Project 3–1: Type + Hierarchy
(51–262) Communication Design Fundamentals
Part I: Typeface Tracing
01 October 2020
Part 2: Typographic Voice
01 October 2020
The words I chose to experiment with were tradition, organic, and bright. My process was to generate many variations by using different fonts, italics or bold-ing, and different capitalisation. After the list was compiled, I put stars next to which ones I thought were best and filtered out which one I thought could be final.
For the word “tradition”, I focused on using a serif font and keeping regular capitalisation since it is more formal. The first one I tried was Cambria which I could already tell was off because the letters were too narrow and it looked awkward with how thick the vertical strokes were. Because of that, I looked for wider fonts and ones where the difference between the horizontal and vertical strokes were not too pronounced but still present for contrast. The third one (Bodoni 72) seemed to work well so I bolded and italicised it. I think this font works well because the ascenders and descenders seem more natural and less pronounced, making it seem seamless and classy. After that, I continued to play around with other fonts, also bolding and italicising them. I experimented with the sans serif fonts, but they do not have the same effect for tradition. Finally, I decided that the italicised version of Bodoni 72 was the best, because the slant of the letters did not seem as severe as the others but just enough to make it feel a bit more refined.
Next was “organic” which I knew had to be a sans serif font. At first, I picked several just to review what I liked and didn’t like about them. I found that the wider fonts worked better to avoid that sharpness again, so I also switched from having all caps to all lowercase letters. I noticed that fonts where the curves are square-ish corners (like in the 5th one) were moving in the wrong direction because it felt rigid, and tried to avoid that. The font is very uniform, there is no contrast in thickness and I think the font below (Century Gothic) works well for this because the bowl seems heavy and full, which is what I interpret as organic.
Finally, we have the word “bright”. You can see in the iterations that I went back and forth with having bold words and lighter because both can be interpreted as bright. I found that having it be sans serif also makes it feel less constrained by the serifs. I chose the font below because I noticed that there is a very slight contrast on the stems of the word (they taper wider at the top and bottoms). It is barely noticeable when the font is small but if expanded like below, adds more dimension and personality to the word.
Part III: Typographic Hierarchy
05 October 2020
For just linespacing, at first I only separated the body text into sections and the last line. I also tried inserting spacing between the titles but found that ineffective.
I used a similar process to experiment with weights by first breaking it down into sections in the body text. I applied bold-ing to texts I considered to be “main points”. After that, I utilized a range of weights but it complicated the text instead of helping to organize it.
Indenting was useful only when I sectioned it off like paragraphs. The introduction to each section should be normal with the rest of the section indented.
I kept the spacing between both versions standard and varied the weights to see how liberally I could apply bold text. The additional spacing between the words allowed the bolded text to not seem as cramped as it did in #2.
The first version of #5 was not successful because I sent mixed signals with the indentation and the weight. The indentation made the information seem secondary which opposed the bolding. The second version is better because the indentation and weighting don’t interfere with each other.
Similar to #3, the difference from these two arises from whether we indent the body or the intro of the section With the linespacing, it’s easy to see why the first version of indentation is better.
