Project 3–2: Type + Hierarchy
(51–262) Communication Design Fundamentals
Part I: Research
History - Didot was developed in the late 1700s to early 1800s in Paris, France by Firmin Didot. Pierre Didot, his brother, popularized the font by including the font in his printing.
Characteristics — Serif, high contrast, optical kerning is often for digital use, straight (perfectly vertical or horizontal) ascenders and descenders
Personality — It has been described as “neoclassical, and evocative of the Age of Enlightenment”. The font is elegant and classic, and has been employed in the fashion industry by Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Typographer Sarah Hyndman did a survey in 2015 suggesting that the light weights, serif style, and high contrast made Didot the most “expensive-looking” font.
Part II: Sketches
The first sketch I did was too playful for the font and did not fit the criteria of what I wanted the font to look like. The second one was inspired by luxury brands, and I tried to mimic the design for Hermes’s perfume bottle because I wanted it to be associated with high-class. In the third one, I wanted to explore and blow up one of the letters so I chose the cursive ‘f’ because it stood for Firmin and thought the curves of the letter was something interesting to explore.
The fourth sketch I did was also inspired by something else. I read that Didot was used as the Vogue font and thought about replicating the cover where the title would cover the top and there would be a large blown up image covering the page. I also experimented with a landscape poster so it resembles something that is more logo-ish.
Part III: Illustrations
The leftmost artboards were the first batch of poster ideas, some of which looked identical to the sketches. The third one was challenging because of the awkward spacing. To try to resolve it, I expanded the design to fit the poster and filled in spaces with text. The comments I got were that I managed to capture the “personality” and understood the characteristics of the font, but the designs looked like they were very much confined to the space. Because of that, I was challenged to play with the opacity, sizing, and overlap of the letters. I used the artboards in the upper right corner to do so. From this, I think I better understood how to see the letters as their own image instead of text as I normally would.
I incorporated these ideas in a new set of posters seen below:
I also wanted to revisit ideas from the first batch of illustrations and incorporate these new ideas into them:
These are the illustrations that are meant to resemble Vogue magazine covers.
For this one, I kept the large title and the idea of having one large image. My instructor noted that the relationship between the verticals of the ‘d’ and ‘F’ might be something I want to explore further, but am struggling to see other ways to use it besides copy-and-pasteing it. I guess she wants me to compare the specific traits of letters against each other.
I also prefer the shade I have chosen here since I think it gives the poster more weight and dimension.
The relationship that I wanted to explore here was breaking up ‘Didot’ and having it overlap with the image. I continued using the italicize ‘f’ and included other random letters. Maybe I could change the random letters and ‘f’ to letters that have more interesting features, similar to what my instructor was saying before.
Part 4: Final Pick
After the last batch, I went through one more round of iterations and started to whittle it down to the last one.
I had decided to go with the rightmost one in the second row because I thought it did a decent job of incorporating the best elements from previous designs. This includes the square brackets with the Didot word and Paris France. I also thought the shape of the ‘f’ and ‘P’ had been really integral to all some designs.
Sources:
