) is that they both embrace technology yet prove that it doesn't necessarily mean there is more variation available. His work shows designers that even in this computer dominated age, they can still turn to their hands for inspiration and solution and transcend the limitations of fonts.

Peter Saville vs Stefan Sagmeister

Best known for his record covers of the 70s and 80s (in particular for Joy Division and New Order) Peter Saville has come to acclaim for his applications of typography. His use of little to no imagery and simplified text often let typography do the speaking, yet they still differed from that of information based design. Although he had developed a strong interest in punk graphics, he also took inspiration from Jan Tschichold’s New Typography, based on principles of modernist typography. This movement of typography began in the early 20th century, favouring rational and functional principles and embracing man made machinery.



Stefan Sagmeister is a contemporary graphic designer and typographer who Paola Antonelli deemed “The Johnny Depp of the design world.” His designs are innovative and push boundaries to great extents, often employing wit and dark and bizarre concepts. In a technology dominant world, while digital is an aid, Sagmeister still utilises his hands and much of his work highly depicts a deeply handcrafted and artistic feel. Stylistically this is a strong contrast to Saville.





References
Saville
http://www.spikemagazine.com/0903petersaville.php
http://typophile.com/node/12610
http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=166

Sagmeister
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si_3PBHdReg
http://designmuseum.org/design/stefan-sagmeister

WEEK 11 LECTURE AND UPDATES ON 3D TYPE

Hi all. Welcome to Week 11!

There are few very important items to ensure you are up to speed on this week.

Our Current Project
BASECAMP looks good. I've joined as well (I still need to sort out some bugs with my log in). I think it will provide a good platform to collaborate in. Well done.

I have also seen some of the early page layouts/grids and I think that the project is looking very promising. It's quite exciting to see such vibrant work being done by the group.

3D Printing
There have been some ongoing problems with the 3D printer and other jobs being printed. With our work Hayden delayed the printing as very few of you had filled out the form. Lauren indicated that most of you have now filled out the form which is great. However, Hayden has also found a number of problems with some files mainly regarding files being too small to print. He will email me a list of problem files on Thursday. I will email this on to everyone or post it to the Basecamp space if I can sort myself out there :).

Although I am confident that we will get some kind of result from the 3D process I was very pleased to see the group already preparing for a backup plan when I was in the studio this morning. Smart thinking again.

This Week's Lecture
Our topic this week revolves around the crucial issue of File Preparation. The lecture focusses on print publishing quite clearly but the inference is that your responsibility in preparing your files correctly applies to all deliverables regardless of whether they are print or screen-based outputs. I can't stress how important this aspect of practice is and the lecture discusses this in a fair amount of detail. Still of course there is not the scope to cover everything so the Discussion Topic for this week is asking you to investigate an area you feel you need to develop your skills in - as follows:

Discussion Point: The digital desktop has shifted the responsibility of preparing artwork for reproduction to the designer. Identify an area of file preparation you need to learn more about and provide an overview (200 word max) of the process and its significance. Post your response to the Studio Blog.

Breaking Rules

There are plenty of rules and norms for creating accurate visual harmony. In the most traditional sense these determining factors include size, composition, grids, margins, visual hierarchy etc.
That is why I find it most interesting when text does not follow these set rules but still achieves an intentional visual purpose that manages to communicate and highly inform the reader.

My examples come from the work of Wing Lau, part owner of "Kind-Of" gallery on Oxford and former tutor of this course!
The featured exhibit changes every two weeks with Wing covering all visual promotion of the galleries (designing the posters and flyers) with his work being mostly based around the use and manipulation of text.

The general visual feel is quite minimalist focusing on the usage of once single font, yet it is the pure composition and scale of the letterforms in which he creates an accurate feel of the gallery without heavy use of imagery, or even imagery of the artists' works for that matter.

For example this flyer was used to promote the latest exhibition "Beinargly" featuring new works of local artist Andy Uprock. Without the use of any of Uprock's original imagery Wing uses a very alienated and almost illegable composition and jumbled character base that perfectly reflects the works of the new show.

For the second poster, Wing promotes a gallery based upon artists who share a passion of bicycle culture. Instead of putting any direct visual clues of a bicycle, Wing reflects the movement created by the vehicle through varying paragraph shape and size. The text itself shares the artists' stories of travel and riding, a metaphor for the idea of movement.

Breaking Convention

I think rules are sometimes made to be broken and that this is very much the case with typography. There are all these rules like fonts having standardised weight etc. But I don't know if it's really necessary or if it should be a basis of judging whether a font is successful or not. Some fonts are design purely to be a title and can't function as body text. Others only work with a certain amount of characters. I think a font should be judged according to what it's trying to communicate and whether it accomplishes that successfully.

Helvetica has been criticised and comic sans is just the worst out of context so I believe we should judge a font on how it works and use the conventional rules as guidelines

Here is an example of some unconventional font's I like, 30 to be precise

http://psd.fanextra.com/articles/30-beautifully-unconventional-examples-of-typography/